If you have a few minutes to invest (OK, maybe 20 minutes), I’d suggest reading Philadelphia magazine’s story about the fall of one of that city’s major firms, Wolf Block, earlier this year. It’s a fascinating, well-reported read, particularly for its description of “a 10-year period from 1985 to 1995 when a ‘Troika’ of three arrogant men took [the firm] over and then ran it into the ground, sparking a mass defection of the firm’s best partners.” The author doesn’t lay all of the blame for Wolf Block’s demise at the Troika’s feet, but he does argue that they badly damaged the firm.

And the story provides a detail which I guess is well-known in the Philadelphia legal community but was news to me. The piece mentions briefly that former Wolf Block partner Arthur Makadon, who leads Ballard Spahr, was so angry at the way the Troika had treated another former Wolf Block lawyer, Alan Davis, that, during his eulogy at Davis’s funeral, he made a couple of nasty comments about two of the Troika. A Philly mag story from that time says that Makadon didn’t name them, but did later confirm about whom he was speaking. According to the story, “When the rant was over, he looked skyward and said, ‘That’s one mission accomplished, Alan.’”

To what extent have tyrannical law firm leaders in Baltimore been responsible for the decline or fall of their firms?

HT: WSJ Law Blog.