Weil Gotshal, 95-Year-Old Law Powerhouse, Will Dissolve After Partner Exodus
Seven Lights
Weil Gotshal & Manges, the New York law firm that made a specialty of rescuing other companies in distress, announced Wednesday that it is shutting down. The firm has retained AlixPartners, the restructuring advisory firm, to help dissolve the practice, the Wall Street Journal reported. A wave of partner departures forced the announcement.
The collapse carries a particular irony: Weil Gotshal built its reputation in corporate restructuring and bankruptcy, the machinery of orderly failure, and will now pass through it itself. The Financial Times reported that partners were stunned by the realisation that “a profitable 95-year-old firm with 1,200 lawyers could be felled by a string of departures.”
The New York Times described the firm as “once a legal powerhouse” that had been rocked by an exodus of high-profile lawyers, a failed succession plan and a scuttled deal to merge with a rival firm. Each blow thinned the partnership; the thinning, in a law firm, is itself the malady, since a firm is the sum of the lawyers who agree to remain one.
The mechanics of the wind-down will now fall to AlixPartners, whose ordinary work is the orderly liquidation of distressed enterprises. Client matters must be transferred or closed, leases and staff obligations settled, and the partnership’s accounts wound up. What remains of the practice will be judged by what its former partners take with them: in modern legal markets, rainmakers move entire practices to competitors when they move, and the departures of recent months had already stripped the firm of several of its most visible names.
The firm’s end closes a chapter of the New York bar. Founded in the Depression era, it grew into one of the city’s pre-eminent practices through decades of bankruptcy work, and its passing marks the latest instance in which the law firm — an institution long assumed to outlive any of its members — proved no more durable than the allegiances of its partners. The firm had 1,200 lawyers on its books and, by the account of its own partners, the finances to keep going. It did not.