The American Lawyer - February 2008

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THE INDIE SCENE
Chicago firms use “small” as a selling point.

4MALL FIRM? YES. NAR- row scope? Sure. Regional focus? That too. Proud of it? You bet.

As Chicago-based Am Law 200 firms have grown into national powerhouses, and national firms have competed for a Chicago presence, midsize Windy City firms have been swallowed faster than cocktails at an open bar. But a handful have resisted. Now, as a marketing matter, they’re trumpeting their continued independence—and taking a few shots at the big boys, as well.

Much Shelist Denenberg Ament & Rubenstein, an 80-law- yer firm serving regional banks and manufacturers, launched an ad campaign recently with the explicit purpose of challenging the legal behemoths.

“We want to attract the high-

quality clients who feel lost out there in the big firm,” says managing partner David Brown. “What a client really needs is a good regional firm that knows its marketplace. That’s want we want to be, without any apology.”

Minneapolis-based legal marketing executive Sally Schmidt says she is seeing a few Midwest firms trying to position themselves as leaner and more agile than their larger competitors. But it’s a hard message to sell effectively. “Small firms still suffer from misperceptions,” says Schmidt. “So you want to have a message about getting it done cost-effectively, but you don’t want clients to think of you as being cheap.”

Goldberg, Kohn, Bell, Black, Rosenbloom & Moritz and Levenfeld Pearlstein, two other Chicago firms with fewer than 100 lawyers and a sophisticated local

SMALL FIRMS, INTERESTING ADS

client base, are trying to find a way to make this approach work.

“Clients are using these big firms who don’t need to be,” says Levenfeld chair Bryan Schwartz. Running ads that say so is a way to tell possible clients that they have options, he says.

“The jury is out on whether it will resonate with potential cli-

ents,” says Susan Longo, a director at Hildebrandt International, Inc. “If it does, big firms will have to be more aggressive in communicating why a firm their size is a better place to go.”

The small firms hope that when it comes to rates, clients will agree that bigger isn’t better.

—E G

DRIP, DRIP, DRIP
A 42-year-old water rights case finally heads for a conclusion.

.OST CASES ONLY feel like they’ve lasted a lifetime. But for many of the participants, New Mexico v. Aamodt actually has.

Filed in 1966 to adjudicate water rights in the Rio Pojoaque Basin, a river valley north of Santa Fe, Aamodt (“rhymes with ‘damn it,’ ” says New Mexico state engineer John D’Antonio, who has spent six years trying to resolve the dispute) is one of the oldest cases in the federal court system. It has outlived two district court judges, dozens of lawyers, and a horde of defendants, including name defendant R. Lee Aamodt, who was a land holder in the valley. “It’s like a saga,” says Holland & Hart partner Mark Sheridan, who represents a group of about 900 non-Indian land owners.

But nothing lasts forever, not even ultracomplex water litigation in the arid West. New

Mexico’s congressional delegation will introduce legislation this year that will provide about $200 million to divert water from the Rio Grande into the river valley. This move, along with modest caps on use, should solve the long-running water crisis in a region where demand is often 50 percent greater than supply.

At the root of the case are the twin demons of population growth and drought. Humans have lived in the Rio Pojoaque Basin for thousands of years and have drawn water from the three small Rio Grande feeder rivers to irrigate their crops for nearly as long. In theory, the four Pueblo Indian tribes that are party to the case would have the first claim to water rights, but in practice it isn’t nearly that simple. For hundreds of years land passed back and forth among Indians and settlers, which makes deter-

conspired to see the
case into early middle
age. A settlement was
almost reached in
2005, but one hold-
out, the U.S. Depart-
ment of the Interior,
scuttled the deal.
But bureaucrats are
no match for senators
with pet projects. Sen-
ators Pete Domenici
(R–New Mexico) and
Jeff Bingaman (D–

New Mexico) favor federal legislation that would circumvent Interior and provide direct funding to the project. They have been working to round up support in Congress. The parties to the lawsuit are counting on the matter to wrap up this year. “I think they are going to step up,” Sheridan says. He’s long past ready for it to be over. His daughter, who was a newborn when he filed his first motion in the case in 1982, is now in graduate school. Time to move on. —B H

RUNNING WATER, SLOWING LITIGATION

mining who has the first right a mind-bending exercise involving thousands of people. Representing these people, naturally, are scores of lawyers, mostly from various government agencies and small local firms. One trial segment of the case, in the 1980s, was held at the convention center in Santa Fe.