In early march the Gaylord National Hotel and Convention Center outside Washington, D.C., teemed with hundreds of attorneys from Hogan Lovells. The firm was holding its first global partnership conference, and one of the hotel’s ballrooms had been turned into a marketplace with stations representing each of the firm’s 40 offices. At each station, partners were on hand to provide information about the office. The stations also offered local treats to entice lawyers to linger. “The Paris station had champagne, the Northern California station had wine, and the Beijing station had baijiu ,” recounts J. Warren Gorrell, Jr., the firm’s co-chief executive (photo, left). “But it wasn’t all alcohol,” he adds quickly. (The Brussels station had chocolate.) The event, while certainly cliché, was nonetheless important for the 2,400-attorney firm, which was created in May 2010 by the combination of Washington, D.C.–based Hogan & Hartson and London-based Lovells.
As the firm celebrates its one-year anniversary, we wanted to check in on the newlyweds. How are things going? The definitive answer is years away. (Gorrell says they’ll know in three to five years whether the alliance has met their financial targets, which he declined to disclose.) Still, firm leaders point to signs that the inaugural year has been a success: strong client pitches (including one that landed a new multibillion-dollar client), adoption of a singular promotion process, and a relatively smooth march toward an integrated compensation system. “We’ve got a merger of equals,” says David Harris, the firm’s other co-chief executive (photo, right). “We have evaluated what each firm has done in the past and picked the best of both and what works well for a business of our size.”
