Last updated September 25, 2008 8:59 p.m. PT

"Heller Ehrman law firm to dissolve Friday

'Legend' survived 1906 earthquake, Great Depression

The San Francisco law firm Heller Ehrman will formally vote Friday to dissolve, ending a legal partnership that survived earthquakes, a depression, wars and social upheavals but was, in the final analysis, unable to preserve its culture of community service amid an increasingly competitive and global legal industry.

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As recently as 2004, Heller ranked second on The American Lawyer's A-list, a measure based on a variety of factors such as profitability, pro bono representation, associate satisfaction and diversity ratings.

But in recent years the firm had grappled with a variety of challenges, including the financial strains of trying to compete in an increasingly globalized legal industry.

The legal press had followed the firm's recent troubles: It was a company that specialized in big litigation cases, and some of these either settled or were scooped up by competing firms, leading to a very bad year in 2007, which led to the departures of key partners whose absence began to weaken the firm."

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/380691_heller26.html

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If interested, use Google News to observe the feeding frenzy of how other law firms are grabbing either lawyers and/or whole offices.

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This is on my mind, because this afternoon, on short notice, I spent three hours adding just such a piece of acquired chum to our seven servers, in both Office 2003 and 2007 format. Burp.

Don't forget Finley, Kumble, Wagner, Underberg, Manley, Myerson & Casey and Myerson & Kuhn (yep, same Myerson, who later did six years in federal prison).

Here's a fun web page Defunct law firms of the United States