Feature Article |
The Last Days of the Philadelphia Lawyer
By Tom McGrath
More recently, the firm of Duane Morris has gone on a growth binge. Behind the decade-long leadership of chairman Sheldon Bonovitz, Duane has gone from 225 lawyers to nearly 700, and opened offices in 25 cities around the country and world. “We were convinced we couldn’t survive at the size we were,” says Duane’s new chair, John Soroko, who succeeded Bonovitz in January, and who hopes to grow the firm to at least 1,000 lawyers in the near future.
Bigger firms and fiercer competition have changed the atmosphere in the Philly legal community from clubby to corporate … and occasionally nasty. Last May, Ballard Spahr chairman Arthur Makadon got local lawyers buzzing with remarks he made at the funeral of respected attorney Alan Davis. In his eulogy, he took shots at unnamed partners at WolfBlock — the firm Davis once worked for — who, Makadon suggested, had ruined the firm. It was the kind of dirty-laundry-airing that would have been hard to imagine a generation ago.
One of the people Makadon was referring to, rumor had it, was Charlie Kopp. Kopp declined to comment about the incident, but he certainly doesn’t disagree that the tenor of the legal world has changed. Although WolfBlock’s growth has been more modest — as of the beginning of this year, it had about 300 attorneys, up from around 150 in the mid-1980s — Kopp says things feel a lot different from the old days: “It’s tough to develop camaraderie when you don’t know half the people there.”
One other change has contributed to the coarsening of tone in the practice of law. A whole generation of once-idealistic lawyers — inspired by the Philadelphia Lawyer legend — all hit middle age, and its attendant crises, at the same time. “A lot of lawyers I know are in their basements at midnight, working on a screenplay or novel, trying to become the next Grisham,” says one attorney. “Law school teaches you how to be an asshole, and a bunch of us woke up around age 55 and said, ‘I don’t want to be an asshole anymore.’”
AMONG THE PEOPLE who run Philadelphia’s biggest firms, there isn’t much nostalgia for or sentimentality about the way things used to be. “People who lament the passing of the old days, I think they just don’t want to be judged on the merits,” says Makadon. Adds Steve Cozen, “There’s nothing mutually exclusive about being a good lawyer and using smart business practices.”
They’re not wrong: Running a firm efficiently and maximizing profits don’t necessarily harm the quality of work being done. In fact, no one claims the lawyers practicing in Philadelphia are any less adept than they ever were.
But efficiency does create winners and losers, and both Makadon and Cozen are clearly on the winners’ side. Among the losers, not everyone is happy with the current state of the world. Hit hardest by the changes in the profession are those lawyers in their late 40s and 50s dreaming of following in Grisham’s footsteps. They entered one legal world 25 or 30 years ago and now find themselves trying to function in a completely different one. “Before, people went to law school because they liked the intellectual challenge and they didn’t want to have to deal with marketing and sales and all that business stuff,” says Frank D’Amore, a local legal recruiter. “Now it’s all about marketing, it’s all about sales.”
Bigger firms and fiercer competition have changed the atmosphere in the Philly legal community from clubby to corporate … and occasionally nasty. Last May, Ballard Spahr chairman Arthur Makadon got local lawyers buzzing with remarks he made at the funeral of respected attorney Alan Davis. In his eulogy, he took shots at unnamed partners at WolfBlock — the firm Davis once worked for — who, Makadon suggested, had ruined the firm. It was the kind of dirty-laundry-airing that would have been hard to imagine a generation ago.
One of the people Makadon was referring to, rumor had it, was Charlie Kopp. Kopp declined to comment about the incident, but he certainly doesn’t disagree that the tenor of the legal world has changed. Although WolfBlock’s growth has been more modest — as of the beginning of this year, it had about 300 attorneys, up from around 150 in the mid-1980s — Kopp says things feel a lot different from the old days: “It’s tough to develop camaraderie when you don’t know half the people there.”
One other change has contributed to the coarsening of tone in the practice of law. A whole generation of once-idealistic lawyers — inspired by the Philadelphia Lawyer legend — all hit middle age, and its attendant crises, at the same time. “A lot of lawyers I know are in their basements at midnight, working on a screenplay or novel, trying to become the next Grisham,” says one attorney. “Law school teaches you how to be an asshole, and a bunch of us woke up around age 55 and said, ‘I don’t want to be an asshole anymore.’”
AMONG THE PEOPLE who run Philadelphia’s biggest firms, there isn’t much nostalgia for or sentimentality about the way things used to be. “People who lament the passing of the old days, I think they just don’t want to be judged on the merits,” says Makadon. Adds Steve Cozen, “There’s nothing mutually exclusive about being a good lawyer and using smart business practices.”
They’re not wrong: Running a firm efficiently and maximizing profits don’t necessarily harm the quality of work being done. In fact, no one claims the lawyers practicing in Philadelphia are any less adept than they ever were.
But efficiency does create winners and losers, and both Makadon and Cozen are clearly on the winners’ side. Among the losers, not everyone is happy with the current state of the world. Hit hardest by the changes in the profession are those lawyers in their late 40s and 50s dreaming of following in Grisham’s footsteps. They entered one legal world 25 or 30 years ago and now find themselves trying to function in a completely different one. “Before, people went to law school because they liked the intellectual challenge and they didn’t want to have to deal with marketing and sales and all that business stuff,” says Frank D’Amore, a local legal recruiter. “Now it’s all about marketing, it’s all about sales.”
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