© 2013 The Texas Lawbook.
By Mark Curriden
Senior Writer for The Texas Lawbook
Leadership at Reed Smith has watched and drooled as its competitors moved into the Texas market with great success. The 1,700-lawyer firm, founded in Pittsburgh, has talked with about a half-dozen law firms in Dallas and Houston about merging. None ended up biting.
Now, Reed Smith, which reported nearly $1 billion in revenues in 2011, has decided to start and create its own office in Houston through lateral hires.
The firm, which has 24 offices globally, turned to Houston legal headhunters Clint Johnson and Janet Downey to attempt to persuade as many top-line big firm partners as possible to jump to the firm’s new office.
According to lawyers familiar with Reed Smith’s efforts, Johnson and Downey have contacted more than three-dozen partners at Fulbright & Jaworski, Vinson & Elkins, Akin Gump, Porter Hedges, Bracewell & Guiliani and Andrews Kurth. Lawyers say that they’ve been told that Reed Smith would like to grow the Houston office to about 40 to 50 lawyers during the next year or so.
“I asked who was definitely on board and they read me a list of two-dozen names or more and said that some of them had committed or were on the verge of committing,” says a litigation partner who has been in talks with the recruiters for a couple months. “They wanted to know if there was anyone on the list I could not work with.”
Lee Haag, a construction law trial lawyer at Fulbright in Houston, has reportedly agreed to join Reed Smith. His biographical material has already been removed from the Fulbright website.
Reed Smith global managing partner Greg Jordan did not respond to repeated inquiries during the past week.
The Texas Lawbook has previously reported that Reed Smith has approached a handful of Texas law firms, including Munsch Hardt, Porter Hedges and Thompson & Knight, during the past year about a possible merger.
The Houston Business Journal has reported that Reed Smith has leased 26,857 square feet in the BG Group Place office building in downtown Houston.
Reed Smith Chief Marketing Officer David Egan told Am Law Daily that the firm isn’t “in a position to talk about the specifics of the lawyers yet, but hopefully will be able to do that soon.”
In addition, the law firm has started advertising that it has various staff positions open for an office in Houston.
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