Firms Regroup to Meet Client Demand Amid Crisis
Darrell Pierce, a commercial finance lawyer, has fielded many client questions during his 28-year legal career. But until last October, “I’ve never had clients calling asking what to do if the bank defaults.”
Unprecedented, unthinkable and unexpected questions have become the status quo for Pierce, the head of Dykema’s financial markets crisis task force, in the wake of the Wall Street credit crisis. This is true even though Pierce, based in both Chicago and Ann Arbor, Mich., helped shut down banking institutions during the savings and loan crisis more than 20 years ago.
“There’s a lot of moving parts here,” Pierce says. “Clients are watching [events develop on] TV while they’re talking to you on the phone and asking you what you think about it.”
Whatever they might label it—credit market distress team, subprime mortgage task force or global financial markets initiative—many large law firms are forming multidisciplinary groups to guide clients through the most sweeping federal intervention into private finance since the New Deal. Though such coordinated efforts among practice groups aren’t new—those formed during the S&L collapse and the dot-com bubble of the late ’90s come to mind—the current depth and breadth of coordination, not to mention the need to react to profound client needs and rapidly developing legislation, has distended the definition of task force almost beyond recognition.
Continue reading the full story online in the January issue of the ABA Journal.
