In the white-collar world, is a bigger firm the better one?
That’s a question Abbe Lowell and Christopher Man said they answered the hard way.
In 2007, they left their long time home at Chadbourne & Parke for a firm that had more than twice the lawyers, McDermott Will & Emery.
Abbe Lowell
“I thought size was the large determinate,” Lowell said in an interview. “More people, more clients, I thought it was a numbers game.”
This month, they reconsidered.
Lowell, a go-to lawyer in the biggest Washington scandals, returned to Chadbourne in early May. On Wednesday, the firm announced that Man and partner Pamela Marple, who represented the John Edwards staffer who tried to take the fall in the love-child scandal, followed.
“It turned out bigger was not better,” Lowell said.
McDermott’s size — 970 lawyers by the latest American Lawyer count — made it difficult to interact with the firm’s partners and clients, he said.
The firm’s partnership structure — tiered with different levels of income and capital partners — also incentivized lawyers to compete with each other for the work, Man said in an interview.
And a bigger firm meant more business conflicts, Lowell said, and having to turn down work because of them.
“Life is always tradeoffs, but am I giving up more work than I’m getting?” Lowell, who helped defend former President Bill Clinton against impeachment charges and represented the likes of Jack Abramoff and Rep. Gary Condit, said.
In a statement, Bobby Burchfield, co-partner-in-charge of McDermott’s Washington, D.C., office said: ”As a matter of policy, McDermott does not discuss its compensation structure with outside parties. Every day, McDermott partners work together across offices and across geographies to provide excellent client service.”
But Lowell and Man said Chadbourne’s size — 398 lawyers according to the American Lawyer — and flatter partnership structure drew them back.
Pamela Marple
Chadbourne also has few lawyers who specialize in white collar criminal defense, and the return of the group doubles the practice at the firm, Lowell said.
Changes in enforcement priorities — especially the Justice Department’s stepped up enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act — also made Chadbourne a more attractive platform.
The firm does mostly corporate work, and has a network of small offices in unusual locations that rank low on corruption indices, including Kyiv, Almaty, Warsaw, and Moscow.
Chadbourne does a lot of project finance work in those places, and handles investments that can often run into FCPA concerns.
The firm’s clients previously had to go elsewhere when things went south on those projects, Man said.
Lowell said he has already fielded calls from partners abroad about matters the group might handle.
Their current clients also moved over to the new firm with the group, Man said.
Christopher Man
On the FCPA front, they represent Ousama Naaman, who pleaded guilty last year to corruption charges related to the Oil-for-Food program in Iraq.
Man also previously represented Titan Corp. in foreign bribery concerns that scuttled the company’s deal with Lockheed Martin Corp., and worked on a corruption investigation for energy firm ConocoPhillips.
The other partner, Marple, who worked as a federal prosecutor and on the Hill, as counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, has a general litigation practice with a focus on congressional investigations.
The group seems to be doing well at the new firm. Lowell already snagged a major new client — former Sen. John Ensign hired Lowell to defend him in a potential investigation into whether he broke federal laws in the aftermath of an affair with an aide.
This is slightly interesting and I generally agree with Abbe Lowell’s politics. But what has this to do with Main Justice?