Before big firms got into bankruptcy work 20 years ago, the area was dominated by small specialized firms. There are advantages to each platform. Big firms offer a full range of ancillary services in corporate and tax work otherwise unavailable at boutique firms. Medium and small firms offer environments relatively free of conflicts, in which lawyers don't have to turn away desirable cases. Former Mayer Brown partner Harold Kaplan moved on Jan. 15 to Gardner Carton, one of the country's premier national health care firms, because Mayer Brown had gotten so big and diverse that he often had to turn down cases he wanted to take on.
Big firms can produce a lot of conflicts in bankruptcy.
It's not just one party against another, it's lots of parties. It's tougher and tougher to deal with conflicts. I went with a smaller firm that will accommodate my needs for full service. We struck out on our own for a number of reasons - control over our practice was one, and another was the lack of conflicts will allow us to broaden our client base and represent more constituencies than we did at Orrick. We still want to represent institutional creditors, but we also want to broaden into debtor representation.