Frustrated with the bureaucracy and conflicts at a big white collar defense firm?
Why not just leave the big firm and start your own?
Steven Molo did.
After twenty three years with two big corporate defense firms, Molo set up – with his friend Jeff Lamken – the boutique litigation firm MoloLamken.
It started with five lawyers. Now it has 17. Molo’s hoping to hit 40 to 50 in a couple of years.
Molo spent 18 years at Winston & Strawn and then another five years at Shearman & Sterling before deciding to set up his boutique litigation firm in 2009.
“There are a lot of great lawyers in large law firms,” Molo told Corporate Crime Reporter in an interview last week. “They are doing a lot of great work. But some are frustrated with the conflicts and the bureaucracy.”
“I’m proud of my association with both Winston & Strawn and Shearman & Sterling. They are two of the great law firms of the world.”
“But I believe the kind of work we do – high stakes litigation – while often done well in large firms, there is also an opportunity to do it with greater efficiency and a greater opportunity for results based compensation in a boutique setting.”
MoloLamken’s focus is complex business litigation, white collar criminal defense, and IP.
And MoloLamken is not exclusively defense side.
“There is such a convergence of the criminal and civil in the white collar area,” Molo said. “You may have regulatory, grand jury, civil litigation – all concerning the same subject matter. The best lawyers have a sensitivity to all of those issues in advising a client.”
And, Molo is now free to not onlly defend big Wall Street banks, but sue them also.
“Clearly one the great advantages of being at a smaller firm is not having to deal with the conflict issues you have at larger firms,” he says.
“We are free to bring lawsuits against major financial institutions. We have a plaintiff’s side lawsuit against JP Morgan Chase. We have sued Citicorp on a couple of different matters. I represented a trader who was at Credit Suisse. It was a criminal case. Had I been at Shearman, it would have been more difficult to undertake that representation.”
“I would never have been able to sue a financial institution at a large law firm.”
What was your thinking when you decided to take the jump from big firm to boutique?
“Part of it was the issue of the conflicts,” Molo said. “Part of it was the inefficiencies inherent in being at a big law firm. Those things were big drivers. Jeff and I are also very entrepreneurial in nature. Even within the context of a large law firm – both at Shearman and Winston, I had a pretty entrepreneurial bent.”
“This seems like a natural vehicle. We looked around and saw other people who had done it and done it well. Knock on wood – we had pretty good success in the course of our careers. And we thought, if we do this right and we are thoughtful about it, why shouldn’t we be able to do it in this other setting. Thus far, knock on wood, we’ve been fortunate that that has been the case.”
“We have 17 lawyers now. We started out with five lawyers. And we are just now starting year three.”
“Our stated goal is something like 40 to 50 lawyers in five years. We think we are on the mark for that. We are very cautious on hiring. We have exacting standards. We want people who are going to add value to the firm right away. We don’t hire associates right out of law school.”
“We hire people typically off clerkships, or who have spent a few years in a large firm. The partners are all people who have trial experience or appellate experience. People who have stood up in courtrooms and have had difficult client problems and can immediately bring some real knowledge and experience to bear in any representation that we undertake.”
“If we maintain that slow growth focused on quality, we think getting to that number of lawyers shouldn’t be too hard to do.”
“Again, it’s quality over quantity – always.”
As for how he handles a case, Molo says “lawyering matters.”
“Conventional wisdom leads to conventional results,” Molo said. “And conventional results in white collar cases are convictions.”
“We can get good results for clients in those situations. We had a situation a couple of years ago. Elkan Abramowitz and I represented David Stockman. He had been under indictment in the Southern District of New York.”
“We thought long and hard about how we were going to proceed. David had not committed a crime. We made a judgment after the indictment and after having received millions of pieces of evidence to go in and make a second white paper presentation to the U.S. Attorney’s office.”
“A second white paper presentation is virtually unheard of. That kind of presentation is made before indictment. But we felt so strongly about it after indictment that we went in and made a second pitch. Ultimately, the Southern District decided to dismiss the indictment against David Stockman. And that came after there were several guilty pleas in the case.”
“Hats off to the Southern District for doing that. It took a lot of courage and integrity for them to do it. And it is perfectly consistent with their tradition.”
“But a lot of lawyers are unwilling to take that kind of a stand. Or even take these cases to trial. It’s up to the defense bar to challenge the government on these cases and say – maybe what the person did was wrong in some way, but it’s not a crime. And they shouldn’t have to go to jail for it.”
[For the complete q/a transcript Interview with Steven Molo, see 26 Corporate Crime Reporter 6(13), February 6, 2012, print edition only.]