Merger of 2 Black-owned firms aims to create lasting institution

Two prominent minority-owned litigation boutiques from northern and southern California will join forces, the firms announced.

Sanders Roberts LLP of Los Angeles and San Diego, with 34 attorneys, will merge with Oakland’s Lafayette & Kumagai LLP, a six-lawyer shop, in a deal to be finalized April 1, lawyers from the firms said this week. The combined firm will retain the Sanders Roberts name.

The move represents the consolidation of two long-established minority-owned firms. Firm leaders said the goal is to establish a legacy as the nation’s first “institutional” firm created by Black partners. The term refers to a plan for designing a combined law firm that lasts well beyond its founders’ generation.

“I’m excited,” said Justin H. Sanders, a Sanders Roberts name partner and the son of founder J. Stanley Sanders, a pioneering Black attorney and Rhodes scholar who made his way from Watts to Oxford University and Yale Law School and became an advisor to Mayor Tom Bradley in the 1980s and ’90s. Referring to merger partner Gary T. Lafayette of Lafayette & Kumagai, Justin Sanders said, “I really respect what Gary’s built and that he’s willing to do this with us.”

Added Sanders, “We expect to achieve a high level of professionalism and cooperation. We know a lot of people are watching us because of who we are, a firm with Black foundations.”

Lafayette, who founded Lafayette & Kumagai in 1994 with Susan T. Kumagai, is a former director of the National Association of Minority and Women Owned Law Firms (NAMWOLF). “Thirty years ago, founding a firm with a Black American man and a Japanese American woman caused a stir,” he said. “But we weren’t focused on race. We just wanted the best lawyers possible and Susan is a spectacular lawyer.” She has now retired, he said.

Early in his career Lafayette clerked for Justice Frank C. Newman of the state Supreme Court. He has represented clients including Comcast Inc., Shell USA Inc., The Coca-Cola Co., Gov. Jerry Brown and the San Francisco Housing Authority.

“This is an opportunity to expand our reach to Los Angeles and San Diego and to show that people who look like us can produce quality work on our own platform with additional practice areas. Our small footprint gets a bigger bench,” Lafayette said.

Adding to Lafayette & Kumagai’s current specialties of class action defense and employment litigation, Sanders Roberts will bring to the merged firm a transactions practice group plus the entertainment law practice of Los Angeles managing partner Lawrence C. Hinkle II, a former chairman, president and general counsel of the Black Entertainment and Sports Lawyers Association. He arrived at Sanders Roberts in January 2023 after practicing at Fox Rothschild LLP and Blank Rome LLP and operating his own consulting group.

“Joining this firm is in essence the first time in my career that I have felt a true passion to make a major difference in the community at large,” Hinkle said, “by growing an established institution that started as a Black-owned firm. My hope is that in 100 years from now the Sanders Roberts legacy endures through strategic, organic growth.”

Law firm consultant Kent M. Zimmermann of Zeughauser Group in Newport Beach gave the project a thumbs up. “Combinations between firms can be transformative and create a stronger, more defensible position of market leadership in shared areas of focus,” he emailed.

“There’s an old saying among management consultants that ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast.’ We find that is particularly true in law firm combinations, given that the principals don’t walk away after the deal is signed, but instead need to practice law together with a foundation built on trust, respect and mutual interests. Those observations bode well for this combination based on what I know about it.”

Lafayette said that he and Sanders and Sanders Roberts name partner Reginald Roberts Jr. announced the merger earlier this month at a NAMWOLF diversity and leadership conference in New Orleans.

“The announcement was very well received,” Lafayette said. “I saw a lot of hope and aspiration in people’s eyes. Some even shed a few tears.”

Sanders and Roberts met as freshmen at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Ga., and bonded when they realized both were headed to USC Gould School of Law. It seemed natural that they would eventually work together.

“Now, because of the quality of the work we have produced, major corporations are seeking our services,” Roberts said. “In a global economic environment, corporations need a diversity of perspectives.” To further that goal, the firm has purposely recruited attorneys who among them speak eight languages.

Sanders Roberts has been busy with high-profile cases. On the defense for the State Bar in a proposed class action over the bar’s alleged role in the Tom Girardi misconduct scandal, the firm represents individual defendants who are former State Bar leaders and counsel. Tom Layton, Joe Dunn, Howard B. Miller, John W. Noonan, Murray B. Greenberg, Mike A. Nisperos Jr. and Richard A. Platel, Agaton et al. v. The State Bar of California et al., 23STCV21606 (L.A. Super. Ct., filed Sept. 7, 2023).

The firm recently settled a landlord-tenant and personal injury dispute filed by former residents of an apartment they rented from its client, Southwestern Law School. Castaneda et al. v. Southwestern Law School et al., 23STCV23325 (L.A. Super. Ct., filed Sept. 26, 2023).

And Sanders Roberts successfully defended a major utility in a federal whistleblower and Sarbanes-Oxley employment case. Wagner v. Southern California Edison Co., 2:16-cv-06259 (C.D. Cal., filed Aug. 19, 2016).

The Sanders Roberts deal comes at a time when law firm mergers are on the rise, according to industry analyst Kristin Stark, a principal at Fairfax Associates of Irvine. “Interest in growth via merger remains very high, and overall activity level is increasing,” she emailed. “We saw a greater number of completed mergers in 2023 as compared with 2022. And the first quarter of 2024 is seeing an increased number of completed murders relative to the first quarter of 2023.”

On its website, Sanders Roberts displays its credo: “What drives us is not the glory of the win, the high-profile cases, or the accolades and renown. It’s bigger than that. What really stokes this fire is the difference we can make.”