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Coach
If you’re a trial attorney, how are you ok with being able to ethically represent this client on the transactional side when that’s not your practice area? As a BigLaw finance attorney myself, I’d be super afraid of not knowing or understanding the nuances of transactional work if I didn’t have that background. I’d never take on a high profile client on the litigation side for that reason - I may get origination credit for bringing it in but I’d hand it off to someone in a different practice group who does litigation. No biglaw firm is going to take you seriously with this. You have no leverage - you have one big client, that has work in a different practice area than yours, and it sounds like this is the sole reason you want to go to BigLaw (without much else to offer a BigLaw firm). Any hiring partner is going to pass because having one client that’s not even “sticky” is not enough to pull someone over. And just because it’s a multimillion dollar company doesn’t mean the work they give you will generate millions of revenue for the firm. I’ve represented multimillion dollar companies on deals that had big write offs to my firm.
Mentor
I think it might just not make sense lol. OP is not in big law and probably doesn’t get how it works
A small PI firm is doing transactional work for a global company?
A3 below is spot on. Trying to parlay this into a big law move likely won’t succeed and could backfire and make it harder to move in the future because the situation you’re describing just doesn’t make any sense practically, ethically, or from a business perspective and it makes you look clueless and/or naive. The skepticism you’re being met with here is the response you’ll likely get from any big firm (or really any remotely sophisticated firm). The absolute best case is you somehow learn enough to successfully represent this client in transactional matters while staying at your current firm and if you build a solid relationship and have demonstrated reps, maybe think about moving in a couple of years. But even then a big firm wouldn’t hire you as a transactional lawyer so best case scenario is they hire you into lit and give your client to an actual transactional lawyer and you negotiate keeping a cut of the fees.
What’s a T5?
I don’t understand why people think this is so weird. Partners bring in new business for other groups at the firm all the time and it’s not expected that they would work on the matter if it’s not their specialty. Whether you can move to big law, I don’t know, but this is not weird at all at my firm. Most rainmakers are trading clients.
Subject Expert
A6: OP is a trial attorney… at a PI firm… It is absolutely weird to bring in a large client for transactional matters in THIS situation.
What you’re describing is typical of biglaw, and is to be expected in a model that supports cross selling across practice areas/groups. That’s obviously not the case here.