Welcome, Freshmen! A New Class Leads Am Law 100 Firms

On June 10 William Voge, Latham & Watkins’ London-based global project finance head, woke at 4:45 a.m. to catch the first flight to Frankfurt. Voge, 57, needed an early start: Over the next 20 hours, while juggling pressing business on four giant proposed energy projects, he visited his partners, first in Frankfurt, then in Brussels, as part of a campaign to succeed longtime chair and managing partner Robert Dell. The roadshow for Washington, D.C., corporate partner Paul Sheridan Jr., who was also vying for Dell’s job, began that day at 5 a.m. in Hong Kong and ended at midnight in Singapore; the day encompassed campaign visits with partners and work on four separate deals. And Los Angeles finance partner Jeffrey Greenberg, the third candidate, recalls trying to give his partners full attention on a campaign visit to Los Angeles that day, while email after email was pouring in on the financing of a deal.

For the three rivals, winnowed from an original field of 38, the last leg of an eight-month succession process “was intense,” says Voge (pronounced Vogue-y). But all three agree that the open and participatory succession process at Latham, the second-largest U.S. firm to choose a new leader this year, after DLA Piper, was a worthy expression of the firm’s culture. On July 14, after two rounds of balloting, Voge was declared the chair-elect. “Partners in our firm now really own and embrace their decision,” says Voge.