Legal News

It?s the Summer of Love for Law Firms: But Will Any Consummate?

By Nathan Koppel

In law firm land, it’s the Summer of Love. Observers agree that firms are looking to a hook up at a feverish clip.

In a piece this week, the National Law Journal cited survey statistics about the growth in merger activity. The Recorder today reported that Thelen Reid issued a memo to lawyers that it’s on the look out for a merger partner. “The decision was made to pursue a merger, and we wanted to give [the firm] a quick update,”� a Thelen spokesman told the paper.

And at Above the Law, David Lat did a nifty job yesterday of breaking out who’s supposedly talking to whom, with the ever important disclaimer that rumored mergers are just that.

So what to make of all this? Firms talk all the time, only to go their separate ways (remember Dewey/Orrick?). Business conflicts, culture clashes, and money are just some of the impediments.

That said, there’s apparently a lot of talking going on, because firms want to add lawyers quickly in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe; markets that are more robust than our native shores, says law-firm consultant Peter Zeughauser. It’s too exhausting and time consuming, he says, for managing partners to fly to distant markets and try to build bulk by hiring lawyers in smaller increments. “There is more merger activity right now, many times over, than at any point in the past year,” Zeughauser says. Out of the AmLaw 100, “I think two-thirds of the firms would have interest in the right deal.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on July 18, 2008 (boomark / email).