The Recorder
February 7, 2007
For top lawyers at big-name firms, a prestigious megamerger can look like the beginning of happily ever after.
But for professional staff like paralegals, legal secretaries, administrators and law librarians, merger news may prompt a serious case of wedding-night jitters. Largely left out of the loop and fearful of having changes imposed, nonlawyers often view mergers as a threat rather than an opportunity.
"There's fear of chaos, fear of losing their jobs, fear of dramatic changes that make their jobs no longer desirable," says Andrea Hunolt, branch director at the Robert Half Legal staffing company's San Francisco office.
"Mergers are not a good thing for support staff," adds Hunolt, "at least in the short run. I know a lot of people who have stuck through it and found great success, but they have to be prepared for a period of uncertainty and the change with that. It's scary."
Reed Smith paralegal Teri Poon is one of those merger survivors. As a paralegal at Crosby, Heafey, Roach & May, Poon had been at the firm just three years when its merger with Reed Smith was announced in 2002.
Poon, who had experienced two painful mergers in the nonlegal corporate world, started to panic.
"I thought, 'Oh no, here we go again,'" she recalls. "You hear these rumors, and you kind of speculate, 'What is going to happen to us?'"
Poon's biggest fear was that she would lose her job outright -- a trauma she had already endured in the tight San Francisco Bay area job market.
San Francisco-based legal secretary Glenn Guzik, also a Crosby Heafey veteran, had other concerns about the Reed Smith merger. He worried about what would happen to the attorneys he supported, whether the newly merged firm would maintain adequate staffing, how his job might change and what would become of the workplace culture.
Crosby Heafey's relaxed California culture "was one of the things that attracted me," says Guzik. "I wanted to see how that would be affected."
Patricia Lane, a legal administrator with McKenna Long & Aldridge, which came into being with the 2002 combination of McKenna & Cuneo and Long Aldridge & Norman, recalls pre-merger jitters at her own firm. "The concerns I think, from the perspective of the administrators, was, will they [the new firm] value what we do in the same way that our predecessor firm did?"
Fast-forward to the present. Lane is an administrator at McKenna Long & Aldridge's San Diego office, and Poon and Guzik are happily employed by Reed Smith.
All three say mergers didn't change their jobs much, and all three credit firm leadership with the smooth, relatively calm transition. Guzik says Reed Smith's top brass met frequently with staff and were good about "keeping us pretty much in the loop of what was going on and asking for our feedback."
David Duckhouse, Reed Smith's CFO, says that strategy is deliberate. "Of course there are concerns," says Duckhouse. "The way to manage that is to keep people informed to the extent that you can."
Duckhouse -- formerly of the U.K.'s Warner Cranston, which joined Reed Smith in 2001-- and Gary Sokulski, Reed Smith's chief operating officer, say their merger strategy emphasizes retaining employees, even if that means retraining them for something different.
"When we do mergers, we don't necessarily look at them as being accretive in any way in terms of reducing or terminating staff," explains Sokulski.
TWO OF EVERYTHING
For better or worse, mergers may put an employee's job description in flux. And combining the nuts and bolts of each firm's day-to-day operations isn't always simple.
For librarians, a merger of two large firms can provide opportunities for expanding research capabilities.
Jane Metz, a librarian at the San Francisco office of McCutchen, Doyle, Brown & Enersen, saw both her department's capacities and her own position expand greatly when her firm merged with East Coast firm Bingham Dana in 2002.
The prospect of a layoff "simply wasn't an issue," as the international firm was preparing to provide research services to about a dozen different offices around the world, says Metz.
Instead, as the combined firm's librarian staff increased to more than 30, Metz moved up the ranks. She is now regional manager for library and research services, supervising a staff of eight spread out over northern California.
Todd Bennett, another firm librarian, says his library benefited from a merger.
Now the West Coast head librarian at the San Francisco office of Thelen Reid & Priest, Bennett remembers the 1998 bicoastal merger of the West Coast's Thelen, Marrin, Johnson & Bridges and the East Coast's Reid & Priest. "We were just beginning to look at online catalogs," Bennett recalls. "So it actually gave the East Coast head librarian a chance to also participate in our first online catalog."
Legal secretaries and paralegals assigned to lawyers staying on at a new firm are also somewhat safeguarded from job losses unless, of course, their performance is less than stellar.
"You do want to keep the keepers and the strong performers," says Michelle Egan, managing director for talent development at O'Melveny & Myers, which absorbed nearly 100 attorneys when it merged with the private equity New York law firm O'Sullivan in 2002. "But honestly, merged firms give an opportunity to upgrade talents ... [and also] provides an opportunity to find people new homes" inside the firm.
Sometimes the sheer size of a merged firm can lead to newly defined roles.
At Reed Smith, for example, former Crosby Heafey IT director Liz Bachman-Grechi became the director of practice technology services.
Reed Smith COO Sokulski says the switch worked out well for Bachman-Grechi as well as the firm. "One of the things about being the chief information officer of a 250-lawyer firm was that she [Bachman-Grechi] got pulled in different ways ... all these things which didn't really accentuate her strength, which was being in front of clients and telling them what our lawyers' abilities were, technologywise."
Don Jaycox, the chief information officer for the U.S. offices of DLA Piper, cites another example of creative deployment.
After the three-way merger of DLA, Piper Rudnick and Gray Cary Ware & Freidenrich in 2005, the company found itself with two directors of software. "The two directors combined supporting the off-the-shelf software as well as developing new systems," says Jaycox. "What I did was essentially divide those functions."
With 2,700 attorneys and offices in the United States, Europe and Asia at the time of the merger, Jaycox says it made sense to make one position entirely responsible for technical support, while the other took over new software development and knowledge information.
Merging Piper, an East Coast power, with Gray Cary, with offices in California and Washington, D.C., and the British firm DLA meant special challenges just from an information technology perspective.
"Initially, it's sort of a triage," recalls Jaycox, who was the chief information officer for Gray Cary prior to the merger.
"We felt that the things most important to deal with right away were the things that underlie our ability to communicate internally," Jaycox says.
That meant Jaycox and his counterparts at the other merging firms cranked into high gear beginning in 2004 to develop a unified domain name and an e-mail system as well as a single phone-dialing system "so a person in Chicago could dial a seven-digit number and reach anyone in the world."
Once most of the communication issues were sorted out -- in time for the official Jan. 1, 2005, merge date -- the company turned its attention to unifying its client bases and establishing companywide payroll, accounting and human resources systems.
CROSSING THE POND
Merging with firms in different locales can also mean special challenges in terms of pay and benefits, particularly when it comes to reconciling regional differences in compensation, health care and vacation.
Typically, top brass choose a system from one of the merging partners while acknowledging that some regional differences simply can't be combined.
"In London there's a completely different way health care is offered than in the United States, so you don't harmonize them," says Reed Smith's Sokulski.
There are also other challenges to deal with -- including differences in language and time zone.
"You're suddenly up at six in the morning on conference calls because of the time difference," says one senior marketing professional at an international law firm, who asked not to be identified. "Then there's the U.K. spelling of things, so 'favor' or 'favour'?"
The marketer, a successful merger survivor with more than 10 years' experience in global law firms, says he also noticed more subtle differences between the U.S. and European cultures: "U.K. firms have a longer history of seeking strategic counsel from nonattorney professionals." He says that meant immediately being asked to sit down "with seven or eight of our most senior managers ... to give my views about what we should be saying about [the newly merged company]."
THE RIGHT FIT?
If a merger is in your future, Hunolt, the branch director at Robert Half Legal's San Francisco office, says the best advice is to remain calm and hang tight.
"Know that it's not going to be business as usual, keep an open mind, reserve judgment until the cards have fallen," says Hunolt.
She advises employees to look at life after the merger as if they were "evaluating a new job," and keep in mind that there will still be some familiar aspects of work at the firm. "If you look for a new job, you would be looking at a brand-new firm you'd know nothing about," she says. "Here, you are in a situation where you know half of it."
Experts who have dealt with the effects of megamergers also say deal makers and top managers can do a lot to ease pre-merger worries by being as honest as possible, as soon as possible.
"The communication function really should be started at the beginning, when firms are really in the process of checking out the financials," says Elizabeth Lampert of Elizabeth Lampert PR, which consults with merging law firms.
"It's important to have meetings so people can ask questions -- kind of like a press conference," says former Thelen chairman Richard Gary, who consults with merging law firms as part of Tiburon, Calif.-based Gary Advisors. "People tend to be insecure, and they need to know, 'What is going to happen to me?'"
Those who have lived through mergers say the potential is great for contentment -- and even advancement -- if you can ride out the initial uncertainty.
"The Chinese symbol for change is danger and opportunity," observes DLA Piper's Jaycox. "You have to deal with that."
Former Recorder reporter Jill Duman is a Davis, Calif.-based freelance writer.