Just weeks into Jami Wintz McKeon's first term as chair of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, the firm took on over 700 new people and opened two new offices, while significantly expanding others, as the firm absorbed the bulk of Bingham McCutchen.

Five years later, McKeon embarked this month on her second term leading the firm, which has grown from 1,100 to over 2,000 lawyers, and now has 14 of its 31 offices outside of the U.S. That makes for a rigorous travel schedule: in the weeks before we met at Morgan Lewis' Philadelphia office, she'd been from Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, to Washington to California and back to the east coast.

McKeon can now expect to stay put for a short while. The firm wrapped its fiscal year Sept. 30—"a record year for us in revenues and profits"—and compensation season is the time of the year that her feet are "most on the ground," she said.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Now that you've got another five years ahead of you, what do you expect to be the biggest challenges? I know you're known for not getting a lot of sleep. But what does keep you up at night? 

Believe me, a lot of things keep me up at night. It's not like I'm Superwoman, or that I just work too hard to sleep, I've just never been a big sleeper, even when I was a kid.

The pace of change is not slowing down, whether you talk about AI, or whether you talk about the Big Four. Technology is moving at such a pace that [there's] pressure to let people work remotely from all parts of the world, especially when you look at the cost of real estate, and clients don't want to pay for law firm overhead. How do you maintain culture? Where do you draw the line? How [do] you keep people learning on the job when a lot of the tasks that many of us learned on are now easier and cheaper to provide with either outside alternative providers?

We are in a world where people generally are feeling anxious and insecure. That's destabilizing, and it makes it hard to predict what's going to happen in any given country. It makes it hard for people to feel good generally. And then you have the really sobering statistics about lawyers: If everybody else is kind of struggling, then you take a population that already starts out struggling, it's just harder.

I say to people all the time: "Look, I can't make this job less stressful." Clients only come to us if they have a big time-sensitive, crushing problem. If anything, the work that we're asking people to do, the stakes are higher for that work than ever before. This can't be a job you come to if you don't like the idea that you're always accessible. Clients would be like, "Totally, we're so glad you're taking a day off. And we're going to call Latham." We can't have that, right? [Laughter]

We have to find a way to keep our organization closely knitted together. We do exit interviews  when anybody leaves us; I read every single one of them. I really encourage people to be candid, and while I hope that people will tell me when they are here if they are thinking we can do better, they usually will tell me on their way out the door. Then we try to do better. It's consuming for anybody who's leading a large organization.

It's been five years since you completed the Bingham merger. Were there growing pains?

Depending on whether you were a critical person or a supportive person, it was either a bold and daring move, or it was the stupidest thing anybody had ever done. I think there were some people who looked and thought, "Well, we know how her term is going to go."

We did a lot of things up front to try to make sure the growing pains were managed and minimal. We really made sure that we knew a lot about every person, every practice, every client, and were really well prepared with a plan for each. We did what we had done back in the Brobeck combination days [in 2003]: every single person—if you work in the mailroom to the most senior partner in the firm—got a buddy. And that person was really responsible for helping your integration.

I think everybody really understood that this was an opportunity for the firm to do something truly transformative. We told our partners up front what we thought the financial costs would be, and we'd been really specific that we only really expected to take a hit in year one. And we actually outperformed in year one and every year after.

The other most significant feature of your first term was your expansion in Asia. Can you talk about the impulse to prioritize the region?

When I met with our advisory board in February 2014 to lay out my strategy, it was mostly focused on global growth. There was a lot of work we thought we had to do in the United States at the time—we were right there in that meaty group of not-really-international, good, solid firms in the U.S. We knew we needed to double down again in California. We knew we wanted to acquire more depth and strength in New York. We knew we wanted to take our Boston office and really expand into that region. We knew we wanted a telecom practice and there were practices of ours like that were strong, but we wanted more breadth and depth.

But the big issue for us was really taking a broader role globally. One of our major industry sectors is financial services, and our clients were having their Asia operations based out of Singapore, so we were very interested in Singapore. But we just kept on not seeing the right combination. Fortunately, in September of 2014, I was introduced by a recruiter we know well to Suet Fern Lee, the head of the Stanford Law Corporation. [Former Morgan Lewis chair Francis Milone] and I had a teleconference a video conference with her, and by the end of that video conference, it was clear to both of us that we might have found the right combination.

I went over to Singapore to meet with her. it was important enough to us that I went during the last week of our fiscal year, right before I was taking over as chair and [when it] looked like either we were really going to get down to it with Bingham or whether we were going to walk away. It was a very intense time.

Our interest was in doing something that hadn't been done before in Singapore, which was having a true merger that would allow us to practice both Singapore law and international law. When I met people from the government at the time, they had all read about the rumors of our combination with Bingham, none of which I was confirming. The rumors were pretty rampant, but the government viewed that combination—that [we] would then be one of the largest firms in the United States—as a positive. And it actually helped us do what we did in Singapore.

Did it give you pause to see a number of other American firms retreating from Asia at the same time that you were moving in?

A little bit, but not as not as much as it might for two reasons.

We really did our homework, and we felt we had a good handle on why those firms were retreating and some inside baseball on why. The fact of the matter is if you do not really focus on integrated integration on a global platform and continue to invest in those offices that are not next door to you, they operate on their own, they don't feel part of the whole, and they are much looser in the socket.

The world is moving east. If you are not in Asia, it is very hard to truly be successful as a global corporate firm. For Morgan Lewis, what has been our tremendous strength is—during the period of time where it was far more popular for firms to skinny down the number of practices they had or really make some dominant at the expense of others—we continue to say, "We're going to continue to represent our corporate clients and the wide array of practice groups, and we're going to be a destination in each one of them."

All those firms that eliminated labor and employment because they thought it was unprofitable? Well, it's not unprofitable at our firm. It's a star practice at our firm, and it helps us build relationships, which then expand to others. That's true for every one of our practices. We are going to have—nine times out of 10—what you need, where you need it, in an environment  where everybody's incentivized to drop everything and help you. You can't just do that if you're operating from New York, you have to be in the major centers where your clients are.

What you described seems to be one of the distinctions between your firm and some of the others that were traditionally regarded as elites and also named as finalists for law firm of the year. Are other firms making a mistake by not taking the same approach?

There's a lot of different ways to have a successful firm. You look at the firms on that list, no one's going to tell you that Cravath or Paul Weiss is making a mistake, right? They're outstanding firms. They're hugely successful, highly profitable elite practitioners. There's nothing negative you could say about anyone, they have just chosen a little bit of a different path. At the opposite end of the spectrum, you look at somebody like Dentons, that would never be what we would want to do, but it's working for them.

It was easier in the days where there were 125 people in Philadelphia, everybody worked only with people down the hall from them, and everybody worked only with clients in the same area. In the legendary stories, you go to the Union League, you present your one-line bill for the year, and it gets paid, right, and you and the client have a nice lunch. Those things just don't exist anymore.

Some firms have decided to continue to stay focused on smaller number of practices for smaller number of lawyers and really have more localized control. And then there's a lot of firms that have decided that they're going to be bigger. You have to decide what your approach and philosophy is going to be, and then you have to really commit to it. You have to do your homework and really focus on getting it right all the time.

How do you maintain any sort of coherent culture now that nearly half of the firm's offices are overseas and you have 2,000 attorneys?

I think it just comes down to how intentional you are about it. Everybody's home is the practice groups, not the offices, and the practice group leaders take a lot of responsibility for close coordination through local leaders. Finding the right time for video conference can be a challenge: We're very big on 6:00 and 7:00. Somebody's up early, somebody's staying a little late, but it usually captures everybody.

I happen to come from a big family. We have cousins all over the place; we get together at least once a year; we make it a point for everybody to stay in touch. If you really feel like you're part of a family, or part of an organization, you have a culture. That culture stays maintained, in part, because you celebrate the things that are consistent with that culture.

We're the only firm in the world of our size that requires everyone to do pro bono. This year, we had 100% meet our minimum pro bono target of 20 hours per person: you don't get that without a culture. People will tell me, "Well, they don't do pro bono in other parts of the world." "We do." "Our corporate lawyers don't like to do it." "Ours do. We all do it." It's a little thing. But it is culture.

At a lot of law firms, they have the "I Love Me Memo," and compensation is the time when you go in and you tell everybody how great you are. Our partner questionnaire is 13 questions.  Eleven of them have nothing to do with you: Who exemplifies the culture within the firm? Who helps you with your practice? Tell us about the people who you've seen make material commitments to client excellence? Who has contributed the most?

In the compensation committee, when I'm sitting down, I can push a button that shows me what you wrote about everybody, and I can push a button that shows me everything that everybody wrote about you. When I look at the bottom of that page, I see there's three people who wrote about you, I know we have a problem. If I see there's 200 people who wrote about you, I'm pretty happy.

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