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Matt KramerTHE gentleman’s profession of the law is becoming a vestige of the past, removed enough from reality to be remembered, like phone booths or fedoras.
Philip K. Howard, a senior partner at Covington & Burling, another multinational firm, may be the closest thing to a gentleman lawyer that one is likely to find these days. He is courtly, white-haired, civic-minded and blessed with an aristocratic pair of arching eyebrows. While he declined to speak directly about White & Case (“I’m not really interested in the business of the law”), he touched on the firm’s current troubles by suggesting that as the bottom line increases in importance, the traditional role of the lawyer as a trusted counselor slips away.
“To the extent that lawyers are simply churning out the same problems one after the other and are treated as factors of production to be laid off or not because of market forces or marginal declines in profitability,” he said, “the emotional and professional commitment that goes along with being an adviser and a solver of problems begins to diminish.”
This bottom-line focus was in evidence at a recent meeting of the New York State Bar Association’s beefed-up Committee for Lawyers in Transition. It was a grim affair: a few dozen laid-off lawyers trading business cards and eating the catered chicken at a Midtown firm while another few hundred chimed in virtually, via the Internet. The talk was of “regrettable losses,” “reduced-hour arrangements” and contract assignments in which one might contribute in “a nonbillable” (read “no pay”) way.
The classic New York law firm is a highly developed ecosystem populated by certain native species: there is the brash, aggressive partner leveraged by lifestyle and, rising from below, like a creature out of Darwin, the ambitious associate who pulls all-nighters doing scut work in hopes of one day taking the chair.
But the natural order of this world has been set on end by the economic crisis and the possible disappearance of fixtures like the pyramid system (under which associa
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