WilmerHale has 1,076 lawyers and about 1,300 staff members in 12 offices in the United States, Europe and Asia.
Some of its people will soon be in Kettering.
Following a six-month site selection process known as “Project Vital,” WilmerHale chose Kettering over 31 other eastern U.S. cities including Indianapolis and Louisville as the home of a back-office “business services center” set to open by Sept. 1 at 3139 Research Blvd. in the Miami Valley Research Park. Most of the 187 workers will be hired locally at an average salary of $49,000. The facility will have a $9.1 million payroll.
A job fair began Saturday and goes from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. today at 1900 Founders Drive in the research park. Kettering Mayor Don Patterson said firm leaders expect the job fair to draw 2,000-4,000 applicants.
WilmerHale is the “market name” for Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, formed in 2004 with the merger of two venerable firms, Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering of Washington, and Hale and Dorr of Boston. According to the American Lawyer magazine, a third of WilmerHale’s lawyers, 309 of them, are equity partners.
“Theirs is one of the few mergers of law firms — and there have been many — which appears to be a true merger of equals,” said Aric Press, editor of American Lawyer magazine. The firm, he said, is “known for defending big-time corporate clients in big trouble.”
Aside from litigation, WilmerHale specializes in corporate and transactional law, intellectual property issues, securities law and regulatory and government affairs practices. Its clients include banks (Citigroup, Deutsche Bank), pharmaceutical companies (Bayer, Pfizer, Wyeth) and aviation companies (Boeing, Lufthansa). Procter and Gamble, , General Electric, Kodak and Panera Bread also use WilmerHale.
The firm is also known for its pro bono work. The WilmerHale Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School provides legal counsel to 1,200 poor and low-income Boston-area people per year. The firm took on an unpopular cause in 2004 when it chose to represent six Guantanamo detainees, five of whom were freed.
WilmerHale often places on American Lawyer’s “A-list” — the top 20 firms rated for revenue per lawyer, pro bono activity, associate satisfaction and diversity.
American Lawyer last week rated WilmerHale 18th in its list of the top 100 U.S. law firms in 2009, up from 21st place the previous year, with 2009 gross revenues of $941 million. That’s a drop of 1.5 percent from 2008. But profits per partner increased by 7 percent to $1.16 million because of cost-cutting measures, including 57 staff layoffs in October, the magazine reported.
The move to Kettering is part of the cost cutting, said Scott Green, WilmerHale’s executive director.
“When we continue to see margin erosion vis-a-vis our competitors, we realize it’s mostly because of where we’re doing business,” Green said. “This does help us. We’re pleased to be able to keep these jobs in the United States.”
The new center will bring together such back-office functions as finance, human resources, information technology and document review now located in Boston, New York and Washington, D.C.
WilmerHale is a solid fit in the Miami Valley Research Park — and potentially an enduring one, said Bruce Pearson, the park’s president and chief executive. He emphasized that WilmerHale signed a 10-year lease.
“This is a 10-year commitment that WilmerHale is making to the Dayton area,” Pearson said.
WilmerHale will take the entire building at 3139 Research Blvd., except for space held by S&K Technologies. Friday was the last day of the lease held by Deloitte Consulting, which is moving to downtown Dayton.
“If we grow as we hope to, then perhaps we’ll consume that (additional 5,000 square feet),” said Harold Gibson Jr., WilmerHale’s managing director for the Kettering office.
Gibson expects 95 percent of the center’s employees will be Dayton-area residents or people willing to commute to the area. “If we were to get 5 percent of our (current) people to transfer, I would be very pleased, because that continuity is very important.”
Twenty positions, involving document review and “e-discovery,” don’t yet exist at the firm. Those employees will scour the “incredible amount of documents and papers” often associated with legal cases, Gibson said. Those documents can include “ten of thousands” of e-mails.
Current technology allows document reviewers to do their work remotely, Gibson said.
“That’s also probably going to be our biggest growth opportunity as well,” he added.
WilmerHale was lured to the area by a $1.46 million job creation tax credit from the state of Ohio, a $250,000 economic development grant from Montgomery County and pledges of $500,000 each from the city of Kettering and the Miami Valley Research Foundation.
Green said the firm had other reasons for locating in the Dayton area. He said interviews with placement agencies and statistical analysis showed “the amount of IT skilled work force in this region is 30 percent above average. There’s a great legal labor pool here, as well as a number of universities feeding that labor pool.”
That labor is available for lower wages than in Boston and other major cities. Ironically for the Dayton region, which has lost thousands of jobs to places with cheap labor, the region is now a beneficiary of its own lower wage rates.
“It doesn’t surprise me they would decide to move their back office, nice as Dayton is, to a lower-cost community,” Press said. “Some firms are preferring to (locate in lower-cost U.S. cities) than going to India or the Philippines,” where they must deal with language and cultural barriers.
“Even without the down economy, the big firms were talking about whether their cost structures were out of hand,” Press said. “The down economy has certainly accelerated those discussions.”
Patterson said WilmerHale leaders told him that the Dayton area was attractive — short commutes, low housing costs and amenities like the Schuster Center, Dayton Dragons baseball and the Kettering Recreation Center.
“Sometimes we don’t see the forest for the trees and we get down on ourselves,” Patterson said. “Sometimes we don’t recognize the gem we have here. We’ve taken our licks over the last few months, but we still have a lot to offer. It’s nice when somebody from outside comes in to remind us.”
Staff Writer Jeremy P. Kelley contributed to this report.
About the Author