Dentons, after rapidly becoming the world’s largest law firm in less than a decade from its founding, now faces a test that can vex a legal operation of any size—a transition from first-generation leadership.
Co-founder Elliott Portnoy, who built the firm while crisscrossing the globe with co-founder Joe Andrew, told partners Wednesday he’ll step down next November as global chief executive, a role he will have held for more than a decade. Andrew stepped away in March from the global chair role, which the firm retired.
Portnoy’s successor will decide the extent to which Dentons keeps pursuing its meteoric growth trajectory or instead shifts more resources to the well-worn path of building a profitable base of lawyers and work in the world’s most lucrative legal market, the US.
Portnoy’s and Andrew’s vision and mission for growth “has driven their efforts to create Dentons over the years,” said Joe Altonji, founding principal of law firm consultancy LawVision, who has worked with the two founders. “It will be the mission of the next generation of leadership, whoever that may be, to carry it forward.”
Dentons plans to retain a search firm to find Portnoy’s replacement, though the firm’s sprawling committee structure could lead to a more diffuse leadership system going forward.
Portnoy, in an interview, said the firm remains committed to its aggressive growth strategy despite the leadership changes. He pointed to an early October meeting in Warsaw, Poland, where the firm’s global board “unanimously reaffirmed our direction: to be the leading global law firm.”
While the co-founders played significant roles closing tie-ups with foreign firms, “these combinations are not about one or two people,” Portnoy said. Rather, they’re about relationships with broad regional and global networks of Dentons lawyers and administrators that have remained steady in most of those countries, he said.
“We are all-in on our strategy,” Portnoy said.
A Growth Story
Whatever leadership structure ultimately takes the co-founders’ place, the stakes couldn’t be higher for a first-generation transition.
The firm will have lost a dynamic leadership duo that had a highly personal touch recruiting and closing many of the law firm “combinations” that made Dentons a global behemoth. And in the US, Portnoy and Andrew rolled out the ambitious growth model dubbed “Project Golden Spike” that sought to bring the Dentons brand to smaller cities Big Law has overlooked.
Portnoy’s climb to lead the largest firm in the world began from a relatively small US firm, Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, where he was elected chairman in 2007 at age 41. Andrew, who’d served as national chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 1999 to 2001, was a partner at the firm, which traced its roots to a founding in Chicago in 1906.
Portnoy and Andrew formed what is now Dentons in 2010 through a combination with UK-based Denton Wilde Sapte, creating a firm with 1,400 people in 18 countries. The firm formalized the Dentons name through a 2013 three-way combination of Canada’s Fraser Milner Casgrain and France’s Salans.
Portnoy and Andrew made their biggest splash two years later with the addition of a 3,600-lawyer Chinese law firm, Dacheng. That gave Dentons the title of the largest firm in the world by headcount, which it has retained ever since.
The firm continued its growth at a torrid pace, combining with at least five firms a year from 2018 to 2021, according to its website. Dentons’ network includes relationships with firms in 82 countries.
Firm Focus
Internally, some partners have long questioned whether the focus on international growth helped its US presence, which has struggled to attract top talent in major markets like New York.
Instead, Portnoy and Andrew marketed a unique domestic strategy targeting tie-ups with local firms in places including Pittsburgh, Iowa, and Birmingham, Alabama.
By next year, three leaders who in 2020 lauded the launch of Project Golden Spike will be out of management. Mike McNamara, the firm’s former US CEO and a close confidante of Portnoy and Andrew, was ousted from his position in 2021. The US board said at the time it made the decision for a “structural change,” though McNamara was embroiled in a major public dispute with a former partner.
Portnoy said that in the US, the firm’s top priority has been to expand its reach in “key legal and business markets” such as New York, Washington, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
He said its second priority has been the firm’s “Golden Spike” project to plant itself in underserved American metro areas.
‘Running Out of Real Estate’
The combinations have slowed in recent years. Dentons announced one combination in 2023, with a law firm in India, and two combinations in 2022, with firms in Tunisia and Vietnam, the firm website shows.
Its China linkage came unglued in August, when the firm announced it would part its formal connection with Dacheng, citing stricter data regulations in the country.
The firm’s international expansion has slowed because the Dentons has planted its flag in most key global legal and business centers and has begun “running out of real estate,” Portnoy said.
Still, Portnoy said the firm is on pace to have a “historically strong year for Dentons in aggregate.” He expects the US offices will post a record financial performance in 2023.
He declined to provide specific revenue figures, but the firm with more than 12,000 employees is on a path to collect revenues of over $3 billion in 2023, according to The American Lawyer.
Jeffrey Lowe, managing partner of legal recruitment firm Jeffrey Lowe Partners, LLC, lauded Portnoy and Andrew for building the biggest law firm in the world. He said Dentons, like other large firms, had naturally transitioned away from its founding leaders.
“It’s a firm that has outgrown its leaders,” Lowe said, “but I mean that in a good way.”