Legal News

One Small Move for Irv, A Giant Leap for Baker & Hostetler

By Ashby Jones

One big hire does not a law firm make. But the right hire at the right time can certainly provide a firm a big shot in the arm.

That’s essentially what’s happened with Baker & Hostetler and Irv Picard, the trustee of Bernie Madoff’s investment firm. Shortly after the Madoff scandal broke in December, the firm scored a huge prize by landing Picard, who had just been named trustee. Click here for the WSJ story on Picard and Baker, from the WSJ’s Amir Efrati.

Thanks in large part to its hire of Picard, Baker stands to make a tidy sum and raise its profile nationally. For Baker, a firm rooted in the Rust Belt (Cleveland, specifically), the Madoff assignment “is like a walk-off, grand-slam home run in the seventh game of the World Series,” says Jeff Marwil, an attorney at Proskauer Rose LLP who isn’t involved with the case.

Until the Madoff case, the work in which Picard specializes — brokerage liquidations — wasn’t considered especially lucrative for major firms. But the Madoff fraud case is so large that it could improve the fortunes of Baker, which last year ranked among the least profitable of the 100 highest-grossing U.S. law firms, with $560,000 in profit per equity partner, according to the American Lawyer.

The hire has begotten others, like partner Marc Hirschfield, who says he left a more-profitable firm for Baker because he wanted to work on the Madoff case. “Cases of this notoriety don’t come around every day,” Mr. Hirschfield says.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on June 09, 2009 (boomark / email).