After I graduated from Yale, I worked for four years for a mid-sized law firm in Los Angeles. For the last 35 years, I have worked for two Southern California regional offices of East Coast law firms: the Los Angeles office of Rogers & Wells (1982-1994) and the San Diego office of Cozen O’Connor (1994-present).
Cozen’s San Diego office has had 12-20 attorneys when I started. Cozen has grown to over 600 attorneys, with its main office in Philadelphia and major regional offices throughout the United States. In general, Cozen expects all of its attorneys to bill 1950 billable hours each year, with 50 pro bono hours.
I have always done commercial litigation. Since 1987 I have primarily represented and advised insurance companies on liability insurance coverage issues. Most of my time is spent in the office. Although I often represent insurance companies in large, multi-insurer litigation, as a practical reality such litigation requires few court appearances, depositions, and trials. The last time I tried a jury trial in an insurance coverage case was in 1989. This is typical of most commercial litigation today, as highly competent mediators can settle almost any commercial dispute. Big law firms are not for attorneys who want to spend their time in the courtroom.
Like most commercial litigation, insurance coverage is document-oriented, and most of my time is spent in analyzing documents, especially insurance policies, and researching case law interpreting such documents. This is not as dull as it sounds. Sophisticated legal work, which is the bread and butter of big law firms, involves a surprising amount of uncertainty about applicable law which requires interpolation of what little authority is available. Sophisticated legal work is an act of creation, because often there simply is no precedent to rely on.
What keeps me interested in practicing as a commercial litigator is the “puzzle” of the legal issues presented to me. In addition, law is still a business which depends on personal contact with other people: clients, other lawyers at Cozen, and opposing lawyers. I still find most big firm lawyers, including opposing counsel, to be honest professionals who are intelligent and interesting to work with. I like the enthusiasm of associates, and always have an “open door” policy for everyone, associates and partners alike, who want to take a seat and discuss a troubling matter. That kind of informal training of associates remains one of the strengths of big law firms, even though it is not always billable under clients’ billing guidelines.
Apart from monetary compensation, the principal benefit of working for large law firms is that the work is sophisticated and therefore interesting. Because the expense of obtaining advice is substantial, large law firms tend to get complicated and/or messy matters that have to be sorted out. This often entails the efforts of a team, which large law firms like Cozen can assemble immediately. For example, there may be a coverage issue where the policy is issued in Texas but the accident occurs in California. Typically, we will need to look at the relevant coverage law in both Texas and California (which may diverge to a surprising degree), and I work with coverage lawyers in Cozen’s Dallas and Houston offices to analyze the issues. As I have known and worked with our Texas lawyers for years, and respect their expertise, I enjoy working with them. I also like them as people, as I do the other members of my department nationwide. I feel that I am part of the best national insurance coverage department in the country, with about 90 lawyers who can deal with insurance issues in all 50 states. Such esprit de corps is typical of departments of most national law firms.
Until 2016, I was one of only five California insurance department attorneys at Cozen, split between the Los Angeles and San Diego. As a result, my “client” in many cases has been the attorney in a different Cozen office who receives an assignment from an insurance company that has a California law component. I am also in many cases “local counsel” for attorneys in other Cozen offices who need a pro hac vice sponsor, and my degree of involvement varies. In general, the Cozen attorney who receives the assignment from the client prefers to control the external contact with the client, which is occasionally awkward. This situation is similar to associates, for whom the “clients” that they must please are other attorneys in the law firm assigning them work. Associates who have a reputation for doing good, timely work attract more work.
Although Cozen has recently added over 10 insurance coverage attorneys in San Francisco and Los Angeles, I continue to get most of my work from other Cozen offices outside California. One of the techniques I have learned to keep the flow of work up is to respond as soon as I can to California law questions directed by email to all of Cozen’s California office, so long as I have some knowledge in the area. I sometimes send a short response and ask if the attorney needs more. For other questions, I may spend 15 or 20 minutes with a treatise making sure my response is correct. Sometimes the response turns out to be billable, but I do not do the work to increase my billable time. Rather, I do the work to make sure that Cozen as a firm is providing thorough and accurate legal advice, and through a long-standing tradition of attorneys in different states helping each other out. I’m surprised at how often I am the only person to respond to a question. I would expect associates, in particular, to see responding as an opportunity to makes contacts in other offices of the firm.
Over the years, I have found that the greatest challenge that any lawyer has at a large law firm is to say “no” to the client of another attorney. The other attorney has a vested interest in keeping the client happy by confirming that the client can do what it wants to do. I’m senior enough at this point to stick to my guns, but junior attorneys have to learn how to say “no.” The consequences of going along with what the client wants, rather than what the attorney thinks is right, can often be disastrous.
From the standpoint of a young attorney, the departmentalization of all large law firms should be an important consideration. Cozen and most large law firms recruit for specific departments, such as tax, real estate, commercial litigation, or insurance. Cozen has always done a lot of lateral hiring, particularly in the insurance department. Cozen has a good summer program in the home office, but we typically hire hourly law clerks from local law schools in San Diego. Our Los Angeles office has one summer associate position.
At least in litigation, the range of cases that an associate in a home office works on is much more limited than the range of cases that associates in regional offices or mid-sized law firms work on. I have always found that my first four years at a mid-sized firm working on a variety of cases, such as will contests and real property disputes, gave me the flexibility to change as the spectrum of legal work I was doing changed. Change in the practice of law is inevitable, and seems to be accelerating. Starting in a department at a large firm typically does not encourage the flexibility that is essential over the course of a career. In addition, the likelihood that a junior associate will take substantive depositions or argue significant motions is fairly low at Cozen, although it is better than a lot of big firms. My younger son graduated from UPenn Law School in 2015 and got a job in Orange County with a small plaintiff’s firm doing consumer and employment litigation and class actions. Although the pay is not “big law” and there are a lot of hours, he has gotten a lot more experience in taking depositions, arguing motions, and settling matters than I ever got in my first couple of years out of Yale, or a first or second year associate at Cozen would get.
Compensation at any private law firm, large or small, is ultimately based on revenue allocation. This creates numerous strains at large law firms, which develop various schemes for crediting revenue between lawyers. For most associates and partners at Cozen, the principal method of determining compensation is amount of revenue collected by the lawyer for work performed. Each lawyer is treated as a separate profit center. The lawyer’s “profitability” is determined by comparing individual revenue with individual compensation plus allocated overhead. The overhead allocation is a perpetual problem for regional offices, which typically do not use many of the services (word processing center, comprehensive library, etc.) which are provided in the home office only, but are “charged” to the regional office attorneys. This presents a problem in acquiring small regional firms to build up regional offices, because the overhead charge may reduce the compensation of small firm lawyers to an unacceptable degree.
Insurance companies have never been willing to pay the billing rates that major corporations and institutions are willing to pay. Accordingly, as a practical matter most insurance lawyers at Cozen are paid less than the corporate practice attorneys in the home office. I have always been willing to take less pay in return for steady work, which is what insurance companies offer. Insurance claims are not dependent on the status of the economy, because the claims arise out of fortuitous events. However, I have also had the advantage of a spouse who has been able to earn as much as I do, which has given me the option to practice insurance law while raising a family.
In general, I stay out of the compensation wars which take place between shareholders or equity partners. These compensation wars primarily involve which attorney receives credit for revenue from institutional clients for work performed by other attorneys. In general, the revenue generated by “personal clients” of shareholders (i.e., clients that the shareholder brought to the firm and would be able to take if she left) is not difficult to allocate. Institutional clients, however, are not in the “pocket” of any individual attorney, so there is a perpetual turf war over the revenue of that client for purposes of compensation. This was true of the national stockbroker clients of Rogers & Wells, and it is true of the major insurance clients of Cozen O’Connor.
Life in a big law firm is never a bed of roses. You have to accept the culture of the firm and the office, or there will be a more or less amicable divorce. The quality of the people I have worked with for the last 36 years has kept me working for big law firms. I am currently thinking I will call it quits with big firms when I turn 66 in 2019, although I will probably keep doing something in the legal world. I have also cut back to 80 percent (i.e., four days a week, with commensurate reduction in billable hours and compensation), which is an option that is available at Cozen, although preparation for a trial that settled in May, 2017, has required me to work five days a week. I am planning to take some vacations in the second half of 2017 to even things out, although I have another big case with a lot of motion practice that is unlikely to settle any time soon.