Talk about having an ace up your sleeve!
Reed Smith’s Oakland office managing partner Sonja Weissman told Cal Law last month that she wouldn’t mind continuing on the management track. (“Because it's so big, there are lots of different management roles at Reed Smith," she said at the time.) It was an unusual statement, since many office managing partners interviewed for the article characterized their role as a tour of duty — necessary, for the good the firm, not that fun — not a career track.
Turns out she knew more than she was letting on.
On Wedensday, the firm announced that Weissman has been appointed to lead the firm’s 65-lawyer Northern California Commercial Litigation practice. She’ll be taking the place of Don Rubenstein, who’ll be going back to full-time practice. Bette Epstein, a trusts and estates litigator, is the new office managing partner in Oakland.
Weissman said she knew about her new position at the time — it was decided toward the beginning of the year — but wasn’t sure when it would go into effect. “It could’ve been as late as Jan. 1, it totally depended on people’s schedules,” she told Legal Pad.
In her new role, she’ll be handling more substantive business decisions, like approving new matters brought in by the group as well as alternative billing rates. She’ll also have a direct hand in recruiting, associate evaluation and promotion. “It’s much more down to the details of the firms business,” she said.
Like office managing partners told us: practice group leaders have a lot more say-so in the destiny of the firm. Which got us to thinking…how far does Weissman want to go in management at Reed Smith? “I seem to have a bottomless appetite for management, so I don’t know when that moment [of having had enough] will hit me,” she said.
Legal pad has two words of advice for Greg Jordan, chairman of the 1,500-lawyer firm: Watch out!
— Zusha Elinson
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