September 2004 Issue

Cover Story

Back from the Brink

Sitting in a Minneapolis hotel conference room last spring, rob beattie had every reason to wonder where he would be working in a few months. All around him the partners who had re­mained at Oppenheimer Wolff & Don­nelly were hashing out the future of the firm, if there was to be one at all.

For Beattie, the scene was all too familiar. Just four years earlier he had watched his old firm implode. Although Oppenheimer once boasted 350 lawyers in cities across North America and Europe, it, too, seemed destined for a similar fate. Cer­tain­ly, it wouldn’t be the first seemingly successful firm to fail—or the last. Not that long ago, headlines had announced closings at powerhouse firms like Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison; Altheimer & Gray; and Hill & Bar­low. Yet for every Brobeck there is an Oppenheimer—a firm that faced potentially fatal challenges and managed to come back from the brink and find new success.

Management consultants and lawyers posit a variety of reasons for law firm turnarounds. Some cite formal management structures, for example, or a professional sales staff that can boost client development. But as any lawyer knows, law firms come in too many shapes and sizes for any one-size-fits-all fix. What works for one may spell disaster for another.

Feature Section

As Worldcom Turns, Cases Pile Up

It will cost citigroup inc. $2.65 billion to extricate itself from the WorldCom Inc. accounting fraud mess.

That’s not chump change in anyone’s book. But it represented a bargain for Citigroup, one of 18 investment banks that underwrote WorldCom bonds before the communications company admitted in 2002 that it had misstated its earnings and filed the largest bankruptcy in American history.

Bullet Proof

Ronnie Lee Bowling is on Ken­tucky’s death row for two murders he claims he didn’t commit. And one of the things that helped put him there was the testimony of an FBI laboratory ex­aminer who said he had “matched” several bullets recovered from the bodies of the two victims to a box of un­spent cartridges found in Bowl­ing’s mobile home.