Quote:
Originally posted by andViolins
This was posted on the "other" board:
"A&H announced to its associates it will be dissolving yesterday, ala Brobeck. Should hit the papers tomorrow. Non-Ohio offices not performing for long time; leases too much $$$. Bummer. I am surprised it took this long for this to hit the BB."
aV
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wow, that is really bad. especially since the ohio offices really only seemed to be doing poorly because of their expansion. yet another example of the danger of law firm mergers.
i think i've said it before, but i think that they expansion outside of the ohio market left them vulerable because they never became a strong national firm and didn't keep that strong of an ohio base - their cleveland and columbus offices weren't really large enough to be anchor offices for a 400+ attorney national firm (which is what they were at their peak). i suspect that a large part of their problem came from the washington office which had fallen all the way down to 14 attorneys (of which only was was an associate) - i seem to recall that they had about about 60 or 70 attorneys there at one point before they started losing people.
i hope in the future that law firm partners will look at something like that and see the danger of the expand or die mentaility - perhaps no firm was a better representation of trying to go from a regional firm to a national firm than arter. just like brobeck perfectly represented the tech boom thinking, arter perfectly represented the expand and become national way of thinking.
ms. naughty diplomat
