Fried Frank’s New Bankruptcy Practice Has Unlikely Member: A COO

Welcome back to the Big Law Business column. I’m Roy Strom, and today we look at how business leaders are making strides inside Big Law firms. Sign up to receive this column in your Inbox on Thursday mornings.

Fried Frank is making a push to build a top-flight debtor-side bankruptcy practice, and doing it with a new role in the lineup: a chief operating officer.

The Wall Street firm last month hired Ben Schrag as COO of its new restructuring practice. He’s tasked with growing the group alongside global restructuring chair Rachel Strickland, who joined at the same time from Willkie Farr & Gallagher with partners Daniel Forman and Andrew Mordkoff.

The announcement caught my attention considering Big Law firms are relatively management-light. They typically rely on successful lawyers to run their businesses. C-suite operations professionals often oversee entire firms, not single practice groups.

As it happens, more firms are starting to hire executives to help manage the business of individual practices. It’s an acknowledgment that law firms are more complex than ever, and partners’ time is best spent on legal work and managing client needs rather than the day-to-day business operations.

“We’ve really seen a shift to practice group leaders becoming highly interested in people with additional business acumen to help them run their practices,” said Jennifer Johnson, chief executive of Calibrate, a consultancy for law firm operations. “That’s where many—if not most—firms are headed in a really intentional way.”

Schrag joins a small but growing group of practice-specific COOs across Big Law.

Those business leaders have varying responsibilities, typically tailored to the desires of the partners they support, Johnson said. They generally advise on strategic planning, workload and productivity management, client intake, budgeting, expense management, compensation, and recruiting.

They troubleshoot problems by collaborating with leaders of firmwide business functions like IT, finance, marketing and human relations, Johnson said.

“The idea is to get each person in the law firm ecosystem to operate at their very highest and best,” she said. “These roles are key to a firm’s successful future state. They help to elevate the attorneys to focus on the practice of law.”

For Fried Frank, building a restructuring practice is a bold endeavor, as I’ve previously written. It requires talented lawyers, broad relationships with restructuring professionals, and a business-generation function.

Schrag is crafting a business development strategy and leveraging relationships he’s built during a unique career with stakeholders across the restructuring business. He is also involved in lateral recruiting, a priority for the group as it seeks to quickly build scale. The group has ambitions of competing with the best-known firms in the highly competitive space, most recently dominated by Kirkland & Ellis.

Schrag’s resume explains why he’s not your typical law firm partner. He began his career working in the Kirkland’s restructuring group after graduating from Fordham Law in 2006. He transitioned to a business career in 2010 and three years later cofounded Prime Clerk, which provides docketing services for many large Chapter 11 cases.

The business grew to more than 1,000 employees before being sold in 2019 to what is now Kroll Inc. Schrag stayed with Kroll after the sale and eventually served as its global chief growth officer.

“I liked law, but I liked business better,” Schrag said in an interview. “And I didn’t figure that out until well after law school.”

Schrag has worked with Strickland throughout his career, and he said he was excited about building a restructuring practice from scratch at Fried Frank. It was an opportunity to build a new business inside a larger organization, something he’d done before. And it was a chance for him to leverage the relationships he’d built up throughout his career.

He also credited Fried Frank for appreciating that an executive focused on the business could free up partners to focus on what they do best: handling legal matters and managing client relationships.

“There was a lot of logic to the idea that if we were going to build the restructuring practice from scratch, while Rachel, Dan, and Andrew were focused on delivering client service to their clients, someone else needed to focus on everything else,” Schrag said.

Schrag is developing services that will include advanced lead-tracking systems, detailed market share data and strategic go-to-market plans, he said. He’ll also build out resources including targeted research, a client coverage approach (a method of staying in touch with clients to identify their needs), and competitive pricing models.

“This initiative will not only enhance our operational efficiency but also strengthen our position in the market, ensuring we deliver unparalleled value to our clients,” he said.

Jon Henes, a former Kirkland restructuring partner who practiced with Schrag, said the Big Law restructuring world is increasingly competitive. Breaking through requires firms to develop real business plans to engage clients and have the relationships to deliver on the plans.

Schrag brings both capabilities to the table, said Henes, who now runs restructuring communications firm C Street Advisory Group.

“He put together a number of experiences all related to the restructuring world: as a lawyer, as a businessperson, as a networker,” Henes said. “And by doing that he has a unique skillset that can definitely help in building out a restructuring group at a law firm, especially as he combines his skillset with Rachel’s.”

Polly Minifie Snyder serves as COO of Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner’s corporate and finance transactions department. She’s one of three practice department COOs at the firm.

Snyder began her career as a practicing lawyer and switched into a business role about a decade ago at Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe under the title chief practice officer.

She’s been at BCLP for about two years. Snyder is involved in strategic planning, budgets, financial planning, managing employees, recruiting, performance, business development, and marketing, she said. She describes her role as being a trusted advisor to the lawyer leaders and serving as a “quarterback” for the operations of the department.

Snyder expects to see more firms hire business professionals in roles like hers.

“Firms are growing. They’re huge and they’re complex,” she said. “And they’re taking their best partners away from doing their best work for the best clients and instead having them work on leadership. So, a lot of firms are being proactive.”

With Schrag’s hire, you can add Fried Frank to that list.

Worth Your Time

On Mergers: Mergers have taken center stage with news of Big Law partners voting to approve three tie-ups of large firms in the span of six days, Mahira Dayal, Justin Henry, and I reported.

On Big Law Humanity: Mike Leonard reports on a 118-page Delaware Chancery Court opinion that includes this line: “Top-flight lawyers at big law firms are human, just like the rest of us. Humans can act in bad faith.”

On Insider Trading: The SEC is going after another individual over an alleged insider trading scheme related to information stolen from a Covington & Burling attorney’s computer, Daniel Seiden and Justin Henry report.

That’s it for this week! Thanks for reading and please send me your thoughts, critiques, and tips.