When Winston Met Taylor: US-UK Firm's Chief Looks to Bridge Gaps

Find all the case information you need, faster. Smart litigators rely on Bloomberg Law's broad litigation news coverage and our market leading dockets. Now with AI-driven search and analytics, customized alerts, and expansive state court coverage. Visit pro.bloomberglaw.com for everything you need to win. [MUSIC PLAYING] Hello, you're listening to On the Marits, the Legal News Podcast from Bloomberg Law. I'm your host, Matthew Schwartz. Culture is a popular buzzword for law firm leaders, describing in vague terms what sets them apart from their rivals. For Winston Taylor's Steve DeMore, it's a key part of melding the two firms that combined in June in Big Law's latest transatlantic merger. Bloomberg Law's Roy Strom sat down with Steve DeMore, chairman of Winston Taylor, to discuss how Winston and Strong and Taylor Weissing analyzed cultural compatibility before their merger was announced. They also talked about how Winston Taylor's leaders are trying to bridge gaps on layer pay, client conflicts, practice group structures, and AI tools. I know people and I know us, this conversations, we're going to want to hear you talk about the big news at Winston Taylor, which is, of course, the merger. But I really wanted to start with you because you've been a litigator at Winston and Strong in Chicago for more than 30 years. You've been a leader in the firm's litigation department more than a decade. So you've lived through a period of pretty big changes in the legal market. And I'm based in Chicago, so I know Winston, first and foremost, is through the practice group you've been in and that you've been helping to lead is a really strong litigation firm, sort of a Chicago institution. So I would really kind of love to hear you tell the story of how your career at Winston developed and how you saw the firm and the market evolve over those years to the place where we are today. Well, Winston's been my only professional home. I started at Winston as a summer associate many years ago, in 1993, and at the time, Governor Thompson and Dan Webb and others were leading litigation. And I started as a lawyer in 1994 in the litigation department. And for many years, I tried cases in state court and federal court, various other places. And we were primarily a litigation firm and primarily rooted in Chicago. And then during a period that I think many of us referred to as Winston 2.0, we expanded our operations outside of Chicago and grew the corporate business, the transactions business, to where it became extremely strong, especially in mid-market PE. At the end of that period, I led the litigation practice with George Lombardi for approximately 10 years. And then in 2024, I became chairman. That's what started the period that we call Winston 3.0, which was a continued emphasis on growth and especially on international growth. And that led us strategically to our combination with the UK operations of what had been the Taylor Western firm. Yeah, I love the 1, 2, 3.0 model. I knew your predecessor, Tom Gerald. He once told me that he sort of viewed the top 50 law firms by revenue as being part of maybe three groups. It was sort of your traditional Wall Street firms based in New York. There was this group of huge global firms, with dozens of offices around the tree. And then a group of large national and semi-international firms that may have started in specific cities and were branching out. And that was the group Winston was part of. And then his prescription for firms in Winston's group was that they needed to get much bigger to compete effectively in the new market. I'm just curious if you signed up to that view or if it motivated you at all to pursue this merger. I think what became obvious to me is that the prescription for the modern law firm wanted to operate in the top 50 was the need for scale and market leadership. And that meant, I think, smart scale being in the right places. And so for us and for Winston 3.0 and my team, that meant that we should be at scale in the connected commercial centers of the world. And that includes obviously Chicago, our home, New York, and London as three very important parts of a connected commercial puzzle. We needed to have strength in London. So that was in part what motivated 3.0 to expand as we did outside of the United States. And the second piece of that is market leadership. And that means really trying to pick your targets in a smart way and trying to be great in a number of important areas. So for us, that means critical transactions. It means major litigation, which has always been our strength. And then strategic IP, which is so important to modern businesses that are built around innovation. And then something new for us, which is private wealth, which we have now gained by our combination. So we're trying to focus on those four practice areas as part of an emphasis on scale and market leadership. - So the idea is to pick your spots and be the best or among the best in those groups. - Yeah, that's exactly right. It also meant for us that there were choices that we made where it was not critical for us to be. And so you probably saw, we withdrew from China. That was an area that was not really tied to our strategic objectives. And so we emphasized and defocused our resources in the areas that were important to us. - You know, it's interesting because law firms for a long time, I think have struggled with a real definitive strategy from a cultural perspective. For two reasons, I think they don't want to emphasize practices at risk of minimizing the importance of the partners who are not in those practices. And then in other times, they don't want to necessarily take the steps you're talking about, which is to remove yourself from practices that you're not emphasizing going forward. What type of leadership does that take to actually say, hey, this is what we're doing. And we have to manage the business and the people towards our goals. - It's such a great question. And some often when I stand up in front of the partnership and I talk about the areas where we want to emphasize, I do feel in my heart that there are some people that are listening to that and thinking, well, that doesn't include me. So what does that mean for me? The way I try to lead our law firm is that I think about what's best for the institution overall. The answer to what's best for the institution overall is the answer to what's best for every individual partner. And so that's the way I try to look at it. I don't think that you can be everything to everyone in every place. That's not a recipe that, well, it's certainly not one that I believe in. And so for me and for our leadership team, it's been, pick your targets, be the best among the best in those areas and do it at scale. - I've been hiding the ball here. We haven't really dove into the merger quite yet. Winston Taylor's now live. It's a firm with I think 1400 lawyers and revenue of about one and three quarters billion, is that right? Tell me how did you find Taylor Westing and what avenues did they provide something meaningful and important to your future? - We were looking for a partner that had strong operations in London. And that was part of our strategic mission. As it turned out, I'd know this when I started this chairman, Taylor's UK entity was looking for a strong US partner. Okay, as you know, they broke out of a varine to combine with us. And so we fit each other's strategic needs in a way that was very, very complimentary. We had a lot, and now we have a lot of mutual clients. And so it was very client focused as well as being focused on the areas where we had shared strengths. So that ultimately is what led us together. And then approximately 10 months before we announced our transaction, I started meeting with the leader of Taylor Westing, and then we kept expanding the group of people that met together. And we found that in addition to all those strategic things that I've talked about, we had a very strong cultural alignment. And we put culture at the top of the list of things that were important to make sure we had right. I had never heard of this before, but we hired an outside expert to do a cultural analysis of both firms to do cultural diligence to give us confidence in an empirical way that what we were feeling in at Hock interactions was validated by a deep study of each firm's culture. And so we did that, and that was a very important evidence to us, to our leaders. leadership team and ultimately to our partners to know that we were going to have cultural alignment. That's from how we got together. What sort of things does a cultural consultant find out? How do you turn that into empirics? Because I've candidly as a reporter, we have such a hard time reporting about cultures. Lawyers want to talk about cultures. We can't make it empiric, you know. I'd love to hear who and how they do that. Well, I'm sure that they won't mind me saying that it was BDO. BDO did the analysis, so they do this for corporations that emerge. And it involved a study of what they defined as cultural documents. And so our policies with respect to so many different areas. Our policies with respect to pro bono. Our policies with respect to responsible business operations. Our policies with respect to sustainability, to training, to opportunity, to inclusion. All the things to our investment in our communities. All of the things that I think are embodied in policies that are maintained by major organizations. And then they did a deep interviews of increasing circle of partners and personnel had both firms, including extensive deep interviews of me and my counterparts in England to get a sense of what have been our cultural, our civic, our personnel priorities. And then they have a scoring methodology and they gave us scores. I also did something else that some folks thought might have been a little bit unusual is after we completed our combination and we were in the early days of integrating, I asked BDO to go back and look for what were the potential cracks, slight differences in culture and to really drill down into those so that we could put them on the table. We could talk about them as a leadership team and we could think about how to address them or at least to know them so that we were not just giving ourselves high fives that we did this great transaction. And we have a cultural alignment but we actually asked BDO to go back and look for what, if anything, were potential cracks in the way that we approached similar issues so we could focus on those. What's an example of a place then that you look to bridge the gap? So, for example, I think there are some differences in the way European-based firms and US firms approach consensus building and urgency. And so sometimes we use the phrase at Winston, "urgent collaboration." And I love that phrase. I thought it was a perfect phrase and what I didn't really appreciate until I had helped from BDO is that what you really want is a balance so that urgency doesn't overwhelm collaboration and collaboration doesn't overwhelm urgency. And so one of the things that we found was that there were some cultural variances in the way that the firms approached the creation of consensus. And I think that stems from sort of a European background versus a US background. And so we talked about those things quite openly to recognize that we approach problems slightly differently. That's an example. What are the biggest sort of gaps that you might have to plug between a UK law firm model and the US? I mean, I know there's differences, for example, in how people are paid for example, even like associates. Are those types of things that you have to work through? Yeah, all of those kinds of things are compensation harmonization. I happen to have a very similar compensation philosophies, various systems integrations. For example, I know a topic that you're interested in is the way each firm had gone about the creation of AI programs. So there's work to do in harmonizing the way both firms went about AI. So all of the other technical systems, integrations, accounting, integration, all of that conflict systems, the UK operates under a different conflict system than the United States does. And so all of those things were also going through a process of really defining how we're going to organize our practice departments internally. And have historically had two departments, a transactions department and a litigation department. And Taylor did it somewhat differently. And so we're now going through a process of figuring out what's the best of both and redefining the way we define ourselves internally. In terms of looking market side, where are you wanting to grow the most, either from a practice perspective or a geography perspective or what is just number one in top of mind for you bringing this bringing Winston Taylor to the market. I guess whether the market being clients or potential partners. Yeah, that's a great question. I'm glad you asked it. And so it'll be continued investment in the in those four practice areas that are important to us, major litigation, critical transactions, IP and private wealth. And so I think you'll see that we'll be making major major strides and growing in those areas. I'm excited about antitrust litigation in the United States. I'm excited about IP litigation both in the United States and in Europe and on the transaction side. We're going to continue to double down in private equity in private capital and M&A and in private wealth. So we're going to keep focusing on those things. But the private wealth business, because it seems to me I could be wrong about this, but seems like a lot of big law firms maybe left that space like a decade ago or felt like it was not necessarily a big law practice. But I have to imagine it's an important driver of the economy. There's so much wealth in the hands of fewer people and the wealth transfer intergenerational is supposed to be huge going forward. So I wanted to distinguish between traditional trust in the state's work. That is that's one kind of work. And I think you're correct to observe that many law firms have moved from that. We did at Winston private wealth is really it's almost more of an industry sector. It's representing a certain group of clients, family offices primarily that have full service needs. And so it's really an opportunity to deliver the law firm as a whole to a client sector that operate in many ways like private equity funds that are able to and have needs for legal services across the spectrum. And a investment funds litigation sometimes employment basically it's an opportunity to deliver the full services of the law firm to a unique group of clients. It's more like a market sector than a practice area. That's interesting. I have to ask about AI you alluded to it seems like it's starting to really change the way law firms think about or plan for the future. We're sharing people with technology skills seems like they want AI proliferated throughout their firm. How is Winston Taylor going to approach AI or what is front of mind for you about this technological change that you feel like you really have to get right. Thanks. The first is that we have to stop thinking about it as a technology it's it's something that has to be embedded in every one of our business systems and both on the client service side and on our operations. And so our thinking about it is what are the business workflows that can be made better with the electrification of it by AI it's really a business first issue. That's that's part of it and and that's I think what most people are talking about is really how to make our businesses more efficient and qualitatively better through the use of generative AI tools. We're doing all of that and and we've got great utilization of AI workflows and tools and skills and that's great. The second part which is equally important and it's something that has been very personally important to me I've written about it in Bloomberg actually and that is the importance of human skills in this generation of rising use of AI. And I think that is so increasingly important that we are making a very concerted effort to teach and instruct our lawyers and even pipeline of law students to focus on durable human skills, the judgment, the empathy, the communication skills, the skills that it takes to do what you do. Roy, for example, to empathize and to talk to someone to bring out the best in the content. So we're focusing very much. on what people use to call soft skills. We're not soft at all, they're super hard to do, and it is what I think our clients and our colleagues really value the most. AI is the great equalizer competency. You'll get great work product from many sources empowered by AI, but I think what really makes the difference in lawyers from the perspective of clients and our colleagues are the lawyers who can take that and really apply experience in wisdom and empathy and judgment and articulation of complex matters into simple concepts. Those are human skills that are going to be and are increasingly important in this world. So we're doing both. People now are going to start having a full law career with AI the entire way through. How do you get them to be in the world? How do you get them to focus on the people? I love that question. So we started a program called a practice-ready program that we're going to roll out in August with incoming first-year law students at six of the major law schools starting in the Midwest, where it is essentially a boot camp to teach the importance of communication, of collaboration, of how to seek and give feedback, building trust, how to serve clients, how to solve problems together, and really force teach the things that probably you and I grew up observing by being in rooms with people for years and years and years. And putting that on the front of people's minds is things that we have to teach and learn. I'm going to make a pitch here about the importance of also being present in our offices and in our cities. It's been very important to me and I think is increasingly important as it becomes easier and easier to work remotely and with AI tools. I think we as major employers in our cities have an obligation not only to our people but to our communities to be present together so that we can learn those human skills. Will Steve, I appreciate it. I very much enjoyed the conversation and thank you for doing this. Thank you for spending time with us. Thank you, Roy, to real pleasure. Thanks for all you're doing. That'll do it for today's episode of On the Marits. It was produced by myself, Matthew Schwartz. Our editor is Chris Opfer and our executive producer is Josh Block. You can reach out to us on X if you have anything on your mind. We use the handle B-Log. Thanks for listening. Attention, smart litigators. When it comes to executing your case strategy, Bloomberg Law's continuous innovation is your secret weapon. And now we're taking it up a notch. Introducing enhanced docket features with AI-driven search and analytics, lightning fast customized alerts, and expanded state court docket coverage. 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