Weeks into the creation of the global law firm A&O Shearman — the result of the May 1 merger of London’s Allen & Overy and New York-based Shearman & Sterling — the 800 partners kicked off their new firm by holding their first partnership retreat in historic and beautiful Copenhagen and not in Texas, where the attorneys would have been greeted by a heat and humidity dome, record-high temperatures, hurricane force winds, massive flooding and, to quote David Letterman, hail the size of canned hams.
It was an indisputably wise decision that would cause any Texas lawyer whose firm conducted its annual partnership meeting in The Woodlands or Plano to give serious thought to making a lateral move.
Even so, the minds of many of the top leaders at A&O Shearman frequently focused 5,180 miles away from Denmark to their practices in Houston, Dallas and Austin.
“Texas is a microcosm of what we want to do. Texas captures what we are trying to accomplish,” new A&O Shearman firmwide executive committee co-chair and U.S. chair Adam Hakki told The Texas Lawbook in an interview. “Texas was core to Shearman’s strategy and it is very core to A&O Shearman’s strategy.”
The combined merger results in A&O Shearman boasting 3,900 lawyers in 50 offices in 29 countries with total joint revenues estimated to be $3.5 billion.
“We are less than two months into this new firm, but the growth opportunities we see now are significantly larger than the opportunities for growth we saw before,” said Bill Nelson, managing partner of the Texas region for A&O Shearman and a capital markets partner in the firm’s Houston office.
Nelson and Hakki agree that the firm needs to focus on rebuilding its Texas operations.
The Texas Lawbook 50 reported that Shearman lawyers in Texas generated an estimated $81 million in revenues in 2023, which was down 16 percent from 2022.
“No doubt we saw turnover because of the merger,” Hakki said. “No question we need to grow, especially in Houston and Austin.”
A&O Shearman currently has 64 lawyers in Texas, including 21 partners. That is down from 74 attorneys in 2021.
Hakki said the key to lateral recruiting is “having differentiators to attract talent.”
He pointed out the firm’s global reach and an A&O Shearman client base that includes one-third of the largest companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
“We practice collaboration,” he said. “We are not a bunch of satellites floating around. Collaboration is the better way to grow your practice.”
According to The Texas Lawbook’s exclusive Corporate Deal Tracker, Shearman lawyers in Texas worked on 43 M&A transactions in 2023 with a combined deal value of $23.1 billion. The firm’s Texas attorneys also handled a dozen securities offerings last year valued at $7.7 billion.