While many Am Law firms are scaling back their wealth management groupsor dropping them altogetherChoate, Hall & Stewart is beefing up on that front. Along those lines, the Boston-based firm announced that is taking on a four-partner team from Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr.
With partners Jennifer Snyder, Nan Giner, Michael Fay, and Brian Monnich, along with a yet-to-be-determined number of staff and associates, moving to Choate Hall in December, Wilmer will eliminate what has been known as its private client group, which advised high net-worth individuals on a slew of tax and legal matters.
Management from both Wilmer and Choate Hall say the mutually agreed-upon move is more about Choate Hall furthering its commitment to the practice than Wilmer actively seeking to shed the group.
Choate Hall’s co-managing partner John Nadas said in an interview Tuesday that when the firm decided earlier this year that it wanted to expand its five-partner, 50-person wealth management team, it looked to Wilmer, a firm with which it has long enjoyed a close relationship. Talks between the two firms began several months ago, according to Wilmer co-managing partner Susan Murley.
“We saw this as a unique opportunity to make an already great practice area even stronger,” says William Gelnaw, Nadas’s fellow co-managing partner. “We were and remain really impressed by the talent thats come to join us.” Nadas cites wealth management as one of some half-dozen practice areas that his firm specializes in. Others include government enforcement and compliance, private equity and M&A, and insurance and reinsurance work.
The four new hires were not available for comment Tuesday, according to a Choate Hall spokeswoman.
In recent years, several large firms have moved away from trusts and estates and wealth management work. In 2006, for instance, O’Melveny & Myers shut down its practice when its two marquee partners moved to Loeb & Loeb in Los Angeles. Latham & Watkins and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher eliminated its groups years before that.
More recently, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati oversaw the transition in 2010 of a six-attorney group to Silicon Valley boutique Hopkins & Carley, and Weil, Gotshal & Manges closed its trust and estates practice in April 2011 when the firm’s entire seven-attorney teamciting Weil’s move away from individual-client representation as the reason for their departurejumped to McDermott Will & Emery. In June, Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo sold an affiliate financial advisory business that had managed $1.04 billion in assets, though its lawyers still advise private clients.