Boies Schiller Elects Managing Partners in Latest Shuffle (1)

Boies Schiller Flexner has named a new leadership group, including three new managing partners and two new executive committee members.

The new co-managing partners include Sigrid McCawley, Matt Schwartz, and Alan Vickery. Hamish Hume and Joanna Wright have been named members of the firm’s executive committee.

It’s been a challenging year for the firm founded in 1997 by famed litigator David Boies, now 79. Boies Schiller has lost nearly 60 partners in 2020 and drew scrutiny for accepting a $10 million federal pandemic assistance loan.

The new leadership appointments come just a week after the notable loss of former firm co-managing partner Nick Gravante, who announced his plans to depart in the new year for Cadwalader Wickersham & Taft.

Bloomberg Law reported last week that McCawley, Schwartz, and Vickery were being considered for leadership positions.

McCawley has recently worked alongside Boies representing a number of hedge fund manager Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse accusers.

Schwartz is a New York-based litigation partner who spent a decade as a federal prosecutor in the vaunted Southern District of New York office, investigating securities fraud. Vickery, also a litigator in New York, has decades of experience handling major cases.

Hume and Wright are litigators based in Washington and New York, respectively.

Boies Schiller has been transitioning leadership away from its famous founder for more than a decade, Boies said in an interview last week. But the effort began in earnest in 2018 when the firm announced a four-person management committee. When Gravante leaves, only Phil Korologos will remain from that group of former committee members, which included Karen Dunn and Damien Marshall.

Dunn left the firm in June for Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in Washington along with former Boies Schiller vice chair Bill Issacson. Marshall and another group of Boies Schiller attorneys decamped to King & Spalding in New York not long after.

Other former executive committee members who have left the firm recently include Dave Willingham, who joined King & Spalding in California, Robert Cooper, who joined King & Spalding in Washington, and Karen Dyer, who is moving to Cadwalader with Gravante.

In last week’s interview, Boies reiterated the financial strength of the firm, but questioned some of the outcomes of its transition process, saying he would have jumped to the current leadership structure in 2018 if given the choice.

“It probably took us going through this process and testing not only what structures work, but what mix of people worked. And that is not something that you can necessarily divine without some experimentation,” he said.

The firm on Thursday announced bonuses for associates that in some cases outpaced the market rates set in 2020. The bonuses also included $20,000 for first-year associates who are slated to begin work at the firm next year.

Boies Schiller also named six new partners on Friday: Andrew Villacastin, Anne Nardacci, Andrew Beyda, David Simons, Tom Sosnowski, and Pascual Oliu.