Duane, Morris Grows N.J. Presence,
Saying Local Firms Can't Compete
By Henry Gottlieb
P
hiladelphia's Duane, Morris &
Heckscher has opened its third
office in New Jersey, and
managing partner Sheldon Bonovitz
predicts that the firm's strength in the
state will double to 50 lawyers over
the next year and a half.
And in comments sure to reinforce
New Jersey firms' sense that big-city
rivals view them as colonials,
Bonovitz says that even the biggest
home-grown firms can't compete as
full-service firms against giants like
375-lawyer Duane, Morris.
"If the 50-lawyer firm is a
boutique that specializes in one area or
is a litigation firm, yes, it can
compete," Bonovitz says. "If it's a fullservice firm the answer is, no. They
can compete for business the bigger
firms aren't interested in."
He added: "The question is
whether a 200-lawyer firm can be a
full-service firm in today's world? I
don't think so."
Duane, Morris opened a Princeton
office two weeks ago for the
convenience of three lawyers who left
Princeton's Hill Wallack, partners M.
Elaine Jacoby and T. Gary Mitchell
and first-year associate Kathleen
Burns. Most of their practice is in the
employment defense field.
Bonovitz says Duane, Morris
hadn't planned to open a Princeton
office until the next year, but that
Jacoby and Mitchell —whose homes
and clients are in central New Jersey
— didn't want to practice in the firm's
other New Jersey locations, Newark
and Cherry Hill.
So the firm agreed. and it's
planning to move the Princeton
operation into larger quarters next year
and staff it with a large practice group
that the firm is negotiating with now
Bonovitz says. He won't elaborate,
except to add: "We'll open our office
in the spring with much more critical
mass."
Bonovitz says three offices are
necessary for a large firm in New
Jersey; north, south and central.
"You let the state dictate the flow
and there are three different market
areas." The firm's southern New
Jersey office, opened in Medford in
1990 and now in Cherry Hill, has
10 lawyers; Newark, opened in
1996, also has 10 attorneys.
Jacoby and Mitchell first practiced
together in the early 1990s in the
Newark office of New York's Epstein,
Becker & Green, but they found Hill
Wallack to be geographically more
desirable and went there in 1994. They
had no plans to leave, Jacoby says,
until they were approached by two
recruiters, Ronni Gaines and Stewart
Michaels of Topaz Attorney Search in
West Orange.
Gaines and Michaels, acting
independently rather than as Duane
Morris' agents, arranged the match.
Jacoby and Mitchell decided they liked
the idea of having national-firm
backup for existing clients and the
possibility of broadening their client
base, Jacoby says.
Hill Wallack managing partner
Robert Bacso says, "I'm sorry to see
Elaine and Gary go; they're nice
people and good lawyers and I'm sure
they'll do fine."
Not so fine, he suggests, is the
notion that smaller firms can't
compete. The giants have merely
attempted to create the impression that
"full service" is defined by size.
He says that when New Jersey's
largest firm, Newark's McCarter &
English, had 100 lawyers not too long
ago, it was considered a full-service
firm. Why, all of a sudden isn't a 100lawyer firm no longer considered a
full-service firm? "What is it now that
has magically made size a definition of
full service?"
In truth, firms like Hill Wallack are
more full-service firms for New Jersey
clients than an out-of-state firm like
Duane, Morris that provide across-theboard services nationally, but have
only a small number of practice groups
in New Jersey, Bacso says.
"We are, and will remain,
competitive with these firms," Bacso
says.
As Gaines and Michaels see it,
future competition for the New Jersey
legal business of large corporate
clients may be among large national
firms filled with local lawyers who
used to practice in smaller in-state
firms.
In the past two years, three New
Jersey firms that just a decade ago
were among the state's top 10 in terms
of size have either gone out of
business or merged with out-of-staters.
Roseland's Hannoch Weisman,
once the second largest firm in New
Jersey, disbanded. Atlantic City's
Horn, Goldberg, Gorny, Plackter,
Weiss & Perskie has become a branch
of Philadelphia's Fox. Rothschild
O'Brien & Frankel. Morristown's
Shanley & Fisher is being taken over
by Philadelphia's Drinker Biddle &
Reath.
Mergers in the business world
are
partly
responsible
for
consolidation of firms. Michaels
says. When corporations combine,
they often end relationships with
one of the merged entities' regular
outside counsel.
And it is becoming increasingly
difficult for smaller firms that have no
national brand name to make pitches
for new business. Gaines says. "With
the world shrinking, it's harder to get
access," she says. “You're come to
have trouble even getting into the
room to do your dog and pony show.”
October 25, 1999
New Jersey Law Journal, Abridged