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Ropes & Gray believes that the complex legal problems faced by
our clients are best handled by the collaborative effort of highly
talented individuals. Consistent with that core premise, Ropes & Gray's
approach to client service has two fundamental objectives. First, through
our hiring and training efforts, we seek to fill the firm with the
best individual legal talent in the country. Second, through the way
in which the firm is structured, we reinforce at every turn the benefits
to our clients and to the firm when our lawyers work as teams to solve
the problems that our clients have brought to us.
Exemplifying our collaborative approach to client service, nearly every
matter we handle is staffed with a team of lawyers, as opposed to just
one. While bigger teams are occasionally required for unusually large
or complex matters, most teams involve just two or three lawyers — typically
a partner and one or two associates. |
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Hands-on training is critical to providing
the best possible client service. Here, Stuart
Yothers (Fordham University Law School '05) confers with partner Barbara Ruskin on an intellectual property matter. |
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| Our team-based approach
carries over from particular client matters to structuring overall
client relationships. A number of our most important clients are served
by cross-departmental teams of partners and associates who make themselves
generally available to handle whatever matter the client may bring
to the firm; in the case of these clients, the particular lawyers assigned
to any given matter are drawn from the client team based on the needs
of the matter and the expertise and experience of the team members.
The lawyers on our client teams are able to develop particularly close
working relationships both with the client and with one another, which
in our view greatly enhances the quality of our service to these clients. |
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Our cross-departmental approach frequently
leads to associates from different practice areas collaborating
on a particular matter. Tax associate Marnie
Metsch (Benjamin
N. Cardozo School of Law '00) and corporate associate
Carl Marcellino (New
York University School of Law '99) teamed up to represent our
client Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe in its $2 billion
buyout of Select Medical Corporation. |
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We further reinforce our commitment to
collaborative client service by treating all clients as clients of
the firm, as opposed to clients of a particular lawyer. Thus, unlike
other firms, lawyers are not compensated based upon the revenue streams
from the particular clients they serve. Rather, all revenues are shared
by the firm as a whole, and compensation is determined based on a variety
of factors that include seniority and non-billable contributions to
the firm, as well as revenue generation. This feature of our firm encourages
every lawyer to approach every matter by involving other lawyers in
the matter where doing so will serve the client, and it enables us
to avoid the problems of hoarding clients that plague so many other
firms.
We also create teams to focus on particular practice areas. The firm
has grouped six of the practice areas shared by our lawyers into formal
Departments. Several of the departments
have crafted informal practice sub-groups of partners and associates
whose client responsibilities
center on a particular practice area; these sub-groups meet regularly
to address issues or developments that are common to their particular
practice specialty. The Corporate Department,
for example, has more than a dozen practice groups, and the tax group
within the Tax & Benefits
Department has informal sub-groups concentrating on mergers
and acquisitions, private equity fund formation, investment management,
international, exempt organizations and executive compensation.
In addition to intra-departmental practice groups like these, the firm
has organized several cross-departmental practice groups that include
lawyers from multiple departments as members. One notable example is
the Corporate Department's Life
Sciences Group, which focuses on practice
issues common to the firm's e-health and proprietary life sciences
clients (such as biotech, pharmaceutical, and medical device companies)
and draws its membership not only from the Corporate
Department, but also from the Litigation
Department,
the Tax & Benefits Department,
and the FDA practice based in Washington, D.C. Similarly, the Corporate
Department's Sports Law Group draws
its membership not only from the Corporate Department, but also from
the Litigation
Department, Labor
& Employment Department, and Private
Client Group, as well as both
the tax group and the employee benefits group within the Tax
& Benefits Department. The objective of each Ropes & Gray
practice group — whether the group is intra- or inter-departmental
in form — is always to enable our lawyers to learn from one another
and to build on one another's strengths, so that the members of the
group can better serve our clients. |
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From left to right, corporate
partner Dennis
Coleman, associate
Dan
Adams (University of North Carolina School of Law '04),
and associate Ryan
Schaffer (University of Virginia School of Law '06) regularly
work together on sports-related matters, such as negotiating
contracts for Division 1 basketball coaches. |
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