At lunch recently with the son of a long-retired name partner of an Am Law 100 firm, he reminded me of the tortured relationship between big law firms and the reporters who write about them. His father was a famously tough operator who took pride in his thick skin and the aggressive nature of his practice. But with a rueful smile, he recalled how after our predecessors at the magazine had written a story that described his father’s aggressiveness in considerable detail, this rhinoceros of the courtroom was reduced to tears of fury at being called out. The son wasn’t complaining; he had just never forgotten the scene.
Some things don’t change. In recent months I have been struck by a few phone calls and e-mails I received from partners who have felt aggrieved at something that one of our ALM titles has published. Almost every time, this conversation turned personal: Not only were we wrong, they said, but we also had a vendetta against them and their firm. For reasons that they could never quite explain, they had concluded that we were determined to “get them”—quotes in the original.
