Dewey's Sharp hits out at stricken firm's US management
Former Dewey & LeBoeuf London managing partner Peter Sharp has claimed that the firm’s New York chiefs “ignored” his plans to save the City office as he moved to refute allegations that he left his former colleagues high and dry.
Peter Sharp
Sharp, who resigned to join Morgan Lewis & Bockius’s City office at the height of the crisis, has launched an attack on the firm’s US management, following claims that the litigator looked after his own interests and broke a promise to go down with the ship.
“In mid-March I told [staff] I was not about to disappear. The situation changed,” Sharp told The Lawyer in an interview published today.
“There’s so much to this. We got to a point by mid-April where it became impossible to hold together any sort of London practice at Dewey & LeBoeuf. I’d also put a proposal to New York to try and hold together a team - I surveyed the office and put forward what I thought was possible, how that could be a viable practice. It was completely ignored.”
Sharp has become a villain among much of Dewey’s remaining staff, with four sources claiming that well before he left he went round vowing not to jump ship as hordes of partners globally were leaving.
A current Dewey associate said: “Peter had met with each of the floors in the building and his message was, there’s a rumour going round that I may be leaving, and I can tell you that that’s not going to happen. [He said] you will not see that headline. Of all the parallels with Captain Schettino […] He fell into the lifeboat, and he’s leading the rescue from the shore.”
But Sharp claimed that a meeting with partners on 20 April, when a number of them told him they were leaving, meant that the situation was no longer salvagable.
“That’s the point when I decided the only constructive thing I could do was try and find a safe home for as many people as possible,” he said.
“You have to make an on-the-spot decision. By that point it became clear to me that the firm was doomed. Everyone who made London what it was was planning to leave immediately.”
Sharp, who quit on 3 May, also blamed the situation on the significant financial pressure partners were under, with some London partners understood to have been forced into selling their houses to pay their tax bills following months of reduced pay.
He added: “Meanwhile, the bank that provided capital loans had notified us that no future facilities would be made available to Dewey partners.”
Today’s feature also reveals that two senior Dewey partners clinched a $3m (£1.9m) bonus on top of their $2.5m fixed profit share cap when the firm renegotiated its controversial guarantee packages in March this year. One star lawyer on $6.4m ended up with a $6.9m deal following the negotiations, despite an apparent intention to limit the widely-criticised scheme of guaranteeing pay to certain partners.
Meanwhile, remaining London staff are being left in the dark over the firm’s plans, with one current staff member telling The Lawyer that no communication has reached them about their situation as the UK LLP verges on administration.
Despite a source telling The Lawyer last week that staff had been told this was their last week, it has emerged that this only applies to those whose close contacts with partners meant they were well-informed. Nothing official had been sent out to staff at the time of writing.
Dewey called a meeting for partners and former partners who had left recently last Wednesday (22 May) to discuss the latest situation, with the UK LLP expected to have gone into administration last Friday (24 May) (22 May 2012).
A current Dewey employee told The Lawyer: “It’s a horrible time. It’s heartbreaking. I’ve been here a long time. It’s like a family here. It’s hard, to see so many people strewn across the City. It’s heartbreaking.”
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Readers' comments (31)
Anonymous | 30-May-2012 11:13 am
“In mid-March I told [staff] I was not about to disappear. The situation changed,” Sharp told The Lawyer in an interview published today. Yes, it certainly did change. Sharp negotiated a new job in about a week, and jumped into that lifeboat. It is basically a coincidence that the Moscow and Almaty offices went to the same firm. Sharp may feel terrible, but not nearly as terrible as those he left behind who are now unemployed.
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Anonymous | 30-May-2012 11:22 am
to anon at 10.37
does that mean peter found his religion when the money stopped coming in?
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Anonymous | 30-May-2012 11:48 am
@Arthur: "London also quite recently (1 yr ago) signed new leases on all floors. Shocking bearing in mind the financial indicators available (that were ignored by all)."
Dewey & LeBoeuf in London was a partnership until relatively recently. You can bet your bottom dollar that Peter Sharp as the managing partner in London was one of the partners holding the existing leases of their building, and therefore would have been personally liable on them. New leases would presumably have been completed in the name of the new LLP, getting Peter and the other partner signatories to the original leases off the hook. Maybe he was not ignoring the financial indicators as you suggest, but rather the opposite, getting himself out of the line of fire by the landlord if the firm went down. Only he can know what he knew of the financial plight of the firm when the new leases were signed, and what the motivations really were for doing this, but maybe it is not as shocking as it might appear at first sight; it is possible that financial indicators, far from being ignored, could conceivably have been a significant motivating factor. We will probably never know, but things are not always as simple as they may seem.
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Anonymous | 30-May-2012 12:11 pm
Some of these comments are pretty amusing. Sharp loves his publicity - he loves talking to The Lawyer and Legal Week - hence this article among many others over the years. Wonder what he thinks now?
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Mr Man | 30-May-2012 12:39 pm
I am more interested in what Morgan Lewis are thinking after reading this.
Turd in a punchbowl rather than jewel in the crown comes to mind.
Still they do say there is no such thing as bad publicity!
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Ricky | 30-May-2012 2:53 pm
to anon at 11:22. What did you expect Peter to do, stay with a sinking ship? He tried his best but some of you are bitter and jealous.
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Anonymous | 30-May-2012 3:14 pm
to ricky
yeah, and the generals turn against the leadership when the war starts to go badly and their backsides might be toast
meanwhile the road the good times turning a blind eye to waht was going on
how brave
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Anonymous | 30-May-2012 3:31 pm
@Ricky: yes, he had every right to leave, as did anyone else. What stinks is that he told people he was not going anywhere, then, when he changed his mind, without telling anyone he went headlong into look-after-number-one self-preservation mode and suddenly disappeared. Is it any wonder that others in the office thought his bevaviour was despicable and became very bitter?
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Anonymous | 30-May-2012 4:10 pm
The longer version of this article (“A Matter of Principals”) says “Sharp, who had always been considered one of the market’s nice guys....” What a joke. The journalist only says this because Sharp has been sucking up to him (and similar journalists at Legal Week and elsewhere) for years. Sharp’s former colleagues would probably argue to the contrary, and his new colleagues at MLB will figure this out soon enough. Furthermore, Sharp never had any plan to save the London office. According to the longer version of this article, even the plan he put to Dewey’s New York HQ only included half the partners. So he was sacrificing half the partners and half the office to save himself and what he considered to be the best part of the office. Remember, as a disputes partner, Sharp has no repeat business. He and the members of his team are reliant on a strong transactions team to feed them work. So everything he was doing was designed to save his own skin – the only reason he ever planned to move with anyone else was so they could feed him work and keep his practice going.
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Anonymous | 30-May-2012 4:56 pm
Sharp was never one of the market's nice guys. I witnessed him shafting people loyal to him in the past when it suited his interests to do so. This debacle is just a more public example of behaviour he has long been exhibiting. I'm glad that these comments are for the most part reflecting his true colours.
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