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The post in Reddit nails it. This week's once-unthinkable raid of Wachtell by Gibson Dunn unmasked how vulnerable many seeming successful law firms are.  Along with Wachtell, Cravath, Williams and Connolly and more are being written off as dinos. To even survive they will have to overhaul their model and probably stick to being domestic firms. Smirk. No surprise then that Cravath, once a market-maker, hasn't matched Milbank. Meanwhile Milbank has added an off-season bonus to its salary jump. Milbank could be establishing itself as an alternate model.  In addition, as The Wall Street Journal posited, mega is the present and the future of practicing law. Obviously, the media will shift coverage to concentrating on what Gibson Dunn, Kirkland & Ellis and Latham are up to. Smaller players could be fading entities. Like Medieval monks, they may labor in obscurity.  Along with that development this week, what we also know: Cupid's bow has lots of reach in law firms. Not onl...

In the late 1960s/early 1970s the counterculture meme had been "Small Is Beautiful." That was an era when youth and other kinds of activists feared the exploding power of large multinational corporations.  Of course, small never really caught on. The stampede was to land a job in one of those multinationals. Currently, it's  taken a lot of push from some employment experts to convince Gen Z that opportunity exists in small business. The jury is still out on that one. Meanwhile, recent events and trends reinforce that the present and the future belong to big. That extends from the practice of law to the operation of religious organizations. What has dominated legal and business news this week has been the announcement by mega law firm Gibson Dunn that it hired away from small law firm Wachtell star litigation partners. Because of its size GD can "afford" to pay those powerhouse brandnames what they assess they are worth in the current hot market for talent. Expli...

  In a hardened world leaning into hate a raccoon with a shortened spine in Seattle stole our hearts.  Collectively, we softened. The entity got named "Jimothy."  But that didn't have to happen. Jimothy could have become targeted for a few bullets to wipe out this odd-looking creature. That was the ethos of the Third Reich.  Instead, the miracle of seeing differently took hold. That had been a meme at the internationally famous Toledo Museum of Art last fall. As a society, we put on a net kind of glasses. We became refreshed, not repulsed, by how Jimothy looked.  That kind of thinking made Dove beloved in the 1970s. It created the message that all women are beautiful, just as they are. The objective was to erase the rigid norms of how women should look which was destroying self-esteem and triggering eating disorders. Today, we consider that mindset radical acceptance.  The business lesson embedded in Jimothy is about unique value. Leveraging the spirit of J...

  No one is naive anymore in this brutal era of capitalism.  Since it's more difficult to get, hold and move on to better work, fear is escalating. One source of profound angst is who's in a romantic relationship with a powerful who and what could be going on in their pillow talk. The issue is not one of morality or fun gossip. It can have significant impact on employment security/mobility. Actually, this is not new. Back in the late 1970s, light years before #MeToo, in a large energy corporation, the head of our department, it was rumored widely, was sleeping with a subordinate. Both were single. Not only was there seething resentment about the subordinate's promotion and visibility. There was awareness that their pillow talk could affect one's own standing in the organization. Of course, a common fantasy was sending an anonymous letter to the straight-arrow CEO about the goings-on. However, the fear was too intense to be involved in anything like that. As we follow th...

  M&A legal powerhouse Wachtell has taken on some hilarious reputational baggage. So far, it's not unraveling its business. But a good time is being had by all as tabloid media milk the story of Nathaniel Cullerton's very public kissyface encounter with a subordinate. My, my, such a seeming abuse of power. The New York Post  and the Daily Mail  are juicing the narrative which had been primarily an inside-legal-sector shock bit of gossip. Here was a junior partner, who should have been still a low-profile suck-up grinder, being so passionate on a park bench that the video-taker chastised him to "get a room." But the story broke out to the general public when it was disclosed that this partner 1) was slated to lateral to a plum position at Gibson Dunn and 2) was sidelined by the park-bench scandal.  Now, both Wachtell and Cullerton have become tabloid fare.  According to one run-through by ChatGPT Wachtell will hold up in client assignments, despite this and ...

  Thanks to FT and media such as Abovethelaw which ran with the story, we know that Wachtell partner Nathaniel Cullerton was slated to lateral to Gibson Dunn. He would join the pack of litigators exiting to with William Savitt. However, after being videoed on a park bench kissing with great passion Wachtell subordinate Kelsey Borenzweig that opportunity went poof.  This snippet of information might change the harsh opinion of Cullerton as having no judgment.  We could indeed reframe the situation as involving clever lawyer planning: How about being able to conduct a discrete affair with Borenzweig, given that they would be at different firms and no reporting relationship would be involved. Sure, he would still be married but that happens all the time in large elite law firms. Many partners do wind up divorcing and marrying associates.  Removed as an obstacle would be that she reported to him, as was the reality at Wachtell. In all reputable organizations that poten...