Twenty years ago, when I was hired by The Recorder in San Francisco as a cub reporter, my beat included covering Heller Ehrman White & McAuliffe. As an institution, it seemed to me as impressive and permanent as the Golden Gate Bridge—for which firm lawyers in the early 1930s arranged financing.

The 118-year-old firm’s dissolution in 2008 shocked and saddened me in a way that the fall of Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison in 2003 or Howrey in 2011, for example, did not.