Lexington, KY - One entire floor and half of another of the Lexington Financial Center are being fitted up to accommodate the new faces in the law firm of Dinsmore & Shohl. By early spring, and despite economic trends prevailing over much of the country, outgoing Managing Partner Joe Terry and his successor, Chauncey Curtz, will have achieved an expansion milestone set years ago.
"When we opened the office for Dinsmore in Lexington in 1997, we started with seven people," recalled Terry, "and we had a goal that we wanted to reach. We thought a good number for a Lexington firm would be a 40- to 50-person office.
We saw that happen this past September when we merged with Woodard, Hopson & Fulton."
There is something poetic about a Cincinnati law firm (Dinsmore) merging with a Louisville firm (Woodard), resulting in a more significant Lexington presence for each.
"We've been pretty cautious in our expansion in Lexington," said Curtz. "We were lucky to find a very compatible firm in terms of culture.
On a personality basis, we fit extremely well, and in practice areas we fit extremely well.
So that's going to make for a very good match, and it will be very easy in terms of the transition."
Even when the general fit is good, the merging of teams, systems and practices presents a range of issues, including getting everybody on the same wavelength.
"Law firms, just like businesses, have cultures, and when you put two different cultures together, you have some transition," said Terry. "A lot of it is education - educating both partners and associates from each of
the law firms as to the other's best practices. The ideal transition is where you can choose those best practices from each and implement those in your merger and then develop a somewhat new culture."
"We've been working hard on a lot of the systems transitions," added Curtz, "because all the information technology, all of the billing and everything, is different in each firm. So our administrative folks have been spending a lot of time in the past 90 days getting those systems to fit together."
Historically, Dinsmore has aggressively sought to attract established attorneys with their own client bases.
Terry acknowledged that, in recent years, the talent pool has become saturated by a glut of law school graduates and the casualties of downsizing.
"In the last four or five years, we've seen that market go to where you have just a huge pool of talent out there to draw from," he said. "The market used to be that you would really have to go out and dig for talent to get the brightest and the best to stay in Kentucky and to stay with a particular law firm.
Now the pendulum has swung, and you don't have to recruit nearly as hard, because you have people knocking your door down looking for jobs, and most of them have experience."
In a recent survey of law firm leaders, 46 percent expected their firm to increase in size in 2010, compared to 72 percent in 2009. Many firms, those on the East Coast in particular, have recently reduced staffs. Layoffs have hit almost every substantial legal market, according to the Center for Career Strategy at Northwestern University Law School in Chicago.
"A lot of people coming out of bigger financial center law firms are looking for places to go," noted Curtz.
While Northwestern's data for '09 shows litigation practices have enjoyed some growth (+1.8 percent), transactional services have taken hits. These include mergers & acquisitions (-8 percent), general corporate (-9 percent), real estate (-13 percent) and capital markets (-14 percent.)
As a result, both men confirmed, recent years have seen a general reduction in starting salaries.
That trend might discourage aspiring legal beagles, but Terry said it shouldn't.
"A law degree is an interesting post-doctorate degree because, unlike a lot of other specialties, there are a lot of things you can do with a law degree," he noted.
"If you're a doctor, you're going to practice medicine.
If you're a lawyer or you have a law degree, you might be in private practice, you might be in-house - you might do any number of things."
While compensation remains a priority among budding barristers, Terry has noticed a profound shift in motivation. "Anymore, most of the young people you see coming into the practice of law are interested in the career as a financial means," he said, adding, however,
"I don't see too many that have the burning desire to do nothing but practice law. Young people today have a more balanced lifestyle than maybe we did when I first started practicing law as a young person straight out of law school.
There was that desire to get in and really dig in. And sometimes you get your priorities out of whack. But the young people today have a more balanced approach to their lifestyle."
Balance of another sort also is top of mind for Chauncey Curtz as he assumes a new leadership role while retaining another.
Even as managing partner in the Lexington office, Curtz will continue to chair the firm's Mining Group - one of the nation's largest and voted the number one mining firm in the country for three years in a row by the national rating association "Best Lawyers." And these are busy, difficult times.
"There is a great deal of activity in Washington and even on the state level in terms of regulations, not only on the production of coal but also on the use of coal and the burning of coal by power plants, primarily," he said.
For Curtz and his group, attempting to plan for outcomes is an enormous challenge.
"There are some big legislative initiatives going on, particularly in the greenhouse gas area on the federal level," Curtz said.
"It's very hard to know how that will all turn out, ... with the discord and the partisanship in Washington right now, the change in the number of Democrats and Republicans in the Senate.
It really looks to me as though gridlock is the most likely outcome for the next twelve months or so."
Curtz and Terry might find some comfort in knowing that every important sector in the economy is encountering its own version of the political gridlock nightmare. But to Curtz, it's small comfort, at best.
"It really has to end soon," he said. "One of the things I think people have lost sight of is the fact that the gridlock is extremely difficult for businesses and for the economy.
I think most businesses in the mining industry and elsewhere are prepared to and willing to deal with the known, but unable to deal with the unknown. It's extremely difficult to make long-term decisions and to make capital investment decisions without knowing whether or not the rules are going to change in two or three or four years."
And, Curtz added, whether it's the legal profession, mining or any other sector of the economy, the gridlock goes hand in glove with the economic problems the country is encountering.
"And I think when the country can start moving forward together the economy is going to start improving rapidly," he said.