Monthly Archives: February 2009

The Record 2509 2008 U.S. Partner Laterals

In the midst of these current turbulent market waters, a total of 2509 partners at AmLaw 100 and 200 firms managed to successfully jump ship in 2008. The biggest winners were K&L Gates (185 partner acquisitions), Reed Smith (74), DLA Piper (58), Jones Day (57) and Alston & Bird (53), while the biggest losers were Akin Gump (59 partner defections), Heller Ehrman (47 pre-dissolution), Thelen (46 pre-dissolution), Mayer Brown (45), and, K&L Gates (again) (40).

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Where Were the Lawyers?

While our economy crumbles, the American public observes like lemmings as the Wall Street criminals who executed the greatest financial fraud in history add insult to our collective injury by continuing to openly steal billions. Only now, instead of conning the world into believing that their excrement is some sort of sophisticated securities derivative too complex for non-Streeters to comprehend, they are referring to their cash grab as “bonuses.” Relatively insignificant sociopaths like Bernie Madoff can only aspire to sit at the desks of these miscreants whose greed may still prove monumental enough to bring us all to ruin. We at Hanover Legal are certainly not the first to ask whether and when members of our legal community should have recognized and tried to put a stop to the epic Wall Street slight of hand. However, we viewed our function as limited to servicing the financiers to whatever extent we were paid to do so, and as long as Moody’s and S&P were signing off on these transactions with their highest ratings, who were we to raise an eyebrow?

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