Keker & Van Nest LLP

'THINK SMALL'
By Kyle Graham

The Yale Law Docket

September 2000

Law firms with fewer than 50 attorneys are thriving across the country. And they're nothing like "The Firm"

The Yale Law School student in a nutshell:

Despite perhaps liberal political leanings, basically conservative when it comes to career decisions.

Believes first legal job must preserve the paper value built on a resume over the past dozen or so years of academic and, possibly, professional achievement.

Thinks the easiest way to ensure such capital preservation is to work for one or two years for one of a handful of large, well-organized, well-paying firms.

For such students, giant, established, demanding but relatively secure firms like Cravath, Swaine & Moore and Latham & Watkins provide defaults. Easy choices.

But a number of smaller firms - lesser-known to some law students, perhaps, but acknowledged, respected, and in some quarters of the legal community, feared - provide all the prestige of these larger firms as well as more responsibility, more freedom, and, well, more fun. We tracked down four of the top firms of 50 attorneys or fewer, three of which participate in Yale's Fall Interview Program, to ask them about their practices.

The Name Game

First, though, a word about prestige. It's simply not true that all blue-chip recruits gravitate inexorably toward the Wachtells of the world, nor that the larger firms monopolize the most attractive and challenging legal work. The four firms contacted - Keker & Van Nest of San Francisco, Texas' Susman Godfrey, Wyche, Burgess, Freeman & Parham in South Carolina, and Kellogg, Huber, Hansen, Todd & Evans of Washington, D.C. - are willing to match their attorneys, or their clientele, against those of any other firm.

As a shorthand measure of the talent these firms attract, note that more than two-thirds of Kellogg Huber's approximately two dozen lawyers are former Supreme Court clerks. Almost all of Wyche Burgess' 27 attorneys hail from Yale, Harvard or University of Virginia law schools, and several of these lawyers also clerked on the Supreme Court. Susman Godfrey recruits almost exclusively from top-tier law schools, as does Keker & Van Nest.

Kellogg Huber doesn't formally recruit at law schools at all (even Yale - mon dieu! ) . It prefers instead to recruit selected, screened individuals, mostly federal clerks. "We don't live under the delusion that only people who clerk are qualified to work at our firm," said Courtney Elwood, YLS '94 and a partner at Kellogg Huber. "But it does serve as a useful sorting process."

These firms acknowledge that the attraction of top-flight students and clerks has an inertial effect on future recruitment, both through the success these recruits have at the firms as well as by simply adding prestige.

"The other people who are here - you get instant credibility when you accept a job here, based on the attorneys you're now affiliated with," said Paul Rollins, a 1998 Yale Law graduate now working at Wyche Burgess.

Meanwhile, each of these firms manages a portfolio of clients and cases that would be the envy of many larger LLPs. Kellogg Huber is the Fortune 500 counsel of choice for knotty telecom-related matters. Its attorneys have argued more than 20 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. Wyche Burgess has nurtured long-lasting general practice relationships with local companies that have "gone national," including media giant Metomedia.

Susman Godfrey's practice is built around commercial, securities, antitrust and products liability litigation. Its recent successes include a settlement of a private antitrust suit against Microsoft for an amount rumored at $275 million (this was just the latest victory for name partner Steve Susman, who has recovered more than $1 billion in settlements and verdicts in the past five years).

These wins lend credence to Rivera's rhetorical exchange: "If you have a significant piece of litigation, not only in Texas but across the country, who would you want to handle it? Ours would be one of a small number of firms I'd consider." The magazine International Commercial Litigation agrees; in 1996 it ranked Susan Godfrey the world's best in its titular area of coverage.

And these caseloads don't prevent the firms from maintaining an active pro bono calendar. Last year, Keker & Van Nest, which primarily focuses on business litigation, joined the ACLU of Northern California in filing a lawsuit challenging the California Highway Patrol's alleged racial profiling practices.

'Sense of Community'

Yet the prestigious companionship and clientele are only two reasons why several Yale Law graduates have chosen to make their home at smaller firms in places like Greenville, South Carolina, Wyche Burgess' home base.

Some sought a sense of community and mutual respect they believed to be lacking in larger cities. "As opposed to, say, Washington, D.C., where everyone's a lawyer, in Greenville you're given some respect for being an attorney," Rollins said.

"Being a good Yale Law student, it is important to me that I find an environment where I wasn't just a lawyer," said Jo Hackl, a 1988 graduate who also found her way to Greenville. "I wanted to go to a community small enough that I could genuinely make a difference in it. When I came here, I quickly became involved in the local legal services agency, and before long became its chair."

Hackl said that working in a small firm, in a smaller city, helps humanize her work and her co-workers. "Wyche Burgess has an old-fashioned approach as to how a law firm should work," she said. "It sees itself as more than a business organization. Instead, it's a group of really talented people who genuinely enjoy working together."

Other Yale Law graduates chose to work at smaller firms in the belief that they would not only receive more client responsibilities than they would in a more crowded environment, but also have more of a say in their employer's respective direction.

"I liked the small atmosphere at Susman Godfrey," says Joseph Grinstein YLS '97. "there was just a little more anarchy here - fewer rules, more responsibility for younger people. Plus, the quality of work here is higher than that at the bigger firms."

At Susman Godfrey and Wyche Burgess, most firm decisions are made by consensus. "Other than partnership, compensation and some mundane things, all lawyers get to vote on firm affairs. One person, one vote - from the most senior partner to the most junior associate," said Robert Rivera, YLS '90 and chair of Susman Godfrey's employment committee. For instance, every lawyer at Susman Godfrey gets a say as to which recruits get offers to join the firm, and which don't.

The accelerated partnership tracks at many smaller firms contributes to this lack of hierarchy. Elwood made partner at Kellogg Huber less than four years after joining the firm. Incoming associates are expected to make partner at Wyche Burgess within four to six years of joining.

The faster trip to partnership, in turn, derives from the increased responsibility afforded to junior associates. "Associates here know that they may be in a courtroom within a week of stepping in the door," Elwood said.

Rewards, Cont'd

Also, the pay at these firms ain't half bad. For a while, Keker & Van Nest claimed the highest first-year salaries in the San Francisco Bay Area. Elwood states that Kellogg Huber's pay is "more than competitive" with other D.C. firms.

And Susman Godfrey's Rivera simply states that "it has been an outstanding year." Given that in 1999 the litigation-focused firm raked in $1.1 million in per partner profits, making it by far the most profitable firm in Texas, one wonders what sorts of year-to-date figures are now running through the Yale Law graduate's mind.

Part of Susman Godfrey's success derives from its willingness - even eagerness - to accept contingency work, leading to tremendous pay-offs in high-stakes cases.

This contingency work in part contributes to Susman's extremely demanding standards for recruits. "Here, with our contingency fee base, you don't have 50 sets of eyes looking at each document," said Grinstein. "So it's vitally important that everyone is highly competent and performing top-flight work."

Working at a smaller firm does present some unique challenges. "Sometimes it's an educational process to convince a client that a smaller firm really can meet all their needs," Hackl said.

But smallness is also an advantage here, in that it provides the firms flexibility to adopt practices like contingency-fee payments and leads to a more stable corps of lawyers upon which a client can rely. Plus, "the fact that we are lean is an attractive selling point to clients," Hackl said.

So What?

So, is a smaller firm for you? Maybe, maybe not. But at the very least, you may want to learn more about a smaller firm or two, along with the Skaddens and Sidleys.

As Elwood puts it, "You have the credentials to do anything, so you can take a chance on a smaller firm. You know that if you find it's not for you, you can still get just about any job."