Boies Schiller Flexner offices in Washington, D.C. Photo: Diego M. Radzinschi/ALM

A group of 14 Boies Schiller Flexner partners in Los Angeles and one in San Francisco are leaving the firm with plans to join King & Spalding, according to four people familiar with the moves, in the latest departures from a firm that had already seen more than a dozen partners leave since January.

Boies Schiller and King & Spalding did not respond to Law.com's requests for comment on the moves.

The departures deal a major blow to the California presence Boies Schiller has steadily built over the past few years and add to a list of 17 partners that had already left the firm this year. All in all, the firm has lost over a fifth of its 150-attorney partnership since January.

Most of the outgoing Los Angeles attorneys are former members of Caldwell Leslie & Proctor, a Los Angeles-based litigation boutique that merged with Boies Schiller three years ago, sources said. The latest departures leave Boies Schiller with only five partners in its Los Angeles office, according to its website.

The departing group in Los Angeles includes office co-head and former Caldwell Leslie name partner Michael Leslie in addition to partners David Willingham, Michael Roth, Albert Giang, Julia Bredrup, Jeanne Fugate, Arwen Johnson, Lennette Lee, Kelly Perigoe, Eric Pettit, Craig Bessenger and Luan Tran.

Boies Schiller's San Francisco administrative partner, Quyen Ta, is also leaving, according to sources.

King & Spalding officially announced those 13 hires in a press release late Thursday afternoon. The group move was brokered by Avis Caravello, according to sources.

Christopher Caldwell, the other co-head of the firm's Los Angeles office, and Jeffrey Hammer are also leaving Boies Schiller, a source said. They will not be joining King & Spalding right away, due to a conflict issue, but are expected to join their colleagues there in the future, according to the source.

The high-end boutique was a big get for Boies Schiller, which had only 10 attorneys in its nearby Santa Monica, California, office when the tie-up was announced in April 2017. At the time, firm chairman and co-founder David Boies said that both firms saw synergies with shared clients, including broadcaster CBS Corp., adding that the additions would mesh seamlessly with the firm's renewed litigation focus.

"We thought from the beginning that it would be a great fit," Boies told Law.com at the time of the merger.

But sources with knowledge of the merger said there was friction from early on. At least one partner at the firm chafed at inflexible rates, often approaching $1,500. Some former Caldwell lawyers were also unhappy with the fallout from Boies' controversial representations of Theranos and sex offender Harvey Weinstein, sources said.

At least eight former Caldwell attorneys left Boies Schiller before the mass departure. Two partners, Andrew Esbenshade and Caldwell co-founder Michael Proctor, jumped to boutique Durie Tangri in 2020 and 2018, respectively. Partner Linda Burrow left to go in-house at Netflix in 2018, followed by Robyn Crowther, who went to Steptoe & Johnson in 2019. In April, white-collar partner Michael Schafler went to Cohen Williams.

After the departure of Boies Schiller San Francisco co-head Kathleen Hartnett to Cooley in March, Ta was made the sole administrative partner in the firm's 15-attorney Northern California office. She first came to Boies Schiller in January 2018 from Keker, Van Nest & Peters, where she had worked for 12 years. She was appointed, along with Hartnett, to lead the San Francisco office last summer.

Tran and Ta were also the lead lawyers on a $30 million initiative announced last year by Boies Schiller and the litigation funder Bentham IMF, now called Omni Bridgeway, to invest in Vietnam-related disputes.

The group move will further bulk up King & Spalding's Los Angeles office, which was launched in 2011 and is led by Peter Strotz, a tort litigator and products liability partner. The firm lists 50 people in its LA office, 37 in San Francisco and 12 in Silicon Valley, some of whom are listed as resident in multiple locations.

Even as the firm experiences rapid changes, Boies Schiller has said it will keep investing in the California market. In an email to the firm obtained by Law.com, managing partners Natasha Harrison and Nick Gravante said they wished the departing lawyers well and said their Los Angeles and San Francisco offices were "integral parts" of the firm's future.

"Obviously, this is a period of great uncertainty for our country," the email said. "What is not uncertain, however, is that the California legal market, and our Los Angeles and San Francisco offices specifically, will remain integral parts of the firm's geographical and strategic footprint. The firm will continue to service existing and new clients with world class talent in the important California market as we continue to restructure our operations for the next generation."

Boies Schiller is in the midst of a management transition that began publicly in 2018, as co-founders Boies and Jonathan Schiller step away from the main leadership roles. The firm appointed a four-person management committee tasked with handling the day-to-day administrative duties: salaries and draws, billing rates, recruiting and accounts receivable, among others.

And in December, partners Gravante and Harrison were elected as co-managing partners. The announcement came shortly after The New York Times raised questions about Boies' work with a man who claimed to have access to a trove of tapes recorded by Jeffrey Epstein. Boies in response said he did nothing wrong, and the firm said the leadership transition had nothing to do with that matter.

In the five months since Gravante and Harrison took on their new roles, at least 31 attorneys have left the firm. The year's departures began with a group move in Miami, where three partners left to create litigation boutique Heise Suarez Melville.

The coming months brought several more departures, including that of up-and-coming partners Hartnett and D.C.-based partner Stacey Grigsby, who jumped to Covington & Burling in April. Two partners on the East Coast with a lucrative monitorship, Dawn Smalls and Lee Wolosky, left around the same time Hartnett did.

Ross Todd contributed to this report.

Correction: a previous version of this article misspelled Crowther's last name. The error has been corrected.

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