Mid-market law firm Jones Walker has absorbed the seven lawyers who made up the boutique Washington law firm of Spidi & Fisch. The lawyers moving to the larger firm include John Spidi, Richard Fisch, James Stewart, and Daniel Burd, who come aboard as partners; Joan Guilfoyle, who will serve as special counsel; and two associates, James Marky and Carolyn Rhodes. The boutique’s lawyers are not moving to a different office, but they are now officially part of Jones Walker, whose banking and financial services practice now stands at more than 50 lawyers, with ten of them based in the capital.
Spidi told IFLR1000, “We didn’t have a litigation practice, we didn’t have an affordable housing practice, and we didn’t have environmental expertise. What was happening was that we had to refer these matters out to other firms. Now we have that expertise in-house, we can keep all the business together. The folks at Jones Walker are people we’ve worked across the aisle from on transactions. We wanted access to that skill set, and we also got to add a couple of very good banking lawyers we’ve known for a long time.”
In an environment where M&A so often gives rise to litigation, Spidi and his colleagues saw the larger firm’s capabilities in the disputes arena as an indispensable complement to much of the transactional work they were doing.
“We do many M&A deals in the banking space, and whenever a merger is announced now, the announcement is usually followed immediately by a law firm saying they’re going to investigate the fiduciary duties of the boards in doing the merger, or lawsuits are actually filed claiming that there’s some issue with fiduciary duties,” Spidi commented.
“These things are mostly dealt with by settling with the law firm that brings the case. Sometimes we have to put additional disclosures in proxy materials we send to shareholders voting on the merger. My own opinion is that the lawsuits are not terribly substantive, and they go away with some amount of settlement for the legal fees,” he added.