Baer Business Law – Greater Philadelphia Area – Intellectual Property Law – Business Law – E Commerce – Contracts – Trademarks – Copyrights

Several days ago, with the notion of taking some photos for this blog, I stepped through the revolving doors at 1650 Arch Street, headquarters of the dissolved Center City law firm Wolf Block LLP. Although it has been six years since I worked there, the security guard at the desk immediately recognized me as a former Wolf Block attorney and asked cheerfully how I had been. Sheepish about forgetting her name, I mentioned that I had opened my own firm and asked if it would be all right if I took some pictures of the lobby area for a post on my blog about Wolf Block’s collapse. She gently told me that the building prohibited such activities without prior authorization. She also mentioned that the press photographers had apparently swarmed the place back in late in March, snapping shots of the corpse, as it were. While the majority of the attorneys had already departed for other firms, a skeleton crew remained to assist with the wind-down (and, in some cases, presumably because they have not found a place to land yet). As we chatted, a couple of people I dimly remembered came down out of the elevators in their shirt sleeves, carrying boxes of files. The scene was reminiscent (at least to me) of the famous photo of the fall of Saigon in 1975, with the last helicopters lifting off from the roof of the U.S. embassy. With these thoughts churning in my head and feeling suddenly ghoulish, I thanked the guard and contented myself with some outside shots.

In the month and a half since Wolf Block’s partnership voted to dissolve, many friends, clients and professional colleagues have plumbed me for the inside scoop on its abrupt demise. I wasn’t there for the final agonies, although during the period when I was an associate (1997-2003) the sense of creeping decay was palpable. In hindsight, the result was inevitable and more than 15 years in the making. In terms of the specific factors and causes involved, I largely agree with the press’ verdict that what ultimately did Wolf Block in was a hemorrhaging of younger, dynamic, business-generating partners (one of them Steve Goodman, a leading startup and emerging technology pioneer of the 1990’s), combined with the effects of the recession on the firm’s real estate practice (which by the early 2000’s was the firm’s sole remaining top-tier transactional practice), an inability to build a national and international presence through organic growth or merger, internal dissension, and a tightening of credit by lenders. For a more detailed account of the decline and fall, there are some excellent articles in the Inquirer and philly.com, which you can view here and here.

To the causes just mentioned, I would add an institutional failure to grasp quickly enough the profound changes in business generation methods that took place in the 1990’s. Wolf Block in 1997 (the year I got there) had a tendency to sit on its laurels, relying on its mid-century reputation for excellence and the same institutional clients and web of personal relationships that had sustained it as a premier Philadelphia firm for decades. The idea of marketing itself aggressively, of making pitches to clients and building an attractive, content-rich website, didn’t really take hold until 2000 or so; by then much ground had been lost. Moreover, partners, as well as associates seeking to enter the partnership, were rewarded for loyalty and long-time service as much as (or perhaps even more than) for their books of business or their entrepreneurial spirit. In Wolf Block’s defense, this was how big law firms operated and stayed profitable until about 1990 or so. However, with the increasing mobility of partners and associates and the resultant fluidity of firm-client relationships, as well as the overriding need to use the Internet to connect with tech-savvy clients, a new marketing-driven business model had displaced the genteel one of earlier days. Try as it might, Wolf Block was never quite able to catch up. (It may be extremely petty of me, but I thought the website stunk until the very end.)

All that said, this post is a eulogy, not an indictment. While the corporate practice had dwindled by the time I joined it, and the e-commerce/IP sub-practice of which I later became a part never got as fired up as it should have, Wolf Block was a rewarding place to work for six years. The firm taught me to draft contracts and gave me remarkably free rein to play in the technology and e-commerce area to which I felt inexorably drawn. Wolf Block sold me the very day of my first interview, when a member of the real estate practice group (who is now the general counsel of a large company with many properties in Philadelphia) walked in without shoes and promptly put his argyle-stockinged feet up on the conference room table. At the time, the firm’s offices were laughably decrepit — it was still headquartered in the Packard Building at 15th and Chestnut Streets, where it had been since the 1920’s – and even the partners joked about the shabby accommodations. The dungeonlike contraptions that passed for elevators took forever to arrive, the paint was peeling in the offices, the art on the walls was about as contemporary as a disco ball, and the men’s rooms were biohazards. That was all right, though. Chic office space didn’t really impress me; intellectuals who wore no shoes at work did. (The firm finally moved to better digs at 1650 Arch in the summer of 1999.)

At Wolf Block I rode the wave of the 1990’s dot-com boom, a time flush with expensive closing dinners, 23-year-old Internet prodigies being primed with angel funds, and epiphanies about the limitless dirty uses to which emerging technologies could be harnessed. (Around 2000, before employer liability and virus concerns made computer and Internet use policies a staple of the corporate workplace, it was common for law firm associates and even partners to e-mail each other .exe files containing everything from snarky, irreverent fun like “Frog in a Blender” and “Gerbil in a Microwave” to incredibly disgusting, but occasionally hilarious, grainy videos showing all manners of goofy perversion.) It was a heady time to be a young lawyer in the big city, just out of law school but not yet mature, and earning more money than a 25-year with still-nascent legal and business skills has a right to earn, especially considering the unaffordable billing rates and mass layoffs that are the order of the day now that the party has ended.

It wasn’t all good times. After the dot-com implosion and September 11 knocked the country into recession in 2000-01, the holes in Wolf Block’s business became gaping wounds. Associates in the transactional practice groups, starved of billable hours, were prodded to write article after article for legal publications in a futile attempt to make up for the service partners’ inability to generate business. At associates’ meetings we were lectured on the pressing need to uphold the standards of “Wolf Block Work Product,” or WBWP, as we called it. But by the early 2000’s WBWP was no longer what it had been in the 1960’s and 1970’s, when Wolf Block was still the preeminent destination for Ivy League-educated Jewish lawyers in the Philadelphia region. As the firm gradually fell behind its competitors in attracting the top associates and young partners, the intellectualism and progressivism that had characterized the first three-quarters of its history began to give way to an atmosphere of conformity and petty office politics. On one performance review, I recall being admonished for not going to lunch enough with a particular senior associate who was the partners’ darling, seemingly because of his confident and cocksure attitude.

In the summer of 2002, with many of its lawyers sitting idle, Wolf Block laid off a slew of associates, including several people close to me. Although I was getting positive reviews and being told to stay the course, at a billing rate of $350/hour and climbing, I didn’t see how I could bring in enough business to make a name for myself, and the IP/e-commerce group clearly was not generating enough business or billing enough hours for me to become a service partner. As it was, for political reasons, the firm failed to grant partnership to one of my colleagues who had a $300,000 book of business (not bad for a senior associate then and not bad now), illustrating once again Wolf Block’s ambivalent attitude toward business generation. In the spring of 2003, therefore, I took a job with one of Wolf Block’s few remaining institutional clients, which turned out to be a wonderful move for me. Fairness dictates, however, that I give Wolf Block due credit for helping to form and maintain that relationship.

Looking back on it all, I am very sorry that Philadelphia will not have a Wolf Block through most of the new century. I would have liked to see the firm reinvent itself, but am relieved that so many talented lawyers were acquired by other firms around the city. I am keeping tabs on old colleagues, both lawyers and support personnel, who are having difficulty finding a new home, and I would heartily recommend many of the lawyers I knew at the firm. With Wolf Block gone, a part of my life, and Philadelphia’s, is now sealed. To those in the Wolf Block diaspora, best wishes and best of luck.