Why Law Firms Collapse

Yale Law & Economics Research Paper No. 521

75 The Business Lawyer 1399 (2020)

42 Pages Posted: 20 Mar 2015 Last revised: 21 Jan 2020

See all articles by John Morley

John Morley

Yale Law School; European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI)

Date Written: January 20, 2020

Abstract

Law firms don’t just go bankrupt—they collapse. Like Dewey & LeBoeuf, Heller Ehrman, and Bingham McCutchen, law firms often go from apparent health to liquidation in a matter of months or even days. Almost no large law firm has ever managed to reorganize its debts in bankruptcy and survive. This pattern is puzzling because it has no parallel among ordinary businesses. Many businesses go through long periods of financial distress and many even file for bankruptcy. But almost none collapse with the extraordinary force and finality of law firms. Why?

I argue that law firms are fragile in part because they are owned by their partners rather than by investors. Partner ownership creates the conditions for a spiraling cycle of withdrawals that resembles a run on the bank. As the owners of the business, the partners of a law firm are the ones who suffer declines in profits and who have to disgorge their compensation in the event the firm becomes insolvent. So if one partner leaves and damages the firm, it is the remaining partners who bear the loss. Each partner’s departure thus has the potential to worsen conditions for those who remain, meaning that as each partner departs, the others become more likely to leave as well, eventually producing an accelerating race for the exits. This kind of spiraling withdrawal is sometimes thought to be an unavoidable consequence of financial distress. But if law firms were not owned by their partners, spiraling withdrawals would not happen. Indeed, the only large law firm in the history of the common law world that has ever survived a prolonged insolvency (the British and Australian law firm Slater and Gordon) is also one of the only large law firms that has ever been owned by investors. These insights have extensive implications for how we understand law firms and corporate organization more generally.

Keywords: Law firms, partnership, bank runs, organization

JEL Classification: G33, K22

Suggested Citation

Morley, John D., Why Law Firms Collapse (January 20, 2020). Yale Law & Economics Research Paper No. 521, 75 The Business Lawyer 1399 (2020), Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2580616 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2580616

John D. Morley (Contact Author)

Yale Law School ( email )

P.O. Box 208215
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European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI) ( email )

c/o the Royal Academies of Belgium
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Belgium
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