Firm Profiles

This isn’t just another big New York firm. Of the pack of grand, old–line Wall Street operations, the ones who cut their teeth on Morgan money, White & Case was the first to break the Wall Street mold, opening in Paris in 1926. While New York remains its biggest office, roughly two–thirds of the firm’s lawyers work outside the United States. Their 38 offices include the obvious ports of call—Moscow, London, Beijing—and the more adventuresome—Almaty, Bratislava, Johannesburg.

The global strategy works when the global economy is healthy. And when it isn’t, the pain is felt all over. White & Case was hit hard during the recession. In 2008 offices in Bangkok, Dresden, and Milan were shuttered because of a lack of work, and areas that the firm has traditionally been focused on, such as project finance and cross–border mergers, took a beating. The 111–year–old firm laid off 70 associates in 2008 and eliminated 200 associate positions in 2009 (along with 200 nonlegal staff jobs). It ranked fifty–sixth of 84 firms on The American Lawyer’s Recession Performance Index, which measured revenue, attorney head count, and profits per partner between 2007 and 2009.

The firm has rebounded, though both head count and revenues remain shy of the boom peaks. It benefited from countercyclical practices and some headlining partners: Thomas Lauria leads a busy bankruptcy practice that seems to specialize in hard cases; George Terwilliger is on the short list of D.C. white–collar criminal defense stars; and Carolyn Lamm, a former ABA president, and Abby Cohen Smutny are two prominent female players in the white male world of international arbitration.

Associate morale isn’t world–class. On the 2011 Midlevel Associates Survey it ranked ninety–third out of 126. A bright spot, however, was the firm’s second–place finish on The American Lawyer’s 2011 Diversity Scorecard. Just under 25 percent of the firm’s U.S.–based lawyers identify themselves as a minority, and the diversity is even greater when one considers that the majority of White & Case’s lawyers are based outside the United States.

The firm is global and not changing course. Just one year after it shuttered the three foreign offices, White & Case opened two new offices in the Middle East and has developed a growing practice in Islamic finance transactions. As firm chair Hugh Verrier puts it: “We go where the work is, and where the clients need us.”

—Updated as of 1/1/12