‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’ Put WolfBlock Out of Business

It was just after midnight on March 23 when 34-year-old Zachary Glaser got an unexpected text message from a friend as he was at work at WolfBlock, preparing for a closing argument.

"Sorry to hear about your firm," the friend said. Glaser responded: "I’m at my firm. What the hell do you mean?" recounts Philadelphia magazine in a lengthy feature article

Indeed, although Glaser hadn't suspected that the venerable Philadelphia-based firm was in trouble, partners met later that day and voted to dissolve. Some WolfBlock employees found out about the planned shutdown as they were reading the newspaper on their commute home. Luckier than some of his colleagues and a number of support staff, Glaser soon found another job and now works at Duane Morris.

While WolfBlock remained financially viable right up until the end, a "prisoner's dilemma" made it impossible for it to stay in business, the article explains: As partners scrambled in a successful effort to obtain new bank financing and put together a belt-tightening plan after failed merger talks with Cozen O'Connor and Akerman Senterfitt in 2007 and 2008, the destructive seeds of doubt had already been sowed.

"Ultimately, in those final days, what WolfBlock needed to survive wasn’t a line of credit, or a merger. What it needed was some kind of larger glue to counteract the shearing logic of the prisoner’s dilemma. It needed, for lack of a better word, faith," the magazine writes.

Under the prisoner's dilemma, the firm could remain operational only if the group of partners worked together cooperatively. And although WolfBlock partners wanted to stay in practice together, they nonetheless began to shop their services to competing law partnerships, fearing that their colleagues were already doing so. That made the breakup of WolfBlock inevitable.

"A law firm is a strange, liquid thing. It doesn’t own anything," the magazine notes. "It’s just a group of people."

Related earlier coverage:

ABAJournal.com: "Why WolfBlock Didn’t Merge to Survive"

ABAJournal.com: "Did WolfBlock Infighting Lead to its Demise?"

ABAJournal.com: "Did ‘Financial Insanity’ and ‘Greedy Lawyers’ Doom WolfBlock?"

ABAJournal.com: "Former WolfBlock Chair to Join Cozen"

ABAJournal.com: "Retired WolfBlock Lawyers Out of Luck?"