Reading the news this week that Weil Gotshal is winding down brought it all back.
For seven years, I was the Chief Marketing and Business Development Officer at McGlinchey Stafford, which voted to “wind down operations” in early January of this year. The circumstances that led the members of our firm to vote to wind down echo what I am reading about Weil: a hoped-for merger that did not materialize, a practice group choosing to move, and other attorneys making plans to leave.
In the midst of this, I was grieving for my father, who had passed away unexpectedly. On top of that, my husband was in the process of being diagnosed with cancer. (He is fine now.)
In the days between Christmas and New Year’s 2025, I was working with a small team to write internal and external communications and prepare for the media onslaught should the members vote to dissolve the firm when we returned to office after the New Year’s holiday. In those early weeks of 2026, I was living a day at a time as the “what next” changed by the moment. In January and February, as my team was helping staff, some of whom had worked for the firm for more than four decades, create LinkedIn profiles and draft resumes, I was trying to figure out our health insurance, because there would be no COBRA come March.
I am not telling you this for sympathy. I am telling you because it is what the end of a firm looks like from the inside. It isn’t a headline. It is a thousand decisions made by tired people who are also managing their personal lives.
What is reported about Weil
Weil, founded in 1931, has more than 1,200 lawyers on three continents, according to its website. Last year it had $2.1 billion in revenue and more than $5.6 million in profits per equity partner (PPEP), and it ranked in the AmLaw 50, per American Lawyer data. Those are numbers any firm would be proud of, but these numbers do not provide a full picture of a law firm’s health.
According to Above the Law, the firm had a lease obligation for about 380,000 square feet of office space across the street from Central Park in New York City. While the firm has not confirmed the news, Bloomberg Law, citing a source briefed on the decision, says the firm is winding down. Earlier in the week, Above the Law reported failed merger talks, a September departure of its corporate chair, and an incoming executive partner who decided not to take the job.
I can’t tell you why this happened. Nobody outside the firm can. What I can tell you is that the numbers everyone quotes, revenue and PPEP, tell you very little about what is actually happening inside a firm.
The numbers are not wrong. They are late
Revenue and PPEP report what already happened. They are a very good rearview mirror. Even Kirkland & Ellis, the highest-grossing firm in the world, recently told The American Lawyer it would stop sharing its financials, saying the ranking “could incentivise quantitative metrics over qualitative strengths,” as the Financial Times reported.
Good numbers give a firm a reason to postpone harder conversations. Every uncomfortable question gets the same answer: look at the chart. Nobody is lying. Nobody is ignoring the data. The data just doesn’t ask the questions that matter.
And the conversation is rarely missing. It is happening beside the coffee maker, in the parking lot, and in the text thread during the partners meeting. It just isn’t happening in the room where someone can act on it.
Two questions, scored separately
The questions I wish someone had put in front of us when we had time to act are simple. How exposed is the firm to the forces reshaping legal services? And how ready is it to respond?
Exposure is mostly outside your control: client behavior, pricing pressure, AI absorbing work task by task. Readiness is inside it: leadership, decisions, process, people, the will to act. A firm can be highly exposed and well prepared, or barely exposed and unprepared. The gap between them is where the conversations need to take place.
Here are the ten places I would look. For each, ask the exposure (E) question and the readiness (R) question separately.
1. Leadership
(E) Have competitors recruited any of your partners in the past year?
(R) In the past year, did leadership make a decision that cost a partner money or status and see it through?
2. Client concentration and migration
(E) Does more than 30% of your revenue come from your ten largest clients?
(R) Have you asked each of those clients how they plan to buy legal services in two years?
3. Culture
(E) Has remote or hybrid work changed how often your partners and associates are in the office together?
(R) Do people say in your partners meetings what they say in the hallway afterward?
4. Finance and investment
(E) Is more than half of your revenue still billed by the hour?
(R) Would your partners accept a lower distribution this year to pay for a change?
5. Operations
(E) Could a client, a legal technology company, or a competitor now handle your most common type of matter faster or for less?
(R) Can the person in charge of that matter type describe how it moves from intake to invoice and name who owns each step?
6. Regulatory and reform posture
(E) Could pending changes to the rules on outside ownership, AI use, or unauthorized practice of law affect how you operate in the next two years?
(R) Does someone at your firm track those changes and report them to leadership?
7. Talent pipeline and bench
(E) Does AI now do work that your first- and second-year associates used to do, such as document review, first drafts, or research?
(R) Has your firm replaced that work with other training for those associates?
8. Technology and knowledge assets
(E) Have any of your clients asked how you use AI or protect their data?
(R) Could you tell a client within a day where its documents are stored and who can see them?
9. Pricing and commoditization
(E) Are you still billing by the hour for work that now takes minutes?
(R) Can someone at your firm approve a flat fee without going to a committee?
10. AI displacement exposure
(E) Does AI already handle any of the main tasks in your largest practice group?
(R) Does someone own the plan for that work, with a date to report back?
One more question sits under all ten: who is in the room when you plan? In too many firms, the people who see disruption first, the COO, CFO, CIO, and CMO, are often not.
What I wish someone had said
I wish someone had walked in and asked us these questions. Not to rescue us. Not to tell us we were wrong. Just to ask, and to provide us a secure place to answer honestly. Maybe it would have changed nothing. I would still have liked to have the conversation.
I didn’t have a choice in what happened at McGlinchey. I did get to choose what I did next. That is why I’m doing this work now: to help other firm leaders see what we didn’t see in time, and to facilitate the conversation while they still have options.
If your numbers look good this year, this is the best time to have that honest conversation. Ask early. Ask out loud. Ask while it still matters.
XXX
Originally posted on JD Supra.
Heather Morse is VP, Chief Marketing & Strategy Officer at FIRM Guidance. She was previously Chief Marketing and Business Development Officer at McGlinchey Stafford and has spent nearly 30 years in legal marketing and business development. With Catherine Alman MacDonagh, she built FIRM Signal™, a diagnostic that scores a firm’s exposure and readiness across ten dimensions.
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