Counsel for the Situation: Shaping the Law to Realize America's Promise

The Sun Also Rises in the East

281 thirty-five The Sun Also Rises in the East The wilderness and dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom. —Isaiah 35:1 Since its founding in 1885, O’Melveny & Myers had been an integral part of the growth of Los Angeles from a sleepy Mexican town to the second-largest city in the United States. Over the decades O’Melveny had established an extraordinary reputation on the West Coast, representing the major California banks, IBM, Occidental Petroleum, General Motors, major motion picture studios, Lockheed Aircraft, the department store Carter Hawley Hale, and, more glamorously, Bing Crosby, Shirley Temple, William Holden, Gregory Peck, James Stewart, Gene Autry, and Ingrid Bergman. In 1976 its fewer than two hundred lawyers were housed in downtown Los Angeles and a satellite office in Century City, where its entertainment department was located.There was a small outpost in Paris, France, established shortly after World War II to service movie studio executives and stars, as many films were then being made in Europe. O’Melveny recruited the top students at the best law schools, many of whom grew into outstanding lawyers and community leaders. Because it was one of the go-to firms in Los Angeles, there was little interest in, or emphasis on, business development. Some of the finest East Coast firms referred their major clients to O’Melveny for work on the West Coast. Understandably, they greeted O’Melveny’s opening of a Washington office with little enthusiasm, and some of my Los Angeles partners were concerned that the East Coast referral business would dry up. Some were also hesitant to refer their West Coast clients to the embryonic Washington office, which had yet to prove itself, instead of established Washington firms like Covington and Burling or Wilmer, Cutler. We had to persuade our own partners that we would serve their clients well and add a new dimension to O’Melveny as a full-service law firm. When O’Melveny set up stakes in Washington in 1976, there were only a few out of-town firms with Washington offices, often staffed by local lobbyists 06-0488-1 part6.indd 281 9/9/10 8:27 PM 282 / a washington lawyer or former federal agency heads. In making this move, O’Melveny changed the rules of the game. The next decade would see a cascade of Washington offices opening up from all the major U.S. cities, and not surprisingly a number of East Coast firms decided to open up offices in Los Angeles. O’Melveny also was being challenged by other first-rate law firms in Los Angeles: Gibson, Dunn; Latham and Watkins; Paul, Hastings; and others. O’Melveny could not rest on its laurels as the best in the West. In my judgment , it had to move to a higher platform and compete effectively on the national and international stage. The Washington office would show the way. Although controversial in its inception, the success of the new office paved the way for a proliferation of O’Melveny offices around the world. There are now fourteen, including five in Asia.* In 1977 the challenge was to convince my partners that O’Melveny had the quality and talent to compete nationally and internationally, to persuade our existing clients that we could meet their legal requirements anywhere in the country (or the world), and to attract new clients by building a reputation as a full-service law firm with strong litigation, transactional, and other practice specialties that even the best Washington-based firms, with their emphasis on federal regulatory issues, could not hope to replicate. Washington itself was changing. With the trend toward deregulation there was demand for innovative multidisciplinary teams of lawyers who could help formerly regulated industries thrive in a more competitive environment. Over the next several years we were able to demonstrate with a string of successes how the Washington office could substantially raise the profile of the firm internationally. We assembled teams of expert lawyers in diverse specialties from our various offices to meet the challenges of, or seize opportunities for, major global corporations. Few clients ever hired O’Melveny to perform routine legal services. But when a “bet-the-company” crisis occurred, we became one of the few go-to major law firms on the general counsel’s short list. Of course, O’Melveny did not open the Washington office with such a grandiose view. The firm had several existing clients in need of legal services on the...