Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison

Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison
Headquarters San Francisco, California
No. of attorneys 520 (Jan. 2003)[1]
No. of employees 1,100 (2003)
Major practice areas General practice
Date founded 1926
Company type Limited liability partnership
Dissolved 2003 (bankruptcy)
Website
brobeck.com (defunct)

Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison LLP was a large law firm based in San Francisco, California. In 2003, the firm was liquidated under Chapter 7 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, after it had lost a substantial amount of money in the dot-com bubble and merger talks with Morgan, Lewis & Bockius had fallen through.[2]

History

Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison was formed in 1926 when three lawyers split from the predecessor firm to Morrison & Foerster. The firm cultivated an A list of bluechip San Francisco clients including Wells Fargo. In the 1990s, as the technology boom began to roar, Brobeck attorneys began accepting equity from emerging companies in lieu of traditional law firm compensation. The firm re-oriented itself to service many tech companies that were growing, going public by completing initial public offerings (IPOs) and then engaging in extensive merger and market consolidation (mergers & acquisitions). Revenue jumped from $214 million in 1998 to $314 million in 2000. By the summer of 2000, the firm counted 754 attorneys, up 40 percent from the year before.[3] Brobeck's profits-per-partner soared to more than $1 million a year.[3]

When the dot-com bubble burst in 2001 onward,[4] the firm's strategy of betting on technology clients to compensate the firm's lawyers imploded as the lawyers' equity shares became worthless, work dried up and partners with traditional clients or portable business darted to other firms. The firm's dissolution was formalized effective February 2003 and thereafter became subject to Chapter 7 bankruptcy proceedings through a petition filed by some of its creditors in September 2003. [5]

The Austin, Texas office opened an outpost for New York firm Dewey Ballantine, now known as Dewey & LeBoeuf. The Austin Business Journal reported that the Texas office, housing a group of arrivals from Brobeck, was shutting down in 2009. The former chairman Tower Snow decamped with some 50 attorneys to begin the West Coast offices of Anglo-American giant Clifford Chance Rogers & Wells, now called Clifford Chance. The work did not materialize, however, and by 2007 Clifford Chance had closed its Los Angeles, Palo Alto, San Diego and San Francisco offices.

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