Wolf Block considering dissolution

Wolf Block partners are meeting Monday to discuss possibly dissolving the 106-year-old law firm, sources confirmed over the weekend.

Wolf Block Chairman Mark Alderman did not respond to a Sunday evening voice mail inquiry, but sources said the Philadelphia firm’s partners will vote to decide its future. Sources said a large group of Wolf Block lawyers are speaking to Cozen O’Connor about joining that fellow Philadelphia firm. Wolf Block and Cozen had merger talks two years ago that failed.

Cozen business department chairman Michael Heller, a former Wolf Block lawyer, said the firm does not comment on lateral partner negotiations but added that if Wolf Block did indeed dissolve, his firm would no doubt have interest in some of those lawyers.

The 300-lawyer Wolf Block was once one of Philadelphia’s elite law firms. But two failed mergers with larger firms over the past two years combined with the economic recession’s effect on its bread-and-butter real estate practice has left Wolf Block in a precarious position.

Wolf Block was formed in 1903 by Morris Wolf and Horace Stern, two Jewish lawyers who could not obtain work at Philadelphia’s elite law firms. The firm rose in prominence during the first half of the 20th Century along with the local Jewish business community. It was able to attract some of the nation’s top Jewish law school graduates until other firms changed their hiring practices in the late 1960s and provided more competition for their services.

Wolf Block was still among the region’s elite firms until the recession of the early 1990s, when some of its top lawyers such as Alan Davis, Steve Goodman and Sy Kurland left for rival firms. A group of 13 partners left for Cozen O’Connor in 1995. Those familiar with the firm have said it never fully recovered from that series of defections. As other firms grew dramatically in size and geographic scope in the past decade, Wolf Block remained largely a mid-Atlantic law firm that was viewed as a mid-sized firm by current standards.

Proposed mergers with two 500-lawyer firms — Philadelphia’s Cozen O’Connor in 2007 and Florida’s Akerman Senterfitt in 2008 — fell through after lengthy, public negotiations.

After the Akerman deal collapsed after Labor Day, Alderman said the firm would not entertain other merger possibilities until after its fiscal year was completed on Jan. 31. Soon after the end of the fiscal year, when partners collect their year-end compensation, some of the firm’s partners began peeling off. Two labor and employment partners joined Littler Mendelson last week, a litigation partner in Cherry Hill left for Obermayer Rebmann Maxwell & Hippel and Wolf Block’s 10-lawyer Wilmington, Del., office will reportedly migrate to Drinker Biddle & Reath this week.

Last fall, Wolf Block announced it was delaying the start dates for its first-year associates from September to November. And in December, the firm laid off 15 lawyers and staff and then made more cuts earlier this year.



Source: bizjournals.com