On Cal Law today, we feature some of the spinoff firms making waves in L.A. recruiting. Legal Pad checked in with a partner at of one of these smaller firms in Orange County, who said there’s been a proliferation of O’Melveny spin-offs like his in the O.C. in recent years.
“It has been relatively common in Orange County over last five years,” said Chris Arledge of Turner Green Afrasiabi & Arledge, a five-lawyer litigation boutique that started five years ago in Costa Mesa. “A large number of people are doing what we’ve done — a fair number knew us and we seemed to be happy, so others were excited to do it.”
He pointed to firms such as two-lawyer North & Nash in Irvine; three-lawyer Teuton, Loewy & Parker in Irvine and three-lawyer Walraven & Lehman in Aliso Viejo— all started by former O’Melveny attorneys in the past several years.
Arledge said he left O’Melveny at a time when they were making a push to increase profits per partner: “It became clear to me that we were going to have to work harder and it was less likely we’d be partner.”
That was something that was unattractive already since he had a young daughter he rarely saw. He'd seen the long hours partners worked and he wasn’t interested. But Arledge was interested in getting hands-on legal experience such as chairing a jury trial, a rarity for an associate at a big firm, he said.
“It appeared to me that I was bumping up a ceiling in terms of professional development,” he said. “The only way to become a successful litigator was to go out and do it.”
So he and several other O’Melveny attorneys struck out on their own.
They worked their network to develop a client base that includes Corinthian Colleges and Meade Instruments — and are actively seeking more entrepreneurial mid-market tech companies that call the O.C. home. They’re also marketing flat fees, contingencies — arrangements that would be a lot harder sell at a big firm.
They’re currently representing a L.A. hip hop performer who is suing reggaeton artist Daddy Yankee for copyright and a celebrity photography company that is suing Perez Hilton for copyright.
“Here, we can take cases like that,” he said.
Arledge expects his small boutique will grow but predicts it will come slowly. It’s hard to compete for associates from big firms since they can’t pay the same kind of money or offer the same level of prestige — but those are exactly the associates they want to preserve their reputation as an elite litigation boutique.
But, for the same reasons that motivated him, there is still interest form some of those big firm associates — and even a few of the partners.
“That doesn’t surprise me because I have seen what kind of lives they live,” he said. “That lifestyle issue is one of the big reasons we wanted to start the firm and it’s paid off.”
— Kellie Schmitt
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