Legal News

Picking Through the Whys of the Wolf Block Dissolution

By Ashby Jones

The Philadelphia press, both legal and mainstream, is picking through the rubble of the Wolf Block dissolution, which officially took place on Monday when the partnership voted to disband the firm. Click here and here for stories from Philadelphia’s Inquirer and Intelligencer.

So why did it have to come to this? Why did a firm that, as the Intelligencer puts it, took 100 years to build up have to vanish overnight?

For now, there don’t appear to be too many easy answers. According to the Intelligencer, some are taking the long view, tracing the demise back to 1985 when Howard Gittis left as leader of the firm and new leadership came on board as the start of the downfall. Others say it was groups of partner defections in the early to mid-1990s, departures that were “never quite replaced.”

Others blame a lack of practice-area diversity, that the firm relied too heavily on its well-respected real-estate practice. “It was like owning one stock in the stock market,” says one consultant.

In the shorter term, others point to a lack of leadership in recent years. Or, perhaps more accurately, a distracted leadership. Critics said firm leadership was focused for a good part of 2008 on completing what turned out to be a failed merger attempt with Florida-based Akerman Senterfitt and that firm head Mark Alderman had in recent months spent a lot of time in Washington, D.C., on President Obama’s transition team.

Alderman said the characterization that he and other firm leaders weren’t providing leadership in 2008 was “not fair.” He said the firm’s leaders never worked harder on behalf of the firm than they have in the last year. There were “a thousand factors” that could probably even go back to the firm’s founders that ultimately resulted in Monday’s decision, he said.

When looking for root causes, Alderman chooses to look over his shoulder a bit. “There’s no question the firm got staggered in the mid-90s with those departures,” Alderman said. “The result speaks for itself. We spent 15 years trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 25, 2009 (boomark / email).