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Special Report

71 Litigation Department Of the Year
Our biennial awards honor overall strengths and practice group expertise.

72 Top Guns
Kirkland & Ellis litigators do lots of things well. But when they go to trial, it’s war.

76 The Finalists
The runners-up racked up some spectacular wins, too: success stories from four finalists,
plus 18 honorable mentions.

92 Footnotes
From Iraq to Facebook, Am Law litigators had a full docket in 2006 and 2007.

98 Practice Areas
Singling out litigation winners and finalists in three key practices.

• Product Liability
  Pharm Team: Shook, Hardy
• Labor and Employment
  Rescuing the Rust Belt: Jones Day
• Intellectual Property
  An All-Around Champion: Wilmer Cutler

Download American Lawyer Magazine, January 2008

PDF format, 25.7MB, 132Pages.

IN HOUSE at The American Lawyer

OVER THE YEARS IN this space I have urged law firm leaders to meet with their firms’ biggest clients. It never occurred to me to suggest that if at those meetings clients tell you they have problems with a partner or a bill or any of the other potential friction points, they expect you to do something about the issue they’ve raised.

So you might be as surprised as I was by a discussion I had with one of the best clients in the country, the sort of fellow that The Am Law 200—and The Am Law 10—line up to woo. He understands the seduction process, is even a bit amused by it, especially the phone calls from the eager-to-get-toknow- him partner who just learned that his brother-in-law sat next to him in a law school class three decades ago. And now could he meet to talk about getting some business?

As my lunchmate tells it, about two years ago he agreed to meet with the head of one of his principal outside firms. He had inherited the firm when he took over as general counsel at the turn of the century; this was his first meeting with the firm chair.

To prepare, he asked his staff for a review of the firm’s performance, identified four problems, and went to the lunch ready to talk business. As he recalls, he recited the litany, received a pleasant acknowledgment, and then listened as his companion turned the lunch into a discussion of possible golf dates.

Afterward he was invited to play at various swell country clubs, but his four problems were never addressed. The upshot: The client, with a slight smile, told me that over the last year he had reduced his spending with the offending firm by 90 percent.

You can’t make this stuff up. There could be many explanations. Among them: My companion was exaggerating; the law firm didn’t care about his lucrative and continuing business; the firm leader was fearful of taking on the relationship partner (or was trying to sabotage his firm); or simple human error had occurred. None satisfy me. Would your partners buy these excuses? It hardly matters. The client has already voted with his cordovans.

Isolated incident? Hard to tell. This month, there’s reason to think not. Every time we run our Litigation Department of the Year project, we ask firms to submit names of client references. And every year we talk with clients who are amazed that their names have been given to us. Nothing yet matches the aggrieved general counsel we spoke to four years ago, who, having recounted how the firm in question had abandoned him two weeks before trial because a partner was ill and the firm didn’t have another lawyer who could try the case, essentially told us he wouldn’t hire the firm again if it was the only one left practicing in New York.

But we did hear some lesser tales of woe. To give just two examples, we talked with a client who told us how unhappy she was with the firm’s failure to scale back defense costs in a case in which she was a fairly minor player. In the view of the client, her principal exposure was not liability from the case—but the law firm’s bill. In the second case, a client said he’d be willing to hire one lawyer at the firm but no one else. In a contest in which we judge the strength of the department, the firm had sent us to a client who thought the firm he had used did not have any bench strength. That client, by the way, proceeded to tout the glories of a competitor.

Perhaps I am putting too much stock in the off-the-record, extremely candid comments of your clients. Or perhaps I am taking too seriously the references you send us. Does it really matter if the chief legal officers of major corporations bad-mouth you? I’ll leave that question to your chief karma officer. In the meantime, chairpeople: Listen to your clients! You have nothing to lose but their work.

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