A three-year-old merger between White & Case Thailand and a local firm has ended in frustration and accusations.

After six months of negotiations failed to resolve a dispute over management style, two of the three equity partners in the Bangkok office of the firm have resigned and set up their own practice, taking four lawyers and perhaps as much as a third of the firms clients with them.

Nopadol Intralib, one of the departing partners, said he believed that the leadership of White & Case never fully addressed concerns he had repeatedly raised about the quality of work and issues of integrity at the Bangkok office. "They were too slow to handle it," he said. "I didnt want to sit on a time bomb. So we thought it best to leave rather than keep going."

Nopadol has levied a string of charges at the Bangkok office, believing it is under-staffed, turning out low-quality work and falling behind in the market, but George Crozer, Asia executive partner for White & Case, defended the office and downplayed the implications of the departures.

He said the firm had long been aware of conflicts among the three equity partners at the Bangkok office and had been trying since an Asian partners retreat in Shanghai last September to resolve them.

"I thought we had a good program going forward," he said. "The three [equity partners] had a full and frank exchange of views where they aired their opinions. Everything calmed down and stayed pretty much under control for many months."
By mid-May, however, Nopadol was again hinting he was unhappy. The matter came to a head on 31 May, when Nopadol and a second equity partner, Khaisee Utaiwan, handed in their resignations, along with four associates and two translators.

Only two of the seven lawyers who joined White & Case through the merger now remain with the firm. Three left separately and two moved to a new firm The Legists, in the process convincing two other associates hired post-merger to join them. A spokesperson for The Legists said they are considering hiring up to six more lawyers.

Crozer said he was disappointed to lose the lawyers but upbeat about the firms ongoing prospects. "I am sad Nopadol and Khaisee are gone €¦ They were valuable partners and we tried very hard over a period of time," he said, but stressed the departures would not cut deeply into revenues: "This is not a body blow for the Thai office. We are going to remain highly profitable."

While at White & Case, Nopadol advised on a number of high-profile construction deals and arbitrations, but despite such successes grew increasingly frustrated.
The volume and complexity of the work taken on by the office, he said, was too much considering the number of senior lawyers in place, and according to him this lead to client dissatisfaction. "Krung Thai the biggest government bank in Thailand have complained to me so many times about lack of supervision," said Nopadol.

or its 59 associates, the Bangkok office currently has four partners one is a full equity partner, another is contract, and the remaining two are salaried.
One lawyer familiar with the situation agreed with Nopadol: "The work comes from very junior people and often gets stuck at the very senior associate or partner level. You dont have the channels along the way for people to get the supervision they need."

Nopadol estimates business has fallen possibly by as much as half, but that regional management will not know the full extent of the problem until the financial year-end on 31 December. "They dont realise the seriousness of the problem. Once they see the financial receipts of income, they will know how much loss they have suffered," he said.

Nopadol also cast doubt over future revenues, saying that a significant portion of the client base has migrated to his new firm.

Crozer questions these claims, however; he says that business is actually better than this time last year, and that more important than client numbers is the volume of business. He said the one remaining equity partner, Weerawong Chittmittrapap, accounts for a large majority of the office revenue and that as of the end of April his accounts receivable was very strong.

Beyond the accusations of lack of resources and financial performance, however, is an issue every law firm merger must confront: the difficulty of putting entrepreneurial partners into a situation where ultimate decision-making authority lies out of reach.

"It was a clash of wills," Crozer said. "They had their own ideas about how to run things. What do you do if youre senior vice president of GE and you dont like what Jack Welch does? You leave. It is really that simple."