Chris Bogart can’t have been the only person to be down on his luck with the onset of the global financial crisis. He had lost his way with Time Warner Cable and then running a tech media venture capital fund and was looking for a new mission. Dining with a university friend who was an arbitration partner at Latham & Watkins, he learnt of the firm’s focus on hourly billing—and making sure bills were paid.
“He had a bunch of international clients and they didn’t like that business model. He would lose business to other firms sometimes because he didn’t have flexibility in the way that he could retain them. He was complaining to me about this. I was by then in a finance world, and he said to me: ‘You’ve become this money guy now. Can’t you do something to fix this problem?’” Bogart told Law.com International.
