Lewis Brisbois recovered from tumultuous year, leader says

After a mass exodus of attorneys from its employment group rocked Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith LLP in 2023, the law firm entered the new year with a “positive and promising” outlook.

“Like any large firm, we have had lawyers come and go over the years. This was our first experience with a group of this size leaving the firm,” Managing Partner Gregory S. Katz said in a rare interview about the situation. “But while their unexpected departure was significant, we still retained 150 employment lawyers across the country, and our focus then, as it is now, was to ensure the stability of our practice, continue to provide the quality services our clients expect from us, and work toward the future growth of our team.”

The turmoil began for the firm in April when John L. Barber, who was national chair of the labor and employment practice, and Jeffrey S. Ranen, who was vice chair, resigned to start their own firm, Barber Ranen LLP and said as many as 140 other attorneys agreed to follow them. They said they were going to establish a presence in 12 major metropolises across the nation.

It was then that the founder of the firm, Robert F. Lewis, agreed to step down as chairman and Katz was elected managing partner.

Then, in what appeared to be a rare act of revenge being served piping hot, a few weeks later emails were released to the media showing Barber and Ranen using antisemitic, racist, misogynistic, and other derogatory language to describe attorneys, clients, a judge, and others.

The Barber Ranen law firm collapsed days later. The two founders were pushed out and several of the lawyers left for other firms. The breakaway firm was reconstituted as Daugherty Lordan, and then collapsed entirely five months after it opened its doors.

Lewis Brisbois did not escape scrutiny over Barber and Ranen’s emails. Clients wondered how the firm’s management could not have known that the two men were engaging in such banter over the firm’s email system. A number of government contracts were jeopardized and, for a short period of time, the County of Los Angeles stopped sending new work to the firm, but has since resumed the relationship.

“The truth is, we did not know. By outside objective measures, they were both proponents of diversity and the advancement of women within the firm. As employment lawyers, they knew what proper communication in the workplace should have been,” Katz said in the interview. “Their interactions with firm management and the wider members of our practice groups and staff gave no indication of the behavior that was happening behind the scenes in their emails.”

Since then, the firm has increased its Diversity, Equity & Inclusion training and mentoring programs.

“We hired a DEI consultant who spent a lot of time with our team, from senior leadership to rank and file members of our team, learning more about the organization, training us, and teaching us,” Katz said. “We all had to take mandatory training and, as a firm, continue our long-standing commitment to the importance of DEI, as noted in our recent success by achieving Mansfield 6.0 certification. We audited emails across the firm and were both relieved and gratified that no evidence of a wider issue was found.”

A software program has been implemented to monitor internal communication at the firm.

“We did everything I think an organization should do after an experience like this,” Katz said. “Our aim now is to move forward with these new measures in place and continue working to ensure that our firm is a place where everyone is safe and valued.”

Katz said 2024 looks like it will be a great year for the law firm.

“I have been working closely with our finance team on forecasting and budgeting, as well as analyzing our pipeline for 2024, and the outlook is positive and promising,” he said. “We had our best recruiting quarter last quarter. It’s a competitive work environment to begin with. The legal industry today is nothing like I’ve ever seen, and regardless of what happened, there is stiff competition among firms for the best talent out there. Yet, we are consistently bringing in strong talent in markets across the country and will continue to focus on growth throughout 2024.”