Top lawyers jump ship for Littler
California law firm hires local attorneys to open 29th US office in Boston
Four senior-level Boston attorneys are leaving their firms to open a new local office this week for Littler Mendelson, a San Francisco-based firm specializing in employment law that will count Boston as its 29th US office.
The move epitomizes several trends that have been roiling the once-staid legal profession in recent years, including the growing demand for law firms to build out a nationwide footprint and specialize in one or a few main areas of law rather than attempting to be traditional full-service firms.
Littler, which describes itself as the largest US employment law firm, has also sought to capitalize on relentless pressure from big corporations to hold down their legal expenses. With economies of scale and scope from specializing in employment law, Littler competes explicitly and aggressively on price with local firms, while promising it can deliver faster service and greater expertise.
The four lawyers joining Littler are David C. Casey, a partner at Bingham McCutchen LLP and chairman of its labor and employment law practice; Suzanne Suppa Sullivan, a Bingham labor lawyer and employment litigation specialist; Christopher J. Perry, vice chairman of the labor and employment practice and 18-year veteran at Hale & Dorr; and Gregory C. Keating, a partner at Choate Hall & Stewart and lawyer there since 1993.
While many lawyers bemoan the pressures on law to become more of a business and less of a profession, Littler is adapting the strategic marketing approach of national franchises like H & R Block, the tax preparation firm, and specialty automobile service businesses like Jiffy Lube: Go national, slash costs for providing commodity services, and use that base to go after higher-profit specialty services as well.
With the legal business in financial turmoil, profit margins for generalist firms under pressure, and several midsize Boston law firms folding or selling out in the last three years, the four lawyers see Littler as an innovative platform that addresses many of the challenges facing employment lawyers at even large, healthy firms. "This is part of a revolution in the way legal services are delivered in this country," Keating said.
Wendy Tice-Wallner, president and managing director of Littler Mendelson, said she expects the Boston office could double in size within a year. It will initially operate from space at 225 Franklin St. while the firm seeks permanent Financial District offices.
Littler already counts as clients nine of the 16 Fortune 500 companies headquartered in Massachusetts, and more than 40 other current clients have indicated they would want to use Littler lawyers in Boston for local work, she said.
"This is part of our manifest destiny to move eastward," Tice-Wallner said. "We have had a strategic plan of touching down in every major metropolitan area."
The Boston office is the third opened by Littler in less than a year, following similar moves into Charlotte, N.C., and Miami that involved recruiting top local employer-side labor lawyers away from local firms.
"From a legal standpoint, Boston has been a reasonably closed market," Tice-Wallner said. Research by Edge International, a global legal consulting firm, found Greater Boston has the third-biggest market for legal services in the United States after New York and Washington, totaling $5.8 billion last year, with $340 million of that spent by the largest 1,000 US firms.
"We saw Boston as an essential market, but as one that would be difficult to penetrate" because local firms tend to have strong, deep relationships with local lawyers, Tice-Wallner said. "The model that seems to work well for us is finding leading local attorneys who are very interested in what we've done, and then allow them to build their own team."
National firms including Holland & Knight; Weil, Gotshal & Magnes; and McDermott, Will & Emery have built up local offices through moves such as Weil's recruiting several top finance lawyers at Hutchins, Wheeler & Dittmar and McDermott's hiring former Massachusetts governor William F. Weld in 1997, before Weld left Boston to pursue an investment banking career in New York.
Bingham, originally Bingham, Dana & Gould, is the leading example of a Boston-based firm that has gone national. A year and a half ago, Bingham merged with McCutchen, Doyle, Brown & Enersen of San Francisco, and the combined firm last July bought a 60-attorney Los Angeles firm headed by the former mayor, Richard Riordan.
Typical work handled by Littler includes representing employers in discrimination and firing lawsuits, advising them on how to avoid such suits, representing companies in collective bargaining with unions, and general advice on state-by-state peculiarities in hiring and labor relations. Top Littler lawyers have been known to quip that much of their work involves dealing with "sex, drugs, and violence" as issues that create legal problems for employers.
Compared to litigation or merger and acquisition legal work, however, employment law tends to yield much lower profit margins, and can often involve what lawyers call "commodity" work such as developing job applications tailored to state antidiscrimination and labor statutes in multiple states.
Joseph B. Altonji, a consultant with Hildebrandt International, a management consulting firm for professional-services businesses, observed in a recent essay that the legal industry is going through a "radical restructuring" as part of which "there will be a few `category killer' firms -- those that roll up much of the work now thought of as local or regional corporate work under a few far more efficient roofs."
Casey, who will be the "managing shareholder" or lead partner in Boston, said he was attracted to Littler's "unparalleled footprint, so we can serve clients virtually anywhere in the country," and said because of the firm's knowledge base and scale, "Our cost structure is such that we can provide world-class labor and employment practice at a cost that is 25 percent less than the other premier law firms in town." Casey and colleagues expect to bring many current clients to Littler, although they all declined to name them.
Littler, established in 1942, now has nearly 400 attorneys and grossed about $165 million in the last year. A November survey by Corporate Counsel, a trade magazine, found that 22 of 194 large companies it surveyed said they use Littler for labor and employment work, considerably more than any other national firms.
Like most firms, however, Littler has seen shrinking profit margins and several defections of top lawyers. Several expansion gambits have failed to work out, leading Littler in recent years to shut down offices it had opened in New Orleans; Portland, Ore.; Long Beach, Calif.; Menlo Park, Calif.; and Morristown, N.J.
The four lawyers' move to Littler does not appear likely to be contentious.
"We wish them the best," Bingham spokesman Hank Shafran said of Casey and Sullivan. "It's a very good move for them. I think they just decided that in today's world of law practice, some platforms are better for certain people than others."
Peter J. Howe can be reached at howe@globe.com. 