The Last Days of the Philadelphia Lawyer

Mark Alderman doesn’t look like the classic Philadelphia Lawyer. He’s 55, but his face is still remarkably youthful, and his shaggy brown hair, reaching down nearly to his shoulders, gives him the appearance of a middle-aged Rolling Stone editor (though a particularly well-dressed one). Almost 30 years ago, when Alderman was graduating from Penn Law — cum laude, editor at the law review, one of the best and brightest at one of the nation’s best and brightest law schools — he and his classmates all had a similar view of their futures: They would join good firms, they would work hard to make partner, and they would stay where they were until they had filed their last brief, overseen their last corporate transaction, argued their last closing argument.

Today, the WolfBlock chairman has a vastly different read on the future of law firms in Philadelphia. “I teach a class at Penn Law School,” Alderman says one day, in his firm’s Arch Street office, a portrait of Winston Churchill hanging on the wall. “I ask my kids, ‘How many of you expect to stay with one firm for your whole career?’ Nobody raises a hand. So I ask, ‘How many expect to be with one firm for five years?’ Maybe half raise their hands. ‘How many expect to be with a firm for two years?’ About a third still don’t raise their hands.” He pauses. “Nobody believes the system will take care of them.”

The legal world in Philadelphia has become a far more volatile place than ever before — not just for law students, but for the people who run law firms, too. And Mark Alderman is candid about the fact that over the past year, WolfBlock, one of Philadelphia’s preeminent law firms for more than a century, has been having merger conversations with just about any firm around the country it makes sense to have a conversation with. The reason isn’t hard to grasp: Wolf’s size and footprint — just over 300 lawyers, in only a handful of Northeast cities — simply aren’t tenable in a world increasingly dominated by 1,000-lawyer firms with offices around the globe.

The most recent rumor came in mid-February, when Wolf was said to be in discussions with Florida-based Akerman Senterfitt. Alderman won’t comment on the likelihood of that deal happening, but he doesn’t hesitate to say that a deal with someone needs to happen — and soon.

“I tell my partners, we gotta get moving here,” he says. If WolfBlock is to survive, it needs more lawyers, more offices, more profits. “Five years from now, if we look like we do today, we’re in trouble.”

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