Credit: Mike Scarcella/ ALM

DLA Piper's two incoming U.S. managing partners—Chicago-based restructuring attorney Richard Chelsey and Los Angeles-based real estate attorney Jackie Kim Park—didn't expect to be steering the firm through churning waters as soon as they stepped into their new roles.

"The paradigm has fundamentally shifted in the last six weeks," Chelsey said Monday.

The pair officially started in the new positions April 2, but they'd been working closely for the last several months with Stasia Kelly, who served as U.S. managing partner for seven years, before moving into the role of executive director of client relations.

Chelsey, who is also global co-chair of the firm's restructuring practice and previously served as co-managing partner in the Chicago office, said that two months ago, he would have pegged increasing productivity, reach and quality in an increasingly competitive legal market as the firm's biggest challenges.

For Park, previously vice chair of DLA Piper's U.S. real estate practice and co-managing partner of the Los Angeles offices, it was to have been the shift from a two-chair model to a single U.S. chair under Frank Ryan, who is to take over the role in January 2021.

But now the terrain has shifted for the duo, who will together oversee all aspects of the firm's operations in the U.S., including lateral recruiting and associate hiring, marketing and business development, and the compensation process.

"This issue is so all-encompassing. It has touched pretty much every single aspect of our practice groups," Park said.

The biggest surge in demand has come in restructuring, along with consulting in the labor and employment practice. Work in finance has also been brisk, and Chelsey sees some transactions in the pipeline moving forward, while others have been put on ice. Real estate and IP work have also held up.

"I'm cautiously optimistic," he said. "It's down where you would expect it, but some of that work is coming back."

DLA Piper is taking a number of measures to shore up its bottom line in light of the ongoing economic uncertainty, but attorneys and staff have been spared thus far. Large conferences have been postponed, the firm's summer program has been halved from 10 weeks to five, and several "large and non-mission critical" tech projects have been delayed to 2021, as have planned capital-extensive office build-outs.

"We're pulling a lot of the financial levers that we can pull," Park said.

The firm was also well-positioned heading into the crisis. Chelsey said that first-quarter results were "very strong," following a 2019 that saw near double-digit revenue growth.

"We're making clear to everybody that job security is top of mind to our people and everyone is collectively working hard to ensure the health of the law firm," he added.