White & Case wrestles with discord again

With White & Case once more hit by departures, it's starting to feel as if my job description involves writing about internal tensions at the firm every year or so. The background has been well published: for a long time there was a sense the firm's City arm had not always sat happily within its global network, despite the practice achieving explosive growth during the credit boom. Tensions had also simmered for years within a firm that could not count on the clear sense of identity that comes from fitting easily into Manhattan's clubby legal market – the firm's internationalism since the 1980s has made it an outlier on Wall Street.

For years such issues could be dismissed as the by-product of the rapid expansion and cultural diversity inherent in such a large global organisation. But since the divisive leadership election in 2007, which led to the appointment of Hugh Verrier as chairman, the situation has seemed more pronounced. That election contributed to the turbulent departure of Maurice Allen and Mike Goetz in 2008, but it appeared the firm may have seized the chance to heal its divisions. The firm's global restructuring last year in response to the recession wasn't pretty, but then it wasn't much prettier at most global firms. There was hope that the worst had passed.

Unfortunately, the news last week that White & Case is losing no less than 12 partners makes such hopes look like wishful thinking. The initial confirmation last Friday that four City partners had resigned left the firm with a deal finance practice looking a shadow of the former glories of just a few years back. But at least it could have been argued that the firm's core practice in projects, energy and infrastructure was onside, even if its uppity London bank team wasn't.

What, then, to make of the eight further partner losses in projects and energy spread across New York, London and the Middle East? The departures leave the firm without a partner in Abu Dhabi and only one in Saudi, and in total look significant enough to raise doubts over its grip on clients like Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs and Saudi Aramco. If the partners who would have been expected to be in the loyalist camp are leaving, it becomes harder to see how the firm will move forward. Warring factions is bad enough. Mutually disappointed factions seem somehow worse.

Obviously, a 400-partner global law firm will not be holed below the waterline by the loss of 12 senior lawyers but, to be plain, White & Case will have to come up with a clear response beyond just plugging on if it wants to regain the initiative. But it's not apparent that the firm accepts that reality yet.

White & Case on the Legal Week Wiki