ROLLONFRIDAY STORY 19TH AUGUST 2005
150 year history over as Coudert folds
Coudert Bros has finally collapsed: on Wednesday the handful of partners still at the beleaguered firm voted to dissolve the partnership.
Coudert's woes began in May, when Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe nicked pretty much its entire London and Moscow offices. The firm made a big deal of hauling out expensive litigators and threatened to sue Orrick's ass if any of the departing partners had breached their fiduciary duties. But the crisis just deepened. Dozens of partners jumped ship - many of them loudly demanding the repayment of millions of dollars of capital contributions - and Coudert disposed of offices left right and centre in a bid to make itself an attractive merger target.
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Coudert partners jumping ship |
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The firm's only real hope was a merger with Baker & McKenzie. But with nigh on 70 offices already it was hard to see how Bakers could make a case for swallowing more than a dozen more, and this week a firm that had been in existence for more than 150 years went down the pan.
The only consolation is that at least with the strong global demand for legal services, the firm's lawyers should be snapped up pretty quickly...