Departure Considerations
Why Smart Lawyers Get Counsel for Law Firm Departures
Odds are that most lawyers will decide to change law firms at least once during their career. However, surprisingly, many who embark upon this major life transition fail to seek legal counsel as part of that process. Why?
Law Firm Resolutions for a Happy New Year
Now that your personal New Year’s resolutions are kaput, February is a good time to consider some resolutions for your law practice that will lead to a happier and healthier law firm. Like most resolutions, these are things that you want to do, and probably know that you should do, but may have been avoiding or just haven’t yet gotten done.
Managing Partner Departures So They Are Not Bad for Business
The effects of partner departures are rarely positive. But even if the right partners leave, partner departures can be bad for business. And while partner departures can present great risks for the firm—they can also present great opportunities—if you are prepared.
Creating Successful Outcomes for Lateral Partner Transitions
Partner departures and lateral moves can create winning scenarios for both the partners and the firms. But taking a disciplined approach to projecting the performance of any practice is the key to avoiding potential unpleasant surprises for both sides.
Your Law Firm Culture Should Protect the Firm from Partner Departures
It is critically important to respond to partner departures in the right way. But like any risk management analysis, it is not enough to put protections in place to react. To manage the firm properly, you also must analyze whether the firm's culture is aligned with the goal of retaining talented partners in the first place.
What to Expect When You’re Departing
For law firm partners, most departures issues are foreseeable and manageable with planning and preparation.
Which Law Firm Partners Should Stay and Which Should Go?
The best risk management approach for partner departures is to prevent the right partners from wanting to leave the firm in the first place. For the others, well, they should go.
How Savvy Law Firms Protect their Firm from Partner Departures
Law firms have a range of options to reduce the likelihood of partner departures and to ethically and thoughtfully protect the firm when they occur.
Succession Planning for (Dearly) Departed Partners
Succession planning for your law practice is more than just prudent preparation. It is imperative to protect client interests, is good business, and protects the value of one of your most significant assets.
Law Firm Risk Management Goals for 2021
In a year full of law firm transitions, departures, and dissolutions, more change is surely on the horizon. This is still the perfect time to add a critical item to your list: Set the goal of reviewing your law firm’s risk management in a systematic way this year.
Looking at Your Firm’s Balance Sheet: Law Firm Clients, and Lawyers, are Not Property
Law firms are not entitled to future profits from the firm’s clients as an ongoing property right, but this does not mean that the law firm can't do anything to protect themselves in the event of a departure.
Is Your Law Firm Prepared for the Next Partner or Group Departure?
While it is a good practice for any law firm to periodically assess its exposure to potential partner departures, the pandemic’s impact on law firms has made this task more important than ever.
What’s in a Title? How Law Firms Define the Lawyers that work at the Firm Matters
Does your firm have Non-Equity Partners? Of Counsel, Consulting, or Contract Attorneys? All of the above? What is the nature of their relationship with the firm, and how are they compensated?
Law Firm Formations and Transformations
As the legal industry continues to adjust to life during a pandemic, things are still changing every day as law firms make economic and other adjustments to their traditional ways of doing business. And all this change is likely to lead to even more change. As a result, we will continue to see law firm […]
Managing Law Firm Dissolutions in Uncertain Times
As the legal industry continues to adjust to life during a pandemic, some law firm transitions and transformations inevitably will lead to law firm closures and dissolutions. But is dissolution always the best option? And will its partners and clients be protected?
California Law Firm Departures in the COVID-19 Era
We read the news daily of law firms – big and small – announcing cutbacks, furloughs, layoffs, reductions in salaries, and distribution freezes. Every industry has been feeling the impact of this global pandemic, and the legal industry is no different. As lawyers who inherently crave predictability, it is difficult to conceive of when and […]
What Does ABA’s Departure Opinion Mean for California Law Firms?
Although we routinely see headlines about partner and group departures, especially during this time of the year, the ABA’s recent ethic’s opinion on obligations for lawyers changing firms (ABA Formal Opn. 489, December 4, 2019) received much less attention. Law firms should have taken notice, however, because the opinion represents some significant new thinking on […]
California’s New Rules: How Communication Rules Impact Attorney Departures
As most of you likely know by now, on November 1, 2018, the new California Rules of Professional Conduct will go into effect changing the regulation of the practice of law for all California attorneys. The significant changes to the prior rules and the enactment of some entirely new rules will have a tremendous impact […]
California Partners Can Lawfully and Ethically Plan and Prepare to Depart from Their Law Firm
In the world of lawyers and law firms, attorney mobility is a continuing reality. Thoughtful lawyers who plan to depart their law firms are prudently getting advice on how to comply with their legal and ethical obligations to the firm and to their clients as part of the departure process. Law firms that have comprehensive […]
Law Firm’s Non-Solicitation Agreement Restricts Mobility of Departing Partner
A recent legal ethics opinion from North Carolina provides interesting insight into the ethics of a non-solicitation agreement between law firms that restricts attorney mobility but not necessarily a client’s choice of counsel. The North Carolina 2017 Formal Ethics Opinion No. 5 analyzed the issue of whether two law firms could enter into a non-solicitation […]
Are you Really a Partner? Non-Equity or Income Partners May Have Unique Issues During a Departure or Lateral Move
In today’s legal world, the traditional view of what it means to be a “partner” seems to be ever-changing. As more law firms move from two-tier to multi-tier partnerships, the question of what it truly means to be a non-equity, income, or salaried partner is becoming an increasingly important issue. Specifically, during any partner departure […]
Mitigating Risks During Departure, Part 2: Minimize Exposure to Potential Claims Following a Partner Departure
It is important to remember that there are no absolute safe harbors protecting you from potential liability even when you endeavor to do all the right things when departing your firm. This is true in large part because there are often grey areas within the rules, tensions between those rules and your obligations to your […]
Mitigating Risks For Departing Partners, Part 1: Control the Timing of Your Departure Announcement
Taking the plunge to embark upon an attorney transition inherently involves some risk. Like with most things, some of the risk you can control, some may be outside of your control. However, taking steps to mitigate risk whenever possible will reduce the likelihood that you are subject to ethical scrutiny, disputes with the firm or […]
Law Firm Can’t Require Departing Partner to Forfeit Equity If Partner Takes Clients
In an important order that impacts the field of partner departures nationwide, a district court judge in the the Eastern District of Virginia held that a provision in a law firm’s operating agreement that provides that a withdrawing partner who “takes clients” forfeits up to fifty percent of his equity in the firm is void […]
Notice to Clients of Attorney Departure Not Likely Protected Speech in California
Earlier this month, California’s Fourth District Court of Appeal agreed with an Orange County trial court that several emails sent by a departing partner to clients and former clients announcing his departure to a new firm did not qualify as protected speech under anti-SLAPP laws. Although the Court of Appeal’s opinion was unpublished, the Court […]
Are Recent Ethical Rules that Establish Attorney Notification Protocols For Departing Attorneys Really in the Best Interest of the Clients?
Earlier this year, the Virginia State Bar enacted a new ethical rule governing how attorneys and law firms should notify clients in the event of an attorney departure or firm dissolution. The new rule, Rule 5.8 of the Virginia Rules of Professional Conduct, is an effort by that state to regulate what it viewed as a […]
Partner Departure Tip: Don’t Let Your Emotions Rule the Day
Perhaps the single biggest factor partners underestimate when transitioning their practice to a new firm, or starting a new practice, is the emotional impact of the move. Even those who consider themselves stoic and rational by nature are often caught off-guard by how highly emotional this transition can be, for both the departing partner and […]
Departing Partners And Potential Conflicts With Current And Former Clients: The Featured Role Of The “Substantially Related” Test In Two Recent Disqualification Decisions
In the space of fifteen months, the Northern District of Texas and the District Court of Delaware have each issued significant attorney disqualification orders. In both cases, the “substantially related” test regarding past and present representations had a featured role in the courts’ decisions to disqualify the same California law firm from significant patent cases. […]
Nelson Levine v. Lewis Brisbois Just Settled: Firm Laptops and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act – Lessons from A Recently Resolved Attorney Departure Case
As many attorneys who follow partner departures and lateral moves know, in 2014 a group of attorneys at Nelson Levine De Luca & Hamilton, LLC (“Nelson Levine”) in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, left the firm to join Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith LLP (“Lewis Brisbois”), a California limited liability partnership. This departure resulted in litigation that […]
Partner Departures and Golden v. California Emergency Physicians Medical Group: Does California’s Business and Professions Code § 16600 Void Any Partnership Provision that Restricts a Departing Partner’s Right to Compete?
The Ninth Circuit’s recent decision, filed April 8, 2015, in Golden v. California Emergency Physicians Medical Group (9th Circuit) Case No. 12-16514, has potentially far-reaching implications for what is deemed to be an unlawful professional restraint in violation of California’s Business and Professions Code § 16600. In closely examining the statute, the Ninth Circuit concluded that the reach of § 16600 […]
Best Practices For Firms In Considering Whether to Provide a Departing Attorney with a Copy of His or Her Entire Mail Folder upon Departure from the Firm
Once a firm is given notice from a departing partner that the partner plans to leave the firm, there are a myriad of issues that need to be resolved prior to, and following, the partner’s actual departure. One important issue relates to the handling of the departing attorney’s email once he or she leaves the […]
The Obligations of Departing Attorneys to Avoid Prejudice to Clients Upon Firm Dissolution or Withdrawal Analyzed in California State Bar Opinion
The State Bar of California’s Standing Committee on Professional and Responsibility and Conduct’s (the “Committee”) first Formal Opinion for 2014 addresses the duties of an attorney to former clients when that attorney will no longer be representing a client following the dissolution of the attorney’s firm. (State Bar of California, Committee on Professional Responsibility and […]
Significant Victory in Challenge Against Unfinished Business Rule’s Application to Hourly Fee Matters in California
On June 11, 2014, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer issued a significant ruling in favor of several large law firms in the ongoing fight regarding whether and if a dissolved law firm has the right to profits from unfinished legal work its former partners brought to their new firms. In his Order granting summary judgment in favor […]
Bankruptcy Court finds that Unfinished Business Rule is Valid in California and May Apply to Hourly Rate Matters
There has been a lot of recent press about the validity of Unfinished Business Claims in California (also known as Clawback claims) following a ruling earlier this year by U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Dennis Montali in San Francisco related to the Howrey, Simon, Arnold & White LLP (“Howrey”) bankruptcy. At issue, was whether the trustee of […]
Law Firms have Ethical Obligations with Respect to the Handling of a Departing Partners Email Communications and Account
According to the Philadelphia Bar Association’s Professional Guidance Committee, ethical rules permit a law firm to review a departing partner’s emails in order to determine what emails should be forwarded to the departing partner and what emails relate to current firm matters of which the law firm should be aware. (See Philadelphia Bar Association Professional Guidance […]
Absent an Agreement to the Contrary, the California Uniform Partnership Act Controls the Scope of a Departing Partner’s Liability to a Former Partnership for Partnership Obligations Incurred by the Firm after Partner Dissociation
A significant issue for departing partners is to understand and evaluate the scope of any potential liability he or she may have to their former partnership once the departing partner provides notice of departure and dissociates with that partnership. In some instances, partnership agreements set forth specific terms upon which a departing partner may continue […]
Departing Partners Must Properly Navigate California’s Uniform Trade Secrets Act When Making a Lateral Move to a New Firm
A departing partner must be familiar with and properly navigate California’s Uniform Trade Secrets Act (Civil Code Section 3246 et seq.)(“UTSA”), which governs misappropriation of trade secrets, when informing clients of a move to a new firm. In the seminal 2004 case Reeves v. Hanlon (2004) 33 Cal.4th 1140, the California Supreme Court defined the scope of the […]
Departing Partners and Client Files Part II: Transferring Client Files in the Digital Era
Not long ago client files consisted only of hard-copy documents in physical file folders and typically contained filed briefs, discovery, transcripts, correspondence and memoranda of law. While there was a split in authority on whether attorney notes and drafts should be included as part of a client’s file, the California Rules of Professional Conduct states that essentially […]
Departing Partners and the Handling of Client Files in California
A substantial body of case law and ethics opinions addressing the handling of client files has developed over the years surrounding the concept that a client’s file is a client’s property. (Rose v. State Bar (1989) 49 Cal.3d 646.) This notion is based on the underlying idea that clients may discharge an attorney at any time, […]
California Rules of Professional Conduct: Responsibilities and Restrictions on Departing Partners in Communication and Solicitation of Law Firm Clients
The California Rules of Professional Conduct place restrictions on an attorney’s conduct in soliciting clients for employment. The Rules define “solicitation” as “any communication concerning availability for professional employment of a member (of the State Bar of California) or law firm in which a significant motive is pecuniary gain,” whether in person or by telephone. (Cal. […]
About the Author
Dena Roche is a trusted advisor to California law firms and law-related businesses, helping her clients understand, prepare for and resolve the critical issues facing law firms every day. She acts as outside general counsel to law firms, and provides counsel on legal ethics, law firm structures, policies, transitions, and dissolutions.
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Topics
- Attorney Conflicts
- Claims Relating to Partner Departures
- Client Solicitation
- Departure Considerations
- Ethical Obligations
- Fiduciary Duties
- Handling of Client Files
- Lateral Hiring
- Law Firm Dissolutions
- Law Firm Formations
- Law Firm Transitions
- Non-Compete Clauses
- Partner Departure Tips
- Partnership Agreements
- Post-Departure Considerations
- Pre-Departure Considerations
- Providing Notice of Departure
- Separation Agreements