Law Firms
Leader of Dissolved IP Boutique Says No One Wanted His Job
Posted Aug 27, 2008, 06:11 am CST
By Debra Cassens Weiss
A Philadelphia intellectual property boutique is being acquired by a larger firm, and the outgoing managing partner attributes his firm's dissolution to an unusual problem: No one wanted his job.
Synnestvedt & Lechner of Philadelphia was having a banner year in terms of revenue per lawyer, managing partner Joseph Posillico told the Am Law Daily. He had served in the leadership position since 2006 and was set to step down from the job this year. But no one could be found to take his place.
"In some IP boutiques you'll have one or two partners who enjoy and are good at doing the administrative work and would perhaps be happy to scale back in client work," Posillico told the publication. "The make-up of the people we had was not that way. They were much more interested in staying in contact with their clients."
But another departing partner cited a different reason for the firm’s demise: Many general practice firms are beefing up their intellectual property practices, making it more difficult for the boutiques to get referrals, the story says. Yet another problem: Synnestvedt & Lechner had lost several lawyers, beginning late last year, and had laid off at least seven staffers.
The law firm is merging with Fox Rothschild, which is hiring Posillico and seven other lawyers. Three other departing lawyers are going to Ballard Spahr Andrews & Ingersoll.
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Posted by Patently Obvious - 3 months, 1 week, 1 day, 13 hours, 32 minutes ago
This is just too funny! Only at Synnestvedt! It is a shame that a 111 year old firm became nothing more than the butt of jokes but the current management ran the place into the ground. Also, the departures started more than a year ago and most of the attorneys left of their own accord - they were not laid off.
Posted by Anonymous - 3 months, 6 days, 13 hours, 8 minutes ago
What ruined S&L was their continuous practice of inequitable compensation and advancement. They paid lateral hires from outside firms considerably more than they paid their own home grown attorneys. None of this even corresponded to the amount of revenue actually generated by the individual attorneys since some of the home grown attorneys generated the most revenue for the firm. It was clearly a manifestation of the partnership valuing attorneys “not from here” more than the ones they themselves trained.
In late 2006, when they created a new pay structure meant to be more equitable to everyone, they still pegged each attorney to certain “levels” that appeared to give more credit to lateral hires than to the home grown team. Needless to say, their lack of respect for their own product was what drove down morale and what caused the first defections which happened well before the partners started leaving. How were they to expect loyalty when they weren’t loyal to their own people?
These articles make it sound like it was the partners who willingly defected and caused the eventual dismemberment of the firm. However, if anyone did their homework, they would have seen that the defections started when several long-time associates, who in fact did much of the work of the firm, realized that their pathway to advancement was being blocked in favor of the advancement of lateral hires and started leaving. The partners then dumped the workload of those who left on the remaining associates without any increase in pay, which had the effect of causing further defections. Only after the writing started appearing on the wall did the partners then start defecting because they saw that the firm, already top heavy with partners (several without any clients), was becoming more and more top heavy.
S&L is not disbanding because no one wants to run it. It is disbanding because it no longer became economically feasible to run it since people were leaving left and right.
The short point of this all is that none of this would have happened had they simply played fair and aboveboard with their own people. Because they didn’t, they created a system of mutual distrust and disloyalty which caused people to leave and eventually caused the death of a firm that had lasted for 111 years.