June 27, 2017
By Scott Flaherty, Roy Strom and Rebecca Cohen
Buchalter: Biggest Head Count Gains
Buchalter’s roster soared from 160 attorneys to 206 in 2016, the greatest relative head count gain of any firm in the NLJ 500. The Los Angeles-based firm’s major hires included former Sony global litigation chief Leonard Venger and former Parker, Milliken, Clark, O’Hara & Samuelian shareholders Sabina Helton and Steven Nakasone, who launched Buchalter’s Japan practice.
“We made a choice to maintain our culture and to grow in a way which is hard work,” chief executive officer Adam Bass said. “The easy way is you acquire another firm and you merge them in, you cut out 20, 30, 40 percent of the people that the other firm was unwilling to do on their own, and you make it work. We saw that as not within the way that we really like to do things.”
Buchalter brings on teams of no more than five or six lawyers at once, Bass said. “The goal is not to bring someone over here and say, ‘Here’s what you were doing at ABC firm, just come over here and maybe we’ll pay you a little more,'” Bass said. “We want your integration to cause success here.”
The firm’s expansion has continued, with the addition of a sixth office, in Sacramento, in February.
Source: The National Law Journal
