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Pittsburgh law firms growing and chasing entrepreneurs
Sunday, April 09, 2000 By Rona Kobell, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
You won't catch Pittsburgh's corporate lawyers planning the office snowboarding trip or delaying a meeting to squeeze in a Slurpee run.
But attorneys are morphing into the techie culture of their clients in other ways. Morgan Lewis & Bockius recently went casual every day, so their technology clients would feel more comfortable. Cohen & Grigsby, an 88-attorney firm, followed suit last month.
The dress code is not the only similarity between lawyers and their clients. The lawyers in charge of the firms tend to be younger than in years past.
At Kirkpatrick & Lockhart, the young management group for the technology practice is so assertive it sometimes has to be held back, said Peter Kalis, the firm's managing partner. Clients demand a nimbleness in decision making, and that can't happen with large, ponderous boards dragging out policy decisions.
"We live in a world of the quick and the dead. Technology has had a lot to do with that," said Kalis.
Kirkpatrick & Lockhart already has a strong technology practice in Pittsburgh. Now it has an outpost in Southern California, having merged with Freshman Marantz Orlanski Cooper & Klein in February. Freshman's lawyers have represented underwriters in issuers in more than 60 initial public offerings. They also represent the Utah Jazz.
Last year, K&L merged with Boston-based Warner & Stackpole, and it now has nearly 80 attorneys in a city that's on every law firm's short list for expansion.
Eckert Seamans Cherin & Mellot also is interested in expanding its Boston presence. Eckert has been looking eastward for some time. In June, it acquired Connolly Epstein Chicco Foxman Oxholm & Ewing P.C., a Philadelphia-based law firm. with an office in New Jersey. Twenty-six attorneys from Connolly Epstein joined Eckert Seamans.
After the Connolly addition, Eckert changed its management structure.
The firm, Pittsburgh's fourth largest, appointed Dennis L. Veraldi chief operating officer and Thomas J. Sweeney member-in-charge. It also established an executive committee that meets twice a month, replacing a large board of directors and chief executive officer.
Because of the change, Sweeney and Veraldi say the firm will make decisions more rapidly. And that will include more mergers.
"There's a race for growth right now, because there's been a decision made that bigger is better," said Veraldi.
The firm has a large intellectual property practice, with 20 lawyers, and that's one of the hottest areas in law now with much of the Internet business focusing on intellectual property.
Veraldi and Sweeney said one of the challenges of growth is keeping the personal relationships that clients expect from their attorneys.
The consolidation in the law industry has become so rampant that some wonder if law firms will go the way of accounting firms, where mergers have led to just five firms today from many 20 years ago. Kalis predicts that won't happen, but he says the consolidation puts great pressures on midsize firms. "They typically feel a lot of frustration losing work to larger firms."
When Pittsburgh's midsize firms decide to grow, they often follow Eckert's example and move east. Within days, last month, Thorp Reed & Armstrong and Klett Rooney Lieber & Schorling announced expansions.
Thorp Reed opened a two-person law office in Princeton, N.J., and expanded its office in Philadelphia to six employees in mid-February.
Klett Rooney expanded its office in Wilmington, Del. The firm added six shareholders to its four-person Delaware office. The new hires came from the Wilmington law firm Duane Morris & Heckscher. The high volume of bankruptcy filings in Wilmington drove the office expansion there.
The day after Klett Lieber's announcement, Pittsburgh's largest law firm, Reed Smith Shaw & McClay, announced that it, too, was moving into Wilmington. It elected five partners to create a new office there, and it hopes to have 15 lawyers. One of its five partners is David Swayze, a former chief of staff and counsel to Delaware's governor.
Reed Smith and Buchanan Ingersoll both have Washington offices. But both made recent strides to expand their presence there, in part due to the high volume of high-tech activity in Northern Virginia. In August, Reed Smith acquired Hazel & Thomas, an 85-attorney firm based in Fairfax, Va.
In December, Buchanan Ingersoll announced it was merging with Silverstein and Mullens, a 30-lawyer tax boutique in Washington. Buchanan Ingersoll also has a presence in London now, after acquiring a 13-lawyer health-care practice in November.
William R. Newlin, Buchanan Ingersoll's chairman and chief executive officer, was not dabbling when he decided to enter the London market. The British Government named Newlin Honorary British Consul in 1997, which charges him with fostering trade between Western Pennsylvania and the United Kingdom.
While other firms look to the eastern United States and Europe, Doepken Keevican & Weiss is one midsize firm going its own way. The firm is expanding toward the Midwest's industrial economies instead of heading east.
A few months ago, it opened an office in St. Louis, and in early March it announced a merger in its Detroit office that brings the firm there to 15 lawyers.
"The change we're embarked upon is to expand ourselves on a regional basis. We see ourselves as a regional law firm," said Leo A. Keevican Jr., the firm's managing director.
The Detroit suburbs have a robust economy and the firm's e-commerce practice there is thriving, Keevican says.
Keevican's firm isn't going after the IBMs of the world -- it is focusing instead on midsize and emerging growth companies.
"You don't get lost at our law firm," he said.
Keevican said lawyers were shifting more into business, and that's the root of their success.
"If you go back, way back, lawyers in the 20th century got together with the Fricks and the Carnegies, and they built businesses. What we really need to do is go back to being partners and entrepreneurs."
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