IN FEBRUARY, K&L Gates chairman Peter
Kalis disclosed much of the 1,720-law-
yer firm’s 2012 financial information in a
press release, instantly becoming “
transparency’s high priest,” as one publication
quipped. “This type of thoughtful, comprehensive, nuanced disclosure can only
be good for our industry,” Bruce MacEwen
noted on his blog Adam Smith, Esq. Unlike
most private companies, Kalis reasons,
law firms “have hundreds of shareholders.
And there’s an element of public trust in
our profession.”
RALPH BAXTER
Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe
San Francisco
Location, Location, Location
Orrick led the movement to relocate back office work to a cheaper spot.
IN 1979 JEROME COHEN and Owen Nee Jr.
(pictured), then partners at now-defunct
Coudert Brothers, opened the first—but
not the last—Chinese office for a Western
law firm. Cohen and Nee worked on China’s first international petroleum deal, its
first joint venture, and its first syndicated
loan, and they advised clients such as General Motors Corporation and The Coca-Cola Company on entering China. Among the
first firms to follow were Morrison & Foerster and O’Melveny & Myers; now 65 Am
Law 200 firms have offices in China.
OWEN NEE JR.,
JEROME COHEN
Coudert Brothers
BEIJING
RALPH BAXTER’s cost-saving maneuver
to relocate Orrick,
Herrington & Sutcliffe’s back-office
functions to a “global
operations center”
in Wheeling, West
Virginia, was initially
met with skepticism
inside the Am Law
In 2002, the Wheeling facility opened with
70 mostly information technology, accounting,
and operations jobs. Moving back-office func-
tions to lower cost settings, whether in Brooklyn or Bangalore, wasn’t a new idea. But before
Orrick, no large U.S.–based law firm had so
thoroughly embraced the concept.
In 2010, some eight years after Orrick’s West
Virginia debut, Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale
and Dorr moved some back-office functions
to Dayton. Last year, Pillsbury opened its own
global operations center in Nashville. Today, as
many as a half-dozen Am Law 200 firms have
relocated back-office operations to lower cost
areas.
Orrick continues to refine its Wheeling
strategy. The facility now houses 300 firm employees, including 47 attorneys in a career associate program launched in 2011. These lawyers
perform many of the same tasks as traditional
junior-level associates but are not on the firm’s
partnership track. “As a firm, we’re more open-minded to change,” Baxter says, “and much of
that is due to the global operations center.”
YOUNG MOO KIM
Kim & Chang
Seoul
Ahead of His Time
Kim recruited U.S.-trained lawyers to Seoul—before everyone else did.
IN 1977, when the U.S. Supreme Court
ruled that law firms could advertise, large
firms shrugged. It wasn’t until a decade
later that Ralph Savarese, then managing partner of Howrey & Simon, launched
the first major corporate law firm advertising campaign. “We had been through a
painful downsizing, and we needed to do
something to differentiate ourselves from
our competitors,” says Savarese. Howrey’s
best-known campaign featured iconic federal and state courthouses with the tag-line, “In Court Every Day.” The ads established Howrey as a nationwide litigation
firm, and paved the way for today’s law
firm marketing model.
RALPH SAVARESE
Howrey
WASHINGTON, D.C.
WHO HAS the most
U.S. lawyers in
Seoul? It’s not one
of the nearly 20
big-name American
firms that have been
launching Korea offices since the legal
market liberalized
last year. It’s top local
firm Kim & Chang,
Other large Korean firms now boast a similar proportion of foreign lawyers, but it was
Kim & Chang founder Young Moo Kim who
spearheaded Korea’s unique foreign lawyer subculture. While a student at the University of
Chicago and Harvard Law School in the 1960s,
Kim observed that American lawyers were
trained to address their clients’ needs and solve
their problems, but Korean lawyers tended to
see themselves more as impartial lawgivers. Kim
was determined to bring the U.S. approach to
Korea, and foreign lawyers were a part of Kim
& Chang almost from its founding in 1973.
The point was never to have the foreign lawyers practice U.S. law—no Korean firm holds
itself out as doing so—but to bring the English-language ability and client service mind-set of
American lawyers to Korean law matters. Lately,
the Korean firms have also focused increasingly
on outbound matters as well, putting them in
direct competition with the newly arrived foreign firms.
Both groups of firms tend to hire from the
same pool of U.S.–trained Korean and Korean
American lawyers. But, for now, thanks to its
founder, Kim & Chang has a lot more of them.
