The Law Firm Disrupted: Peaks and Valleys in the World of Virtual Firms

Article by: Dan Packel
Read the article on Law.com

At the start of December, when my colleague Justin Henry broke the news that scores of attorneys were leaving FisherBroyles, the first distributed firm to crack the Am Law 200, managing partner James Fisher took issue with our numbers.

The 140 lawyers expected to make the move to spinoff Pierson Ferdinand wasn’t accurate, he emphasized. But with Tuesday’s report indicating that over 130 attorneys were joining the newly launched firm, I’ll say that we were close enough.

But, unlike the largest law firm defection of 2023—when a similar-sized group split from Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith, with ill-fated results—there doesn’t appear to be any hard feelings here. Partners who made the move spoke favorably of their former firm leaders to Justin, and kind words also flowed on LinkedIn between the exiting partners and FisherBroyles leadership.

“As a departing member of FisherBroyles, I too want to say that my experience was first rate, the people were great and that this was the best gig I ever had. Good luck James and Kevin, I’ll miss you guys,” one partner wrote. Fisher, meanwhile, called another exiting partner a “class act.”

Kudos to everyone involved, then, for handling a seismic move with dignity and respect—and let’s hope that for everyone’s sake that we don’t see a tranche of ugly leaked emails making me recant this observation.

It’s worth asking whether the nature of distributed firms allows for these mass exits without acrimony. As legal industry futurist Jordan Furlong tweeted yesterday, “One thing to remember is that FisherBroyles’s ‘distributed law firm’ model was never built or intended to last more than a few years. It’s a platform for successful senior lawyers who want to make lots of money with no distractions or responsibilities.”

If everyone—founders and partners alike—are on the same page about the transactional arrangements that underpin a firm’s existence, then there shouldn’t be rancor when partners, even a large group of them, opt for a new opportunity. It’s all fair in the course of business, right? And when colleagues exist primarily as boxes on a screen, rather than living, breathing presences down the hallway, is it harder to interpret their departure as a betrayal?

And, at least on paper, it looks like there are real functional distinctions between the two firms. With plans for significant investments in technology and the creation of new tiers of attorneys below the partner level, which will both create succession planning opportunities while enabling lawyers to employ leverage, the spinoff firm looks to be implementing a more forward-looking structure.

To quote another Furlong tweet, “FisherBroyles never did put down any roots or invest in the future, but that was a feature, not a bug. It was just a bunch of older lawyers maximizing their final years of practice.”

All this is to suggest that the roughly 150 attorneys remaining at FisherBroyles will have little trouble carrying on in the same fashion as they have for the last two decades.

Furthermore, there’s apparently some wind in the sails of the broader distributed law project. Today I learned of an entry to the field I wasn’t aware of: Scale LLP, founded by former tech general counsel, touted the hire of a team of corporate and securities lawyers from a Boulder, Colorado shop. Clearly, the story of this sector of the legal industry is still being written.