New York

What Makes the Elite New York City 
Legal Market So Different? 

W

—[any large random number of Managing Partners of US and UK firms
headquartered outside New York]

When such a large proportion of intelligent and thoughtful people all say the same thing—and when
the failure rate of firms’ actually trying to pull it off is so astronomical—one is tempted to ask what
semi-delusional psychology might be at work. But we’re not trained in psychology, we’re trained in
economics, so let’s ask a different question: Just what exactly is it about the elite New York City legal
market that makes it both so attractive and so tough to crack for non-indigenous firms?
This perhaps-obvious question, albeit one to which we’ve never heard a satisfying answer, occurred
to us yet again after meeting with a more than respectable non-NYC, firm whose leadership
expressed that very desire. And they’re trying. They already have a New York office with dozens of
lawyers, but the consensus of observers upon our discreet inquiries was that it’s not terribly
impressive—“rubbish” was one characterization.
Perhaps we were hasty in calling this a rather obvious question, so a moment of background on what
exactly we mean.
Non-indigenous firms enter other major metropolitan area markets all the time; indeed, a large part of
the history of Big Law between about 1980 and about September, 2007 consisted of that very
phenomenon. Local or regional firms built out national and international footprints. And most of the
firms that sought to expand beyond their home turf—at least those who went about it in a concerted
and programmatic way—have succeeded. Non-local firms have penetrated, for example, Atlanta,
Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, LA, San Francisco, and Washington DC—and for that matter in
Canada—in convincing and durable ways and many have ended up as go-to, top of the food chain
competitors in those markets.
But in New York, not so much. Indeed, the exceptions prove the point. Everyone immediately thinks
of Latham and Kirkland, and Gibson Dunn. Those firms are prominent here precisely because they

AdamSmithEsq.com

 Page —2—

succeeded, whereas asking which non-homegrown firms “succeeded” in virtually any
other city in the country would be seen as, and would indeed be, an odd question.
You might ask, and we have, whether London and Hong Kong are equally tough to crack, and the
consensus seems to be, “not like New York.” Very hard, yes, but on this score, for better or worse,
New York stands alone.

Whenever a market seems to have a distinctive characteristic, unlike all other markets in the same
category, we want to know why.
So we set about asking people presumably in a position to know—managing partners and leaders of
1
elite New York-headquartered firms. Together with our own decades of immersion in the New York
market, we now believe we can lay out our theory of why New York is so tough for outside firms to
crack.

The Background and the Allure of New York

T
•

•

•
•

O a large extent, the reason non-New York based firms salivate over the market here
is self-evident: High rates, high and growing profits per partner, high revenue per
lawyer. Some data:
“Top firms in New York outperformed their AmLaw 100 counterparts across the
country last year…”—opening sentence, “New York’s High-Flying Firms Hit new
Heights in Profits, Revenue” (The American
Lawyer April 2017).
The average PPP of New York-based 
The average PPP of New York-based firms
firms is 192% that of the AmLaw 
was $3,195,000 and of the AmLaw 100
100.
(including the NY firms) was $1,661,000, or
only 52% as high.
The AmLaw 100’s PPP grew on average by 3.0%.
Six of the 17 homegrown New York firms had more than 12% growth in PPP, while a
majority of the others saw strong or moderate growth. For example:
o Cravath +18%
o Fried Frank +14%
o Davis Polk +13.5%
o Milbank +12.8%

1

 Firms we approached included: Cadwalader, Cleary Hamilton, Davis Polk, Debevoise, Hughes Hubbard, 
Patterson Belknap, Paul Weiss, Proskauer, Shearman & Sterling, Simpson Thacher, Sullivan & Cromwell, Weil 
Gotshal, and Willkie Farr.  Under our own version of Chatham House Rules, we will not disclose which we 
actually met with, but it was about half. 

AdamSmithEsq.com

 Page —3—

•

•
•

o
Shearman: +18%
o Weil Gotshal: + 22.6%
o Cahill, Cleary, Kramer Levin, Paul Weiss: all +5—10%
Citi Private Bank Law Firm Group reported similarly enviable results:
o “New York-headquartered firms outperformed the broader legal industry in
2016 and were increasingly pulling ahead of the pack.”
o Among Citi’s sample of 31 NY-headquartered firms, 77% saw PPP grow—“a
higher percentage than the rest of the industry.”
o NY firms also had greater growth in revenue—4.8%--than firms based in any
other US region.
New York-based firms seem to have greater pricing power than firms elsewhere,
putting through larger rate increases and having more success making them stick.
Finally, we looked at the 2017 AmLaw 100 firms ranked by profits per partner and
here’s what we found:
o 12 of the top 15 are New York based, and the three exceptions are Gibson
Dunn, Kirkland, and
Quinn Emanuel, all of whom have robust New York offices, to say the least;
o Even in the next 15 (##16—30), a perhaps surprising 7 are New York based;2
o And no New York-based AmLaw 100 firm ranks in the bottom 70 on PPP.

One more non-quantitative note: A number of observers we spoke with noted that a strong
corporate practice tends to throw off other work for the firm—litigation, regulatory, tax, etc.
This is obviously also attractive, but sets up in its own way a chicken and egg problem of
scale: A corporate department needs to have a certain critical mass of expertise and bench
strength before it’s really viable on the market. But building that bench before you have the
work to keep it busy is not going to happen. (Cf. litigation where you can plausibly have one
or two go-to trial lawyers supported by, we hate to say it, largely fungible associates and
staff.)
So the allure is self-evident. What’s not self-evident in the least is why New York is such an
unusually tough market to invade.
The overall landscape and the lessons of history
The track record of firms historically based outside New York seeking to invade the city’s
elite practice areas is long, instructive, and almost universally feckless. With rare
exceptions—which we’ll briefly address—the failure rate has been so high that many firms
have effectively stopped trying. Firms in this cohort are resigned to maintaining sizable New
York offices (meaning 50 to 150 or 200 lawyers or so) but doing so with no realistic
                                                             
2

 The non-New York cohort in this group includes, in descending order of PPP: Latham, Paul Hastings, Dechert, 
King & Spalding, Baker Botts, Sidley, Fragomen, and Akin Gump. 

 
AdamSmithEsq.com

 Page —4—

expectation of their participating in quintessentially New York-centric capital
markets transactions.
And make no mistake: This can be an eminently rational economic approach. These firms
can maintain they have a New York office, planting a flag for the sake of the firm’s image in
the eyes of clients, but without the intense and endless stress of having to maintain a
position at the top of the market against some of the most capable competitors in the world.
It can be staffed by lawyers whose capabilities are serviceable and frankly need not be
superb. For these firms, their New York office serves
Challenged on why his firm’s New 
(ideally) as a catch basin for taking in work that can
York office wasn’t larger, one 
be performed in less costly offices for price-sensitive
AmLaw 50 Managing Partner 
clients; and as a conference room home-away-fromretorted, “So you would advise that 
home for visiting lawyers from elsewhere in the firm.
we become a failed Davis-Polk?” 
This approach was perhaps best captured by the
Managing Partner of a global firm with non-New York
US roots who was challenged at a forum to explain why the firm’s New York office capability
was not more robust: “So you would advise that we become a failed Davis-Polk?”
We dwell on this not because a strategy of attempting to be a “failed” version of anything is
an advisable course—it’s patently not—but because the vast majority of firms entering New
York from outside end up resigned to taking this approach. We will confidently venture the
hypothesis that this is not true of any other metropolitan area and we believe it sends quite a
revealing message about the difficulty of entering New York.

E

xceptions

In looking back at the history of law firms expanding outside their home territory into
the world’s most challenging markets—New York and London—the lesson emerges
clearly that firms that enter with one narrow strategic objective and limited initial ambitions
(and not because they “ought to” or “must be” there on general principles) are the ones who
succeed. As a gross and perhaps marginally unfair observation, this attitude has
characterized US firms entering London more so than it has characterized UK firms entering
New York. With respect to US firms invading New York, the only genuine and notable
successes of the past few decades have been Latham and Kirkland and to a slightly lesser
but still impressive extent, Gibson Dunn. We believe their experience—specifically, how
they approached their entry into and subsequent growth in, New York—underscores our
observation. (See further discussion below.)
Segmenting the market

AdamSmithEsq.com

 Page —5—

“Law is the most hierarchical profession there is; every lawyer in New York
knows exactly where they stand in the pecking order.”
—Managing Partner, New York office, AmLaw Top 5 firm
We strongly second this observation and believe it’s worth presenting a rough and
somewhat impressionistic hierarchy of firms as they would be ranked by lawyers who have
spent a large part of their careers in New York. The positioning of some individual firms
within this listing is certainly arguable, but the point is not to pass judgment firm by firm.
Rather, it’s to present what we believe is a fundamentally accurate description of the
market’s perception of New York market segmentation.
Top-tier elite
Star power

Niche standouts
Privileged
Mass (albeit with
some standout
specialties)

Cleary, Cravath, Davis Polk, Latham, Paul Weiss, Simpson
Thacher, Sullivan & Cromwell, Wachtell
Debevoise, Gibson Dunn, Hogan Lovells, Kirkland, Proskauer,
Shearman & Sterling, Skadden, Weil Gotshal, White & Case,
Willkie Farr
Boies Schiller, Cahill, Quinn Emanuel, Schulte Roth
Akin Gump, Jones Day, Mayer Brown, Morgan Lewis, Sidley
K&L Gates, Reed Smith, Morrison & Foerster, O’Melveny, Orrick,
Winston & Strawn, many many many others

As always, marketplace perception lags reality, for better or worse, and in Law Land with an
especially protracted half-life. It’s worth noting however how stable the ranks of the New
York elite have been over decades and decades.
In a remarkable piece of cultural anthropology, I discovered that one Spencer Klaw
published a ranking of “The Wall Street Lawyers” in December 1957—60 years ago, for the
record—listing “Wall Street law firms” by descending number of lawyers, which I will take as
a not-irrational proxy for market demand for each firm’s services. Here are some pertinent
rankings: #1 Shearman; #2 Cravath; #3 White & Case; #4 Dewey Ballantine; #5 Simpson
Thacher; #6 Davis Polk; #7 Milbank; #8 Cahill; #9 Sullivan & Cromwell; #13 Cadwalader;
#14 Willkie Farr; #19 Paul Weiss; #20 Cleary. (Firms then ranked 11, 12, 15, 16, and 17
have either merged or failed.)
I submit you could spend a long time searching other industries before you’d find one where
the elite pecking order had remained so stable over the course of so many years.3

3

 It’s not an entirely fair comparison because it obviously includes firms across the entire swath of the US 
economy, but as a point of reference only 12%, or one in eight, of the Fortune 500 firms in the 1955 ranking 
were still F500 firms as of 2016.  American Enterprise Institute, December 13, 2016. 

AdamSmithEsq.com

 Page —6—

This isn’t the place nor is it our intention here to present a comprehensive
“prestige-ranking list” in the mode of so many beauty-contest surveys compiled by the
numerous firms and media outlets that make that their business, but we will venture to essay
a capsule version of how the firms at the top of the New York pecking order that were not
there a few decades ago did it:
•

Skadden and Wachtell: Legendary home-grown upstarts exploiting “wrong side of
the tracks” practice areas disdained by the then-white shoe elite. All American
success stories, in their own ways.

•

Latham: What can one say? “Latham is Latham,” is a facially tautological explanation
that we actually hear from competitors throwing up their hands quite a bit. Certainly
their relentless focus, discipline, and execution, over 30+ years, seems beyond the
capability of other merely mortal law firms. We’ll just stipulate they’re a special case
and leave it at that, shall we?4

•

Kirkland and Gibson-Dunn: Both have benefitted from the ability to pay top-of-market
rates to desirable laterals and both have built powerhouse brands in bankruptcy,
corporate/M&A, litigation, and media and entertainment. Kirkland enjoyed a strong
Chicago-centric corporate franchise from which to subsidize investment, and GibsonDunn had the same in LA. Kirkland also benefitted from the private equity and “nonbank banking” boom.
As with Latham, both have demonstrated a track record of uncompromising
standards when it comes to hiring lateral talent, and focus on acquiring capability
rather than revenue. (If revenue follows, so much the better; if it doesn’t, these aren’t
warm and fuzzy places.)
Finally, several of the people we spoke with in researching the background of this
paper volunteered unprompted that both Kirkland and Gibson-Dunn are more
“transactional” than indigenous New York firms. We took that to mean that they may

                                                             
4

 Not 100% true, and we have the story to prove it.  In the mid to late 1980’s the largest client of Latham’s 
New York office—reputedly 40% of the office revenue—was Drexel, which famously blew up at the start of 
1990.  In a brilliant lemons-to-lemonade move, Latham offered key bankers and lawyers at Drexel office space 
and administrative support until they got back on their feet, which they of course soon did, seeding much of 
Wall Street with hard-core fans of Latham. 
 
Alas, other firms can’t count on enjoying the same stroke of massive good fortune as Latham, in the form of 
the abrupt collapse of their largest New York client—although Latham (“being Latham”?!) repeated it on a 
smaller scale with the implosion of Lehman Brothers in 2007.  

 
AdamSmithEsq.com

 Page —7—

move more from opportunity to opportunity and have more one-off or periodic
clients. We won’t press this for deeper meaning but we believe it bears mentioning.
Interestingly, none of these firms has turned to mergers or acquisitions as a way to build
their New York footprint. Coincidence?
Economic factors
The practical and economic reality of attempting to recruit out of the top-tier firms is: Don’t.
“We never ever see resumes out of Latham or the NY elite—and Skadden only very
rarely” (Managing Partner, New York office, AmLaw Top 5).
“The odds of any work migrating out of Sullivan & Cromwell, Skadden, Davis Polk,
etc., is absolutely zero; there is no chance whatsoever. Clients will not move and
why should they?” (Managing Partner, New York office, AmLaw Top 15 firm).
For a variety of other reasons, hoping to recruit laterals from prestigious firms to build
revenue is, we firmly believe, a mistake. A sampling of quotes from recent conversations
we’ve had bear this out:
•
•
•
•

“It’s false that you can buy revenue—completely false.”
“In 10 years as managing partner of our New York office, I recruited 48 lateral
partners; 47 delivered a smaller book than they’d promised.”
“Laterals fundamentally misunderstand the challenge of moving business.”
“I went back and analyzed nearly a decade of lateral recruitment for us in New York;
the total revenue they had all promised was about $100-million, and the actual
amount they delivered was $22-million. Plus the compensation we’d paid them all
was greater than $22-million.”

Other considerations underscore that recruiting in the expectation of building revenue is a
bet against the house. You might get lucky now and then, but that’s not how it goes in the
long run. Not only are clients of the elite firms institutional clients of the firm and not of any
individual, but junior and even senior partners in those firms have never received any
training in business development or in running a practice. Work has been delivered to them
on a silver platter throughout their career.
Also germane is that with rare exceptions partners in these firms are “lifers”—they’ve never
really worked anywhere else—and they would face a steep learning curve and potentially an
awkward and unproductive transition, to adapt to a different culture and environment.

AdamSmithEsq.com

 Page —8—

Put slightly differently and more generously,
partners in these firms have developed a tremendous stock of
Partners in NYC firms tend to be 
what’s called “firm-specific capital”—skills, knowledge, and
“lifers” with a deep reservoir of 
habits of mind that have value only in one particular
firm-specific capital. 
organization, and nowhere else. It matters not that they’d
never use and perhaps not even recognize this term: If taken
from their familiar surroundings, they will be facing a steep and probably unexpected
learning curve in the acculturation process. This is not true, by the way, of most partners in
most non-elite firms; the skills they have that clients and the market are willing to pay for
tend to be quite portable and transitions to new environments achievable, assuming good
intentions and some determined effort all around.
On the compensation dimension, partners in elite firms anticipate benefiting from the
lockstep or quasi-lockstep “up escalator” in compensation as well as the generous pension
promises these firms have extended—together amounting to an income stream worth tens
of millions of dollars which they would forfeit by departing. (The pension benefits are
typically conditioned upon non-compete agreements.)
Finally, in today’s world the increasing prevalence of client “panels” means more and more
clients couldn’t follow their favorite partner to a new firm even if they wanted to.

T

he New York lateral partner market is unlike any other.

This is obviously, and rather infamously, true on the economic front, but more
importantly and less well-appreciated—because it’s an “invisible” dimension—is how
distinctive the New York market is in sociocultural and even anthropological terms.
The anthropology of Manhattan
All of the previous considerations are, we believe, part of coming to a realistic view on the
feasibility of picking laterals out of elite New York firms. But overriding all these in
importance are the unusual dynamics of status in the power structure of New York City itself.
As cosmopolitan and worldly a self-image as New Yorkers like to have of themselves, when
it comes to one’s rank in the sociocultural pecking order of Manhattan Island, New York can
begin to look quite provincial indeed. London, by contrast, is a genuine “crossroads of the
world.”
Within every locus of society, there are universally recognized and extremely durable
unspoken rankings of what’s a top-tier organization and what’s not quite so elite. So, for
example, there are elite and less elite investment banks, hedge funds, cultural institutions to
belong to or serve on the boards of, clubs to belong to, and neighborhoods to live in.
An impressionistic view:

AdamSmithEsq.com

 Page —9—

Domain
Investment banking

Hedge funds

Cultural institutions (board
memberships or other
significant involvement)

Neighborhood

Top-tier
Goldman Sachs, Lazard,
Rothschild, Blackstone,
KKR, Greenhill, Allen & Co.,
Moelis
Citadel, Renaissance
Technologies, Bridgewater,
D.E. Shaw
Metropolitan Opera,
Metropolitan Museum,
Carnegie Hall, Lincoln
Center, New York Public
Library
Fifth Avenue, Park Avenue,
Tribeca/Soho

Less so
Citi, Bank of America
Merrill Lynch, JP Morgan,
Jefferies, Evercore
Man Group, Oaktree, OchZiff
Brooklyn Museum, City
Center, Alvin Ailey Dance,
92nd Street Y

Riverside Drive, West End
Avenue, Chelsea,
Gramercy Park

So too with law firms. Partners at top-tier law firms do not view what they do as their job or
profession: They view it as core to their identity. Leaving a firm universally recognized as
being in the New York top-tier—even for another outstanding, but locally less wellrecognized firm—would require an act of profound self-examination which only a tiny
minority of lawyers would be willing to undertake. And, they might fairly ask, to what
conceivable end?
Let’s be specific. Imagine a hypothetical partner at a widely respected but not super-elite
firm (say, White & Case) moving to another equally or slightly more prestigious firm (Sidley
or Proskauer). Now place him at a cocktail party on the Upper East Side, and news of his
move will be graciously received with best wishes from the cognoscenti.
Switch the hypothetical to him leaving Davis Polk or Sullivan & Cromwell for—anywhere else
at all, frankly (short of the Cabinet or judiciary)—and the reception will be chilly, combined
with an unspoken mixture of bafflement and suspicion. People will immediately leap to the
conclusion that he was asked to leave as the result of some unimaginable incident, and that
assumption will be immutable and enduring. He will have fallen a peg and he will not
recover.
That is the single most critical reason why expecting to recruit partners from the top-tier elite
New York firms—short of those who are “damaged goods” and who are unacceptable for
that reason—is deeply unrealistic. In the strongest possible terms, we would urge you not to
bank on it as your New York “entry wedge” strategy.

 
AdamSmithEsq.com

 Page —10—

C

atch-22 and the 10,000 Hour Rule
The Catch-22 of entering the New York market at the high end is that the biggest
and toughest deals and litigation engagements go to the name-brand firms because
they have the elite reputations because they’ve always gotten the biggest and toughest
matters which is why they’re the name brand firms…. In other words, you can’t get a seat at
the table unless you’re already seated at the table.
If clients are a firm’s demand and lawyer talent is its supply, then the self-fulfilling name
brand aura kicks in here as well. The “best and brightest” law students aspire to start at the
most prestigious firms, who tend to have their pick, leaving young associates with slightly
less gilded pedigrees to firms a notch down, and so on down the ladder. Regardless of what
you think of the high churn rate among junior associates, as a matter of financial prudence
or professional-development technique, there can be little doubt that the elite NYC firms get
more than their share of the cream of the raw talent coming into the industry.

Nearly a decade ago Malcolm Gladwell popularized the notion of the “10,000-hour rule” in
his 2008 book, Outliers. It built on decades of psychological and sociological research into
what distinguishes world-class mastery of cognitively complex tasks: Concert pianists or
violinists, chess grandmasters, elite neurosurgeons, the Beatles of The White Album era.
Make no mistake (because the “10,000-hour rule” has been deformed into playing a part in
many inapt analogies): (A) A baseline of substantial native talent is a prerequisite; but/and
(B) from that point forward, what separates the best from the rest is largely how long and
how intently they worked.
If the ability to perform at elite law firm partner-level is such a cognitively complex task, and
it surely is, then spending 10,000, or 20,000, hours working on tough and intrinsically
interesting deals or matters would seem to be a prerequisite. Associates at New York firms
get that under their belt in 5 to 10 years at 2,000
If you don’t have a seat at the table, 
hours/year. Perhaps at less fortunate or privileged
it’s hard to get a seat at the table. 
firms (in terms of the degree of difficulty of client
work), it could take many more years to “bank” an
equivalent amount of experience.
All of these factors—clients’ prestige-tropic firm selection, students’ and associates’
reinforcing the migration towards reputation, and deal/litigation experience enhancing
deal/litigation experience, combine to create a powerful virtuous circle for the elite New York
firms:
•
•
•
•
•

The higher your firm’s reputation the more important clients you can attract;
Bringing with them important and interesting deals and other matters;
Challenging your top talent to hone its skills;
Producing perhaps creative but at the very least rock-solid legal work;
Which keeps clients coming back and paying sky-high fees;

AdamSmithEsq.com

 Page —11—

•
•
•

C

•
Enabling the firm to grow its PPP, all-important in the lateral talent
arms’ race;
Producing the not-insignificant dividend of elite firms’ being able to be very choosy
about their internal standards for retention/promotion;
Enhancing the firm’s reputation as “elite” still more;
Repeat.
ultural factors: Collaborative and institutional vs. meritocratic and
entrepreneurial

This brings us to a perhaps unwelcome but unavoidable reality, which we recommend
any firms contemplating or in the middle of expanding in New York face squarely and in
clear-eyed fashion. If the New York elite firms whose cultures premised on collaboration
and a “firm-first” institutional orientation are closest in spirit and behavior to the culture of
your firm and which you are properly determined to sustain—but they will never be a realistic
source of partner recruits—then you will have to address the implications of drawing
partners from firms in our “privileged” tranche or standouts from the “mass” ranking.
Individuals who have succeeded in these environments will come with positive and negative
baggage.
Positive:
•
•
•

They’re demonstrated self-starters and ambitious, bordering on driven
Their skills as a sheer practitioner are beyond reproach
And they have demonstrable skills at client relationship development and
management.

Negative:
•
•
•

They may lean more towards a self-first, not firm-first, outlook
They’ve become accustomed to a compensation/rewards system premised primarily
on individual, not firm-wide, performance
And they may bring rough edges or sharp elbows when it comes to such matters as
staffing engagements and assembling teams within the firm, collaborating on client
presentations, or performing natural and expected obligations of being a “good
citizen” as a partner such as mentoring associates and selflessly promoting the
capabilities of one’s colleagues.

There are no facile solutions for addressing these pro’s and con’s.
A few words about the “New York” personality type and about New Yorkers
What New York is actually not: It’s not rude or coarse and it’s not all about money. In our
experience, real New Yorkers—meaning at least anyone who’s been here a few years and

AdamSmithEsq.com

 Page —12—

can’t imagine living anywhere else—are the most genuinely helpful of all
Americans and the most intellectually curious.
Now, a couple of things New York and New Yorkers are very much about: Achievement,
ambition, and finding/producing/becoming/experiencing “the best of.” These traits also
come with a fair dose of impatience. Ask directions in the Midwest and people will want to
know where you’re from and how you’re enjoying your stay. In New York: “Two blocks down
on the left,” without breaking stride. New York is efficient that way; we’re not being abrupt,
just concise.
Finally, an observation about the talent pool in New York. What differentiates New York
from other US cities—and puts it on a par with its global counterparts such as London—is
the remarkably deep “bench” of accomplished people in a wide variety of fields. You can
find 50 or 100 deeply accomplished lawyers in almost any city of scale, but in New York
lawyer #1,000 or #5,000 will be a very capable practitioner indeed. So too will you be
impressed with the caliber of restaurants that will never be listed in Zagat’s, understudies for
understudies in the theatre, shoestring modern dance companies, and no-name
practitioners from hair salons to medical specialties to upholsterers. Yes, New York has
more A players than many places, but the quality doesn’t tail off too abruptly. This matters
because it reflects our point about achievement and ambition; it’s not just at the top of the
food chain.

H

ow, then, to assault fortress New York?
We cannot offer a prescription for success, but we can tell you what the ingredients
of your battle plan need to be:

AdamSmithEsq.com

 Page —13—

•

•

•

•

•
Don’t assume
Sidebar for non-US based firms. 
that a terrific name-brand in
[your home
If you’re a non-US-based firm, do you need 
town/region/country] will
substantial capability here to be genuinely “global?”  
make the phone start ringing
Our answer—given that the US is approximately ½ the 
in New York; it won’t. (To
global legal market—is yes.  You can be elite, you can 
paraphrase a friend who was
be hyper-prestigious and a “go to” destination for all 
dispatched from his US firm’s
the things you do best, you can be, in short, a superb 
historic home-base city to
law firm.  But “global?”  without critical mass US 
help build their New York
capability? Not in our book. 
office, “At home all I had to
Consider this, however: New York City is not all there 
say was that I was calling
is to the US.  Have you seriously looked at 
from _______ and I got a
Washington, DC, California, Texas?  California as a 
warm reception, but here the
separate country would be the 8th largest in the world 
name means nothing; half the
people don’t even know it’s a
by GDP (after Brazil but ahead of Italy); Texas would 
law firm.”)
be Country #11, neck and neck with Canada. Maybe 
Since you’ll be starting out
you should enter New York after you have a US 
without “a seat at the table,”
beachhead elsewhere.  Just a thought. 
focus on getting seats at
adjacent and nearby tables, if
you will. Let your lawyers’ capabilities speak for themselves. Nine times out of 10
no one from the other side will hire you for their next deal, but maybe one time in 10
they will. Capitalize on it.
Be hard-headed about the investment it will take—over an extended period of time—
to achieve what you’re hoping to in the New York market. If your entire firm isn’t
prepared to settle in (by which we mean lose money) for a fairly long run, we advise
you not to start.
Inoculate yourself now to the “Manhattan premium:” Everything—administrative
assistants, rent, catered lunches, furniture delivery, broadband access—costs 40%
more in Manhattan than you might have been expecting.
Finally, a note about firm “culture:” Firms we work with often worry about whether
swimming in the New York pond will challenge or threaten or dilute their “culture.”
We can’t answer that for you; only you can answer that for you. But if you give a
New Yorker an aspirational vision—a call to create something as part of a team that
didn’t exist before, and the chance to show how good you are—our confident
prediction is that New Yorkers will rise to the occasion as you’ve never seen.

Which leads us to our last words of advice: If you don’t know why exactly you want to be in
New York, don’t come. Mere dreams of $1,000+-hour rates are not a reason.

AdamSmithEsq.com

  

Page ?14?

Bruce MacEwen
Janet Stanton
Adam Smith, Esq.
New York

 

AdamSmithEsq.com