At the end of 2023, Minden Gross LLP—a 73-year-old law firm with 35 partners, 20 associates and a coveted client roster—caught the legal community by surprise when it published a terse notice on its website. Citing the “challenges facing mid-size law firms in Canada” and an “unsuccessful” attempt to strengthen the firm through a merger, Minden Gross declared that it had no choice but to “implement a wind-down plan over the next few months.” The collapse cut sharply against Bay Street’s public image. By prizing tradition and projecting confidence, the most well-established law firms take on an aura of invincibility.
Yet when Michael Slan, the managing partner at Fogler, Rubinoff LLP, heard about the Minden Gross implosion, he didn’t find the news all that shocking. In his 46-year legal career, Slan has come to realize that law firms enjoy no special immunity from failure. Over the past two decades, he’s witnessed the high-profile dissolutions of Goodman and Carr LLP and Heenan Blaikie LLP. He’s also lived through a law-firm breakup himself: in 1990, when Lyons Goodman fell apart, he was a partner at the 40-lawyer Toronto firm. In other words, Slan has been around long enough to appreciate a simple fact: “Law firms can be fragile,” he says.
In the days after the Minden Gross announcement, the firm’s 55 lawyers promptly hit the job market. By February, the vast majority had found a new professional home. This development, too, struck Slan as unremarkable: when a prominent firm implodes, the competition will naturally scoop up the suddenly available talent. “There is always a demand for excellent lawyers,” he says. “It’s always competitive.” The aftermath of the collapse, in his view, was largely predictable.
Still, the reshuffling of so much talent has had a concrete impact on the Toronto legal market. Two law firms, in particular, took on a significant number of the Minden Gross castaways. At Foglers, whose lawyer headcount hovers around 120, Slan negotiated the acquisition of three partners and three associates. The Toronto office of Dickinson Wright LLP, meanwhile, welcomed six partners and four associates, raising the size of its legal team to about 70. Broadly speaking, both firms seized on the opportunity to land top talent. Now that we’re well past the half-year mark of the collapse, it’s an ideal moment to ask: how has the effort to absorb those lawyers gone so far?
In 2010, Mark Shapiro became the fifth lawyer to join Dickinson Wright’s satellite office in Toronto. After his arrival, the American legal giant continued to increase its footprint in the city, albeit gradually. As the office’s managing partner since 2015, Shapiro has presided over much of that expansion. The first plank of the firm’s growth strategy has been steadfast student recruitment. The second has been to seek out, in the lateral market, hardworking lawyers with valuable skills and/or a portable client base. “We don’t try to grow for the sake of growth,” says Shapiro. “There’s always got to be a purpose for the hire.” By December 2023, he’d strategically built up an office of nearly 60 lawyers.
That’s when Minden Gross dissolved. Amid the fallout, Shapiro embarked on a negotiation to bring on a group of lawyers who’d practised commercial real estate, leasing or corporate law at the now-defunct firm. Though Dickinson Wright had expertise in those areas, Shapiro saw a chance to “expand our capability, our offerings and our client base.” Over roughly three weeks, he often spoke on the phone from the moment he woke up to midnight, helping to hammer out the details of a deal. “It was pretty intense,” he recalls. “I have no memories of anything but dealing with this in December.” Near the end of the month, he finalized a 10-lawyer talent grab. (Because the Minden Gross real-estate team operates a high-volume practice in an area of law that tends to involve an immense amount of paperwork, it has long relied on a large outfit of support staff. To make the transition to a new workplace as seamless as possible, Dickinson Wright also welcomed close to 20 legal assistants, law clerks and other support professionals who’d worked at the fallen firm.)
Throughout the winter, Shapiro encouraged the Minden Gross newcomers and Dickinson Wright veterans to share expertise and collaborate on casework. This was a canny decision. According to one study, laterally hired partners need to be “integrated with incumbent partners and clients within the first 18 months, if not sooner.” The study, which analyzed financial and personnel records at multiple law firms in the United States, paints a bleak picture of what can happen when lateral hires fail to team up with their new colleagues:
“[I]f a [lateral] partner reaches the year-plus stage and hasn’t convinced at least a couple of the incumbent partners to work on clients he or she brought with him or her, and if the partner hasn’t also been invited to join the account team for a couple of the firm’s existing clients, there’s a very, very high chance that he or she will leave within the next year or so. Collaborating brings lateral hires up to speed with firm practices, allows them to get to know their colleagues and, most importantly, builds trust between the lateral hires, their colleagues and their new clients.”
Almost immediately, Shapiro observed that sort of teamwork in action. And not merely at his insistence. Shortly after the Minden Gross lawyers arrived, he passed by a boardroom inside Dickinson Wright’s office at Commerce Court West. “The whole Minden group and a bunch of our real-estate lawyers were having a social meeting,” he says. “That would have been one of those feel-good moments.”
In the months ahead, such encounters became increasingly routine. Both legal teams also began to join forces on specific files. At a certain point, Shapiro stopped noticing. “It’s now commonplace,” he says. “It doesn’t stand out anymore.”
Within a month of the Minden Gross dissolution, six of the firm’s lawyers—alongside a three-person team of support staff—moved to Foglers. That cohort then split up among a trio of practice groups: commercial litigation, bankruptcy and corporate law. As the managing partner at Foglers, Slan had a number of reasons to pursue the acquisition. First, he knows that when skilled lawyers become available on the open market, it’s foolish to let them pass you by. Lateral recruitment is also a vital way to offset a problem that all law firms, including Foglers, have to confront: the inevitable loss of top partners to retirement. Nearly every year, some number of senior lawyers will decide to end their careers or scale back their practices. New blood allows firms to fortify their ranks before those departures.
When meeting with incoming talent, particularly at the partner level, Slan tends to deliver the same message: “I tell them, ‘Our goal is to ensure that you provide quality services, that you provide value to clients, that you have a firm-minded attitude, that you earn a good deal of money and that you leave some money on the table for the firm.’ That’s our process.” But he’s also patient. Slan doesn’t expect lateral hires to show up and instantly rake in revenue. “It takes a little while to readjust,” he says. “Whenever we take a lateral in, we try to accommodate them and assist with the transition the best that we can.”
His approach with the Minden Gross lawyers was no different. Slan also understood that the new recruits had to recover from the shock of a law-firm failure. “Some of the people from Minden Gross were a little shaken,” he recalls. In time, though, he saw—much like Shapiro has at Dickinson Wright—robust collaboration between the Minden Gross team and the seasoned hands at Foglers. Revenue, too, has started to arrive. Considering the circumstances, Slan is delighted. “Based on what I’m seeing in this case, it’s going well,” he says. “Things are working.”
Daniel Fish is the editor of Precedent. Since joining the magazine more than a decade ago, he’s reported on dozens of topics, including the legal economy, mental health and partner compensation. In that time, he’s received several leading journalism awards for his long-form feature writing.
Illustration by Sébastien Thibault.