Unlike most American firms landing blinking in the City, one problem that Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges will not have is standing out. After all, these self-consciously combative trial lawyers extraordinaire manage to stand out in their home town, having grown at staggering speed from their 1986 launch to become a top 100 US practice in just two decades.
But it’s far more than startling growth that the Los Angeles-based upstart is known for. It remains one of the very few law firms of any significance to focus exclusively on litigation, a stance that the firm has turned to its advantage by freeing itself from conflicts, both legal and the hassle of having to compete with transactional departments for resources.
The 375-lawyer firm’s singular culture, defined to a considerable extent by charismatic founder John Quinn, also marks the firm out. Playing off its LA roots, Quinn has made a virtue of rejecting the buttoned-down law firm image, even by
Part of that culture was an aggressive push to win business that saw the firm regularly cold-calling potential clients, a tactic that Quinn maintains to this day (despite what
This is part of the whole trial lawyer mentality. While
Quinn has also distinguished itself through its unusual recruitment strategy that saw the firm obsessively target the brightest students long before it really had the reputation to justify their employment. Now it’s fully stocked with former law review editors from top schools and brings in the calibre of students you would expect to see at Cravath.
Mixing this weird alchemy of quirk, ambition and audacity, Quinn has rapidly established itself as one of America’s most prolific litigation teams and go-to counsel for clients including IBM, Shell, Northrop Grumman and General Motors. And aside from the lucrative defence work, the firm is well known for taking aggressive contingency fee positions to fund high stakes claimant litigation – with Quinn once telling journalists that “we like having skin in the game”.
Skin has so far proved highly profitable, according to The American Lawyer, whose 2007 financial rankings show Quinn’s revenue to have rocketed to $384.5 (£195m), which average equity partner profits had hit $3.01m (£1.52m), making it one of the US’s most profitable law firms.
The question now is if
The plan now is to have a credible team to start pursuing high-end litigation in the City, with post-crunch claims targeting banks and accountants clearly high on the agenda.
How this plays out will be fascinating. No
In this context, the Sullivans and Weils of this world are hybrids and not much like most pure-blood US law firms at all. Either way, Quinn is going to stand out from this crowd.
But even though the firm has made a great success of taking its model into the highly competitive New York market - building a 130-lawyer practice in six years - some of the initial comments regarding the firm’s City strategy suggest that it doesn’t quite have its head around how litigation works in the UK. This utterly fresh approach could prove to be either a stunning success or a dismal failure and much will depend on the firm’s ability to replicate its famed knack of hiring the best that propelled its growth in the US.
Urquhart, in town “on a quest for the best and brightest the
I think so too.
