Speaker 1:
From the library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York city, you're inside the ICE House, our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on Markets, Leadership and Vision and Global Business. The dream drivers that have made the NYSE and indispensable institution of global growth for 225 years.
Speaker 1:
Each week we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs and harness the engine of capitalism. Right here, right now at the NYSE and at ICE's Exchanges and clearing houses around the world. And now welcome inside the ICE House. Here's your host, Josh king of Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
I'm not going to lie. There's a certain wistfulness, a certain sense of loss when two storied names on the New York Stock Exchange merge their businesses, creating one powerful enduring entity and the synergies that result.
Josh King:
That's certainly progress but it also means that one of those stock symbols disappear from our ticker. Such was the case in 2018 when CVS Health that's, NYSE ticker symbol CVS, completed its acquisition of Aetna. That was formally NYSE ticker symbol AET.
Josh King:
Both businesses got their start here as publicly traded companies going back almost a century. The Melville Shoe Corporation, which eventually became CVS after myriad mergers and divestitures was listed on September 27th, 1928.
Josh King:
Aetna's shares listed here 40 years later, September 24th, 1968. And when the two firms announced their deal in 2017, it was valued as a $70 billion merger.
Josh King:
But that handshake and the ensuing press release was only the start of the process. One of the most important hurdles to bridge was antitrust approval from the Justice Department. After all the Tunney Act, passed in 1974, requires the courts to sure that such agreements are in the public interest.
Josh King:
Judge Richard Leon of the United States District Court in Washington was initially skeptical of the deal. And he said, "If the Tunney Act is to mean anything," he wrote, "It surely must mean that no court should rubber stamp a consent decree approving the merger of one of the largest companies in the United States and the nation's third largest health insurance company simply because the government requests it."
Josh King:
The backroom work of crossing the Ts and doting the I's on mega mergers are often a footnote to the glitz and glamor of the joint interview of CVS's, chief Larry Merlo and Aetna's CEO, Mark Bertolini when they meet on the set of CNBC at post nine on the NYSE on the day of their formal handshake. Let's leave the details to the lawyers to work out as a paraphrase of the common refrain.
Josh King:
Well, here on inside the ICE House footnotes are our stock in trade. We've never had the head of one of the world's leading law firms on our show, but as the healthcare landscape is changing beneath our feet, that overdue omission will finally be rectified.
Josh King:
When the dust is settled on the CVS Aetna combination McDermott Will & Emery, one of several law firms working for Merlo and CVS Health Corp, revealed that it had advised on health regulatory issues as well as tax, real estate, IP and IT, and also represented CVS on the sale of Aetna's standalone Medicare Part D prescription drug plans to a subsidiary of WellCare Health Plans Incorporated.
Josh King:
These are the kinds of moves that ultimately convince a skeptic like Judge Leon, to give his okay to the $70 billion deal. Those are the details that the lawyers work out.
Josh King:
Today on the show Ira Coleman, Chairman of McDermott Will & Emery, one of the largest law firms in the world. He joins us today to share his insight on the legal issue facing healthcare, the state of big law, and why lawyers who work for him can build their hours, spent on wellness. Our conversation with Ira Coleman, right after this.
Speaker 3:
Now a word from Jennifer Tejada, CEO of PagerDuty, NYSE ticker symbol PD.
Jennifer Tejada:
PagerDuty is a digital operations management platform leveraged by developers, customer support, IT and security to help ensure the brand experience for their end consumers runs perfectly all the time.
Jennifer Tejada:
Our organization reflects the diversity and the richness of our community. We're really excited about global impact. We chose the NYSE because it's a place where iconic companies are truly born in the company of giants.
Josh King:
Our guest today, Ira Coleman was elected the chairman of McDermott Will & Emery in 2017, following nearly a quarter century with the firm.
Josh King:
Previously he led the corporate and transactional practice group and served as the managing partner for the firm's Miami office.
Josh King:
Ira also serves as the general counsel for the Healthcare Private Equity Association, that's HCPEA. And presents regularly at private equity, national healthcare and leadership focused conferences on a variety of subjects.
Josh King:
Ira, welcome to the New York Stock Exchange and welcome inside the ICE House.
Ira Coleman:
Wow. Thank you so much, and it's great being here. And that's an introduction that I have to make sure my mom listens to. That's wonderful. And you're too kind.
Ira Coleman:
Hopefully I answer some questions and have a good time together here today and share some insights into the business of law and what we do and how we watch the healthcare industry go from a government not for profit church owned Synagog owned business, to this incredible for profit powerhouse that it is today.
Josh King:
Have you ever been at the New York Stock Exchange before?
Ira Coleman:
I think I came in fifth grade during P.S. 100 when we did our school trip, yes. And I think we rung a bell for one of our clients. I got to have the privilege to do that.
Josh King:
P.S. 100. Where was that?
Ira Coleman:
Brooklyn, New York. Coney Island.
Josh King:
And that's where the Coleman's grew up?
Ira Coleman:
That's where the Coleman's grew up. We moved to the country, which was Staten Island, New York, over the Verrazano Bridge, and then went to school in upstate New York at Albany, where I learned how to ski, recognized how cold it was and headed down to south Florida for law school and enjoyed it down there. And as my wife likes to say, Queens girl, I tricked her into staying instead of coming back.
Josh King:
And we're going to get a lot into the state of Florida and the state of healthcare. Something you said struck me though, church owned, Synagogue owned industry, your earliest memories and your sense of history of the healthcare industry from that nascent sort of community created system in which one person cared for a group of people.
Ira Coleman:
Sure. Well, that's what it was. It was the Talmud like, New Testament like, taking care of a neighbor, of doing unto others like you would want done unto yourself.
Ira Coleman:
So when folks were sick, people had to take care of them. And it wasn't the big industry that it was today. So we had either the state doing it or the religious orders doing it.
Ira Coleman:
And nobody ever thought of it as a for-profit entity until probably in the late 80s, early 90s is when it really started catching on. We watched it, we helped it grow, and we helped build that trend.
Ira Coleman:
And when you go back, the earliest laws, kind of on the books on this, were the self-referral laws of 1986 around which prohibited doctors and those healthcare professionals from having an ownership interest in things that they sent patients to, kind of avoid that conflict of interest.
Ira Coleman:
Which was very interesting, because they wrote these rules after there was a whole big push to get doctors involved in the kind of the financing of the healthcare industry.
Ira Coleman:
And what I mean by that when new technology came out like an MRI, there was no money to go out and buy it. And if this thing cost a million bucks, much easier to get 10 doctors together and each put up $100,000 and get this brand new MRI machine and bring new technology to the patient. So that was great. And they were encouraging that.
Ira Coleman:
And then all of a sudden there was abuses there. And at one time I remember Broward County, Florida, which is where Fort Lauderdale is, had more MRIs in just that little county than the entire country of Canada.
Ira Coleman:
They said, "Okay, something's wrong with this. We got to put out laws to prevent it." And they came out with these self-referral laws and something called the Stark Law named after Congressman Pete Stark, that basically said, "You shouldn't have an ownership interest in it."
Ira Coleman:
So they wrote the rules and there was a lot of gamesmanship around the rules I would call it like the tax laws. There's things you can do, certain things you can't do, and you got to know where those lines are.
Josh King:
Growing up in Coney Island, how did the Coleman's go get their medical care?
Ira Coleman:
My parents were teachers, so we were part of the HIT Plan, which was probably the first earliest kind of HMOs, where you went through a primary care gate keeper and then you went to a specialist if you needed it.
Ira Coleman:
So we were very accustomed to that kind of gate keeping model, which is very different than the new generation of Coleman's, which we're the worst consumers of healthcare.
Ira Coleman:
When we have a headache, we go to a neurologist. When we have a tummy ache, we're at a gastroenterologist. If my foot's cramping, I'm in an orthopedic surgeon in 10 minutes, right?
Ira Coleman:
High utilizes of expensive care, the worst way to do it. Rather than kind of rolling it back in and trying to go talk to a primary care doctor first, then maybe avoid the heavy, costly diagnostics.
Josh King:
So, from these early days back in Coney Island, to this episode that I talked about in the introduction, your fingerprints, the fingerprints of your firm, are certainly on one of the most storied names of one of our listed companies, CVS Health now with a market cap, following the Aetna merger of $96 billion. Your memories of sort of the work on that deal?
Ira Coleman:
Sure. Some of our best and brightest were on it kind of solving for really difficult issues to get clearance and go forward. Joan Polacheck's one of my partners, one of the brightest people I know, math major and clerk at the US Court of Appeals. Brilliant mind, really helped work through that and many other partners. We had a team.
Josh King:
You got a team that you've talked about, Kate McDonald, Jeremy Earl, Ancur Gold, Tim Shuman. I want to go into the lives of your partners like Joan, Kate, Jeremy, Ancur and Timothy.
Josh King:
From the first call that they get from Larry Merlo or one of his lieutenants to that final deal dinner when all the documents have been signed and sealed, how does Joan and her team sort of engage from the beginning to end on something like that?
Ira Coleman:
Sure. Depending upon what the issue shoes are in that particular one, we basically free up kind of a tactical force dream team of experts in each of the verticals that we're covering.
Ira Coleman:
And then she's going to be the overarching quarterback of the team so to speak to make sure we're not missing anything. And I think, and this transcends one deal, but tells you something about the law these days.
Ira Coleman:
Really good firms and really great firms in the future are going to have to collaborate not only with your law firm, but many other law firms and other professionals as well.
Josh King:
A lot of firms were on that deal for sure.
Ira Coleman:
Yes. So I'm sure there are a lot of firms that we're working with on that deal and a lot of professionals like medical economists and antitrust experts and healthcare consultants and accountants, and the list goes on, investment bankers.
Ira Coleman:
So I think the people that win, the entities that win, are ones that can share their experience in a humble like manner, bring that really relevant expertise and really bring smartness to the table without being a smarty pants.
Ira Coleman:
And you also have to have a good way about you that people want to call you. So I always say a good partner is one where when the phone rings and they say, "Hey, Joan Polacheck's on the phone," the CEO general counsel or somebody on the other side, doesn't go like, "Oh, it's Joan," and make a noise. They go, "Oh, it's Joan. I want to talk to her."
Josh King:
Yeah.
Ira Coleman:
That's the difference. You can have the same knowledge base. It's do you have the concern? Do you have the empathy? And you have the humbleness that people want to work with you, that's a big deal for us.
Josh King:
You mentioned, and I couldn't miss it, that there are a bunch of zeros on a deal like that. And you're the chairman of a firm surpassing now a billion dollars in revenue.
Josh King:
How many toes do you, Ira Coleman, dip into the water on a deal like that or do you let Joan do her work?
Ira Coleman:
Let Joan do her work. I'm only involved to say thank you to the general counsel or if there's something that's needed where they need the chairman of the firm to talk to somebody whether it's at the government or the other side, happy to do it, do that at all the time.
Ira Coleman:
But this is a crackerjack team. And I would probably be burning the eggs while they were making the great souffle.
Josh King:
You are the number one healthcare law firm in the world, certainly beyond the borders of the United States. Much of the focus on data privacy stems from GDPR or General Data Protection Regulations, something that may not be covered now in Great Britain after Brexit.
Josh King:
McDermott Will & Emery released a special report on its potential impact. The full report can be found on your website, but as events play out, what's your opinion as of today of its impact?
Ira Coleman:
Yeah. I think that GDPR is what's coming through the United States, maybe not today, but pretty soon I think. The EU was just more aware of it and more on top of it.
Ira Coleman:
And it took some time for us to kind of get there and we're steeped in the rich tradition of free speech and stay away from anything that could thwart any kind of capitalism.
Ira Coleman:
So we always lean towards those freedoms and we don't want to interfere with business, which is probably a good thing. But then you get these kind of breaches or folks not knowing what's being done with their data and there has to be a balance.
Ira Coleman:
So I think we're going to see more of that. And whenever you have these large industries that start getting heavily regulated, it's very good for the law firms. Not just because, "Hey, we're going to make money," but we can make a difference.
Ira Coleman:
And it's very hard to engage young people these days so when people come into law and start working with us, the delayed gratification equation doesn't work anymore. Saying, "Hey, work really hard and stick with us and we'll pay you some nice money and then you'll get to be a partner." And you're supposed to hear the organ music and a gold halo come over people, and it doesn't resonate anymore.
Ira Coleman:
So you got to do something else. So the research shows us that engagement and doing things that are meaningful to people really make the job satisfaction a lot higher.
Ira Coleman:
So we're blessed that we have a young cohort that basically says our associates say that 87% of them will go above and beyond the call of duty for the firm or its client base. That's like an astronomical amount. When you're in the 70s, people are writing stories about you in business school. So we're really lucky about that.
Ira Coleman:
When I go in and we ask some questions about it, it's because of the work we do. So when you can kind of put your fingerprint on what's going to happen to a GDPR like law in the United States, trying to balance it, trying to have input on it, trying to explain it, trying to educate, trying to influence becomes meaningful.
Ira Coleman:
And when people talk about work life balance, we talk about work life blend. Work, life balance makes it sound like, okay, when I'm at work, it sucks. Okay. And when I'm at home, it's really fun. So that's the balance.
Ira Coleman:
No, we want to say you should really enjoy your time at work. You should feel like you're accomplishing things. You should be able to go back home and share these stories that are entertaining, that brought you to a richer place.
Ira Coleman:
And if you could do that, then we're not talking about delayed gratification of why you want to stick around. And we also recognize that many, like in the financial institutions, will have exits. They'll go someplace else.
Ira Coleman:
So they might start with the us and then decide to do Teach For America or work on a startup or work for one of the folks on your exchanges. And then maybe drop back into the McDermott family.
Ira Coleman:
I heard a stat from Bain Consulting that said the folks who were in entering the workforce now are going to live to over 100. So the rules that I came into the game with certainly don't apply.
Ira Coleman:
It was, you applied your trade, you retired, you lived a few years, you died. Now it's you could drop out of the workforce for 30 years, have a brilliant career doing something else or becoming just an amazing standup paddle border and skier. And then drop back in. You've traveled the world, you've written books, you've learned the feet of-
Josh King:
Do you encourage people to either take sabbaticals or go elsewhere for a while? And do you actively welcome people back into the family?
Ira Coleman:
We actively welcome people back in the family. We have many boomerangs. More during my tenure as chair than anything else. And it's one of the things I'm most proud of that people feel welcome to come back and we're really spending some resources to revitalize our alumni program.
Ira Coleman:
To have people know that we share that feeling and feel that connection. Do we encourage them to go out? A little bit, probably not as much as we should. We do have coaching and we do have mindfulness and rest exercises that I think kind of stimulate those discussions of if I'm not happy, how can I be happy? What else should I be doing?
Ira Coleman:
And we also bring in people from all walks of life to talk to our folks about different things. So we had Stephanie Izard from Girl & The Goat, share some great things and great experiences and some really great personal stories when she was speaking to our women's summit up in Chicago last year.
Ira Coleman:
And she was wonderful and she was really inspiring. And would I be surprised that people said, "I want to open a restaurant," or, "I want to do this." I think those are the kind of things that kind of get people thinking.
Ira Coleman:
So maybe when we do our McDermott ski trip, when we have these great ski races coming down, people will say, "Oh, I missed my calling. I should have been a ski racer." And Frank Steiner will take a sabbatical-
Josh King:
Or at least become GC for Vail Resorts, which I think would be a pretty good gig.
Ira Coleman:
Exactly. That's right. That's got to be a great free ski pass on all their mountains, right?
Josh King:
Going back to that CVS Aetna merger, it was first announced in late 2017. I want to hear a little bit from CVS' chairman and CEO Larry Merlo when he announced the deal.
Becky:
Joining us right now is Larry Merlo. He is the president and CEO of CVS Health. And Mark Bertolini is the chairman and CEO of Aetna and gentlemen, welcome to both of you.
Becky:
It's great to have you here today.
Larry Merlo:
Great to be here.
Becky:
This is not exactly something that was a huge surprise or secret. We knew that it was behind the scenes getting worked up.
Becky:
But why don't you two tell us how you came together and why? Why this merger makes sense from your perspective?
Larry Merlo:
Well, Becky, we've had a business relationship going back to 2010 and as Mark and I continue to have discussions in terms of how can we do things more strategically?
Larry Merlo:
It was clear as CVS Health was moving to become more of a healthcare company and getting closer to Payers, Mark had a similar strategy in terms of getting closer to the customer.
Larry Merlo:
And it's really the perfect time to bring these two companies together to create a new healthcare platform that can be easier to use and less expensive for consumers and really create a new front door to healthcare in our country.
Josh King:
That was such a big deal for everyone involved. As you scan the horizon for 2020, do you see things of that magnitude beginning to shape up?
Ira Coleman:
Sure. I think you're going to see some sizeable transactions and we always bucketed it into the kind of payer, provider, patient. And I think everything's kind of blending together a little bit.
Ira Coleman:
There isn't going to be any more pure Payers insurance companies. There aren't going to be any more pure providers, whether it be institutional or whether it be individuals.
Ira Coleman:
So we're seeing these kind of mega changes of people coming to together and buying things which creates some strange bedfellows.
Ira Coleman:
Folks who were traditionally competitive or at each other, significant stressing in contracting and in litigation and stuff, are now going to be allies or actually owned by the same organization moving forward.
Ira Coleman:
I wouldn't be surprised if you see a big four Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook move into provider payer status, things like that. It's just too big to ignore.
Josh King:
Just tying it back up to this conversation we were having earlier about bringing younger associates up, educating them, getting them excited about the things that you guys are focused on whether it's private equity, healthcare, restructuring.
Josh King:
How do you ensure that your lawyers learn the industry specific information they require to groom them on those first few years out of law school or when you bring them over laterally?
Ira Coleman:
Yeah, it's a great question because our clients, and we have client listening programs, we're out there talking to our clients all the time saying, "What do you want?" They say, "I don't want to work with lawyers who don't know my industry and are asking silly questions that we believe they should already know."
Ira Coleman:
So we do intense university style training programs for folks who have self selected different disciplines in areas. So a vertical might be renewable energy. That's very hot these days, especially with young people coming out.
Ira Coleman:
I was schooled by one of my first year lawyers because we had 14 single use bottles in a room with eight people around the table. And I saw she was upset and I'm like, "What's the matter?" And she said, "Look what's going on." And I'm like, "But recycle. We recycle them." She's like, "That's not good enough."
Ira Coleman:
Renewable energy is one of our verticals, which we've been growing out and people self-selected to that and they want to learn everything about it. So we'll have classes on it. We'll have Master's classes on it where senior folks in the firm will talk about their experience. What's important to the industry will have folks from the industry talking about it.
Ira Coleman:
In the private equity area, we do that plus we do lunch and learns with private equity professionals who come in and talk to our folks. General counsel of HIG, one of the larger private equity firms, came in and spoke to our entire corporate and healthcare group about how to get hired and fired as a outside counsel to a private equity firm.
Ira Coleman:
And Rich Siegel, is a wonderful guy, very honest and forthright and talks about what he expects our youngest lawyers to know and not on his dime. If you want to work in the private equity industry, here's the kind of things you should be reading. Here's what you should be following. Here's the type of understanding I want you to have.
Ira Coleman:
And then most of our folks are pretty good self start learners. So they're out there doing it and they're doing it in ways, when I'm at an associate retreat, and there's 500 McDermott associates there and I ask who listens to podcasts, pretty much every hand goes up.
Ira Coleman:
I do it to my partners meetings. I'm probably at about a 50 50 shot. So there's different ways to learn. There's different ways to approach things.
Ira Coleman:
And I think that if we drill down on technology, I always say to my young folks, "You are so far ahead of any of the partners on this because you've been doing it your whole life. You've been working through it your whole life. You're so much more advanced. It's so much more natural to you. Use this as a springboard to greatness. That you understand this, you work with it, you're comfortable with it."
Ira Coleman:
The people are younger. They want diversity of thought. It's a great way to capture wonderful clients and have these very important discussions about their businesses.
Josh King:
Long before there was any such thing as a podcast, back when there was AM radio or Casey Kasem's American top 40, how did Ira Coleman originally get interested in the law? Was it at SUNY Albany or some time before?
Ira Coleman:
Well, I faked being a DJ. I was TJ the DJ on my cassette recorder mixing Billy Joel songs and Led Zeppelin songs and whatever was hot at the time.
Ira Coleman:
To hear my voice on the radio, fakely of course, so I always like that aspect of it. And I always love when you see there are these great finance professionals, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and they love being DJs. My son's fraternity-
Josh King:
David Solomon, the Chairman of Goldman Sachs being example number one.
Ira Coleman:
Exactly. And there's many of them. It's incredible and impressive and I get it. It's fun to do. There's nothing-
Josh King:
In your neck of the woods at the Super Bowl a couple weeks, he was a headliner.
Ira Coleman:
Oh really? That's wonderful. I missed his pool party. I would say that same thrill of watching an audience react to you, picking a song or doing something. That's kind of what got me into law.
Ira Coleman:
Which was, my dad, he was an elementary school principal and he always talked about wanting to be a lawyer, but his choice was to go to college or be a painter because my grandfather was a painter and my dad said he wanted to go to college to be a teacher because the GI Bill would send him for free. So he did that.
Ira Coleman:
But he always talked about how, if he could have done anything, he probably would've been a lawyer because he liked that. So I gravitated towards it. And there were a few people in our neighborhood that were lawyers who would always talk to me about their cases when I hung out with their kids and went over there for dinner.
Ira Coleman:
So I gravitated towards that. I would always talk to my dad about it. So when I was in college, my great summer job was a janitor in his elementary school. And I got to watch, this was my first lesson in leadership also, because I got to watch my dad as a principal, be a true leader.
Ira Coleman:
I knew him as kind of a strict parent and kind of a quiet guy and very honorable and always doing the right thing. And all of a sudden I'm watching, I don't know if you had this in your schools, but we always had these dance festivals and it was the first week in June and it was beautiful outside and everybody's outside and all the kids are happy to be outside and each grade had their own dance.
Ira Coleman:
I think this would was maybe it was the fifth graders or something. They had like a 50s kind of twist. And my dad jumped into the middle of the circle and did this crazy twist dance with some of the teachers that were there and grabbed some of the students in and was dancing it up with them.
Ira Coleman:
And I'd never seen my father do that. And I heard people talk about him in a very different way. Wonderful, charismatic guy he was and everything. And I'm like, "Boy, that's very different than I know him as a son."
Ira Coleman:
And it was wonderful to see and explore and the respect that he had from always kind of doing the right thing, being fair and being humble. And never putting himself above the teachers, above the students or above the families that came in.
Ira Coleman:
And it was pretty amazing because New York city school system, you don't have a lot of funds to do things. You have very little power to get rid of underperforming teachers. They're pretty protected by the union.
Ira Coleman:
And he was able to always have his school in the highest rankings and this wonderfully engaged PTA, wonderfully engaged faculty, and I would always say, "Wow, it's a miracle that he could do it."
Ira Coleman:
And remember I'm a 18 year old kid in college. I don't really care about these things. So it really must have been pretty special that it made a memory, it made a stamp with me.
Ira Coleman:
And I also remember when I would work in the school and you're a janitor, I'm the guy with the keys and the overalls, and all the people were leaving to go to work in the city at these big jobs. And some people would look right through you, even if you said good morning to them, they wouldn't even answer.
Ira Coleman:
I'm sweeping the schoolyard from a wild weekend of broken bottles and fires. I don't know why kids like to start fires, but that's what they did.
Ira Coleman:
Some people would be so nice to me and would give me a big smile and a big good morning on the way into work. And some people would ignore me.
Ira Coleman:
And it always stuck with me that no matter where I was in life, I want to be the person that says hello to everybody and treats everybody equally because I don't want to leave somebody feeling like they left me feeling.
Ira Coleman:
And even though I could rationalize and say, "Well, this is not my station in life. I'm in college now. I'm going somewhere. I'm going to go to law school. I'm going to do all these things."
Ira Coleman:
But at that particular moment, when you have feeling, you feel empty. You feel like you're invisible. So I don't ever want people in my firm to treat people like they feel invisible and I don't ever want people to feel like they're in my firm and I treat them invisible.
Josh King:
That's so interesting. Talking about first lessons in leadership, I gather Ira based on your resume, that you and I are roughly the same age.
Ira Coleman:
I'm much older than you.
Josh King:
I assume that you like me might have consumed an episode or two of L.A. Law in your youth.
Ira Coleman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Josh King:
So let's take a little sidebar into the partners meeting of McKenzie, Brackman, Chaney and Kuzak. I want to get one chairman's view of how he conducts a partners meeting and contrasted to yours.
Speaker 8:
A new matter. Leon Croner a medical corporation versus Celia Robinson.
Ms. Perkins:
A doctor suing our client for $750 bill.
Speaker 10:
A collection matter.
Ms. Perkins:
It's a little more complicated than that. For the last nine months her insurance company's been giving her the runaround and that's why the bill's not paid.
Douglas Brackman:
Ms. Perkins, undoubtedly you've seen those ads on television? Lawyers in polyester suits, soliciting for clients.
Ms. Perkins:
Yes, sir.
Douglas Brackman:
Those lawyers handle $750 collection cases. McKenzie Brackman, Chaney et al, does not handle $750 collection cases.
Ms. Kelsey:
Douglas, will you come off at. This is a referral from Morley Saperstein. I ask Abby to help me with it.
Douglas Brackman:
As your time is usually billed at $135 an hour Ms. Kelsey, how much exactly did you intend to charge this client for whatever heroics you might perform on this $750 matter?
Ms. Kelsey:
What I intend is to charge her nothing.
Josh King:
So how closely does Ira Coleman's style of chairing a meeting of the partners of McDermott Will & Emery approximate Douglas Brackman played by the great Alan Rachins grilling Jill Eikenberry as Ann Kelsey?
Ira Coleman:
I wish I could say I had that kind of discipline around our partners. I think I'm much more of a servant leader, kind of a little bit of a sherpa of the flock to really help people, really smart people, achieve what they otherwise couldn't achieve by themselves, mostly through encouragement and showing them that they could do this.
Ira Coleman:
It really is my honor to be the chair of this firm. It's got an 85 year amazing history. Gone through just incredible times, incredible smart people there. Just a wonderful collection of partners, associates and staff professionals.
Ira Coleman:
So I would say yes, we are very data driven evidence based. So I think he'd be proud of me for that. But I think we are much more of a, we want to be servant leaders and help you get to where you could go. Help you just do things that much better.
Ira Coleman:
Our unofficial model is hashtag always better. And that comes from we can always do a little bit more, a little bit better. Our clients are paying us more each year, our rates go up.
Ira Coleman:
We have to offer something more. We have to get smarter. We have to get more efficient. We have to use artificial intelligence. We have to ask the right questions. We have to learn the businesses better. We have to hire better.
Ira Coleman:
All those things each and every year I think we have to go back and do it. But L.A. Law was one of the sexiest shows on TV. Who didn't want to be a lawyer after that?
Josh King:
When you say whether you're Jill Eikenberry or Susan Day watching L.A. Law, or you're in the present day at McDermott Will & Emery, and you are adhering to this philosophy of always better. You've got to get really great people under your roof and your 1000 plus lawyers.
Josh King:
And the legal field, possibly more than any other profession, puts this premium on educational background. In fact, when former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, Antonin Scalia was asked what it would take to succeed as a lawyer by a George Washington university law student. He had no issue saying this.
Antonin Scalia:
I'm going to be picking for Supreme Court Law Clerks, I can't afford a miss. I just can't. So I'm going to be picking from the law schools that basically are the hottest to get into. They admit the best and the brightest and they may not teach very well, but you can't make a sow's ear out of a silk purse.
Antonin Scalia:
And if they come in the best in the brightest, they're probably going to leave the best in the brightest. Okay. Now the reason I tell this story is one of my former clerks who I am the most proud of.
Josh King:
That story was picked up by Malcolm Gladwell, as part of his exploration of higher education in the last season of Revisionist History.
Josh King:
Do you feel that not having one of the marquee names in your degree affected your opportunity coming from Nova in Miami?
Ira Coleman:
I think you got to work that much harder. And I love Gladwell's podcast, I thought that was great. And I liked him taking the LSAT. I thought that was pretty great too.
Ira Coleman:
The two areas, and I agree with Scott Galloway, the two areas in the US that are ripe for disruption are healthcare okay. And higher education because higher education has become kind of an elitist luxury brand. And healthcare for all the reasons that we talked about and more.
Ira Coleman:
So I do think there's pressure on the mediocre that it's terrible coming out of. I've lost clients or haven't gotten clients, because I didn't go to Harvard or didn't have that pedigree.
Ira Coleman:
But I could tell you that when I'm in a room full of our lawyers, where a bunch of people on my team did go to Harvard and Princeton and all the great schools, you either get it or you don't get it.
Ira Coleman:
And attitude has a lot to do with it and hardworking has a lot to do with it. And I'll point to the Malcolm Gladwell book. It was Outliers where he talks about smart enough. Where if you take a mix of really smart people and if you rank them by IQ and you thought the top IQ people were going to do the best and the middle would do the middle and the lowest would do the lowest. And it didn't turn out that way.
Ira Coleman:
It's which ones had the family support, which ones had the hustle, which ones had other things. That's the way it is in law. Smartness, there's wonderful Judge Justice Scalia said, really is a good baseline and what they do and in being very careful and really carefully chosen words, it probably means even more.
Ira Coleman:
But in the day to day, and this was from one of my clients, who's a woman who went to Columbia Law School and Princeton undergrad.
Ira Coleman:
She said, "Ira, I'd rather work with a lawyer who knows how to get me a good answer fast than the best answer in a very ineffective way, inefficient way." And that resonated, just know when you're done with this and what the problem takes and then move forward.
Ira Coleman:
So as the managing partner on L.A. Law was correctly pointing out, what are you going to do for that $700 case? How you going to bring efficiency to it? He knew intuitively that they weren't going to, that you were doing this pro bono. That you were doing this for free, you were doing this for ulterior motives.
Ira Coleman:
Which might be great but you have to always have the eye towards, how would you solve it in a business like manner? So I think it's unfortunate that mediocre doesn't get the chance anymore.
Ira Coleman:
And elitism is there. Those are the kids that we go after. But we're really trying to do something different and we're trying to really put some data around it.
Ira Coleman:
Because if you look at who succeeds at our firm, it's not just that. And it's some of the people who kind of snuck in through the back door and blow people's doors off, become our most productive and vibrant partners.
Josh King:
Our mutual friend is a guy who just got a job pulling cables from one floor of a law firm to another. And he did not have one of those elite law degrees. He went and got some arcane reading law in Europe or something, but the guy's a hard worker.
Ira Coleman:
It's amazing and a really bright fellow.
Josh King:
Getting a good answer and moving forward. After the break Ira Coleman, the chairman of McDermott Will & Emery will and I discuss some of the recent acquisitions that he's made for the firm and his outlook for the firm. That's right after this.
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Josh King:
Welcome back. Before the break Ira Coleman, Chairman of McDermott Will & Emery and I, were discussing how his career progressed leading up to being named chairman of the firm in 2017.
Josh King:
Ira, what inspires a person to go from a very successful practice, you've built out your team, you know exactly what you're doing, to telling your partners that you want their vote to be elected chairman?
Ira Coleman:
It was interesting because I had a great life and things were going well. My clients and I were really working hand in hand and we had great teams. So I didn't really have to do much to just kind of continue on this wonderful glide path.
Ira Coleman:
And some days I look back and go, "Why?" But I never hesitated because it was a calling that I had because of a man named Larry Gerber, who when I joined the firm, he was the chair.
Ira Coleman:
And Larry took the firm from this sleepy Chicago firm, probably making under $200,000 profits per partner, all the way up to the big leagues where we were competing with not just New York firms. And I think we were 16 or 17 and profits for partner in 16 or 17 in our economics, of overall economics.
Ira Coleman:
So it was very easy for me to say, "Hey, I want to get us back to where our rightful place in the Am Law." That's the American Lawyer Top 25. It's this craziness that private companies report their results to a magazine, but that's what we do in law. I don't know, one day we'll come back and figure out why we do it and we continue to do it.
Ira Coleman:
We would say it doesn't matter. And it's not the measure, but it's one of the measures. And it also helps with our virtuous cycle. We're able to acquire great talent. And if you have great talent, you can do great work.
Ira Coleman:
And if you do great work, you get great results. And then clients come to you because you have great results. And if you're getting great results and you have great clients, then you have the best work. If you have the best work, you get the best people. And it creates this wonderful virtuous cycle.
Ira Coleman:
So I said, I've seen us go from the highest highs and then we got period of where I'll call it a little fat and lazy, maybe a little too happy drinking our own Kool-Aid a little too much.
Ira Coleman:
And it was very easy to make softer decisions rather than the hard decisions that got us to where we were, so we backed off.
Josh King:
And why do you think that was?
Ira Coleman:
I think because the recession came through and we made the bets that any revenue was good revenue instead of really trying to kind of signal out what was really in the best interest of the clients. What was really in the best interest of training our young people and being able to move forward it that way.
Ira Coleman:
So we took our eye off the ball a little bit. So everybody got scared because the world was over in 2008, 2009. Right? So other firms kind of came back a little stronger, a little faster and we didn't. So that hurts.
Ira Coleman:
And once you get that hit it's hard to kind of turbo charge yourself back. And I think that our leadership then while they did the best they could and they were doing a wonderful job of really kind of right righting the ship. We didn't move fast and as definitively as we could.
Ira Coleman:
And we saw this. Some of us saw this and I said, if I'm going to do this, I was very, maybe brutally honest. We had a lack of investment in certain CapEx that we wanted to make in technology in offices and things like that.
Ira Coleman:
And it was going to be to the $25 to 30 million right out of the partner's pocket. So not the greatest platform to run on, but truthful.
Ira Coleman:
And then also truthful of saying, "Hey, if you want to take this journey with me, elect me. Which is very different than how we're going. If you want to do that, great. If you don't want to do that, that's fine. I'm here, I'm McDermott for life, love this place. It's great. And that's fine."
Ira Coleman:
And we went forward, I got elected. I was really excited about it. And I flew without a net on my first-
Josh King:
Was it a squeaker? Did you have the old guard who wanted to keep things the way they were?
Ira Coleman:
It's kind of like electing the Pope. It's a management committee, our board of directors, our 21 voting members actually make the decision. So it's secret ballots and nobody really knows. So I always like to tell my children that I was elected by unanimous decision. Right.
Ira Coleman:
But no, I'm sure it was a squeaker. There were many of us running and we went through the process and what's really nice is several of the folks who were running, came up to me and said, "So glad you won, you have taken the firm in directions that I could never have. You did such a better job than I would've. And I'm thrilled that it worked out this way."
Ira Coleman:
So that's the kind of partnership we are. And there are still people I turn to all the time for great advice, inside and outside the firm.
Ira Coleman:
But I think that going back to the why, it was really easy for me to say, I had a clear vision of where we needed to be, that I needed to have great people around me to help do that. And then I needed the whole partnership to be behind us and executing on it.
Ira Coleman:
So when I'm telling people they're taking a five to 10% compensation hit just to get us kind of back to where we needed to be, so we can get our conflict system well oiled, our client intake well oiled, our technology platform up and all of that stuff.
Ira Coleman:
And that's what we did in 2007. And we were able to deliver that investment back within that year, which was pretty amazing. So then I think I got some credibility with the partners and then in 2018 and we went out and did our biggest acquisition ever, I was able to look them in the eye and say, "Hey, I feel good about this. And I want you to trust me on this." Collectively they did.
Ira Coleman:
And we went forward and we had outsized results from that great acquisition in 2018. And then instead of sitting back on our heels in 2019, we doubled down again and added another 50 plus partners, laterals to grow and develop.
Ira Coleman:
And all at the same time growing our internal resources and growing our client base and adding some really nice clients and some really valuable, nuanced practices to help build out the power alley practices that we have.
Josh King:
The power alley practices of tax, private client healthcare. You decide to make this move to hire this large group from DLA Piper.
Josh King:
We talk so much in this room and the library about M&A, between big companies, how does M&A work between big law firms?
Ira Coleman:
M&A between big law firms is so personal and so individual that you'd be wildly surprised of what could queer a deal and how it really is about personal touch and feel and culture.
Ira Coleman:
And not the not cultural veneer of, "Hey, we all have beautiful offices and shiny cups on our desk," but real culture of helping people out, of going to bat for each other and things like that. And just doing everything you can for a client.
Ira Coleman:
So we look at it as our first thing is indispensability, right? Is this lateral move going to make us more indispensable to our clients? Second thing, is it going to make us more productive, more profitable?
Ira Coleman:
And the reason why we need that is to continue to add to our luster, to add to our brand, to do the things that we need to do so that people know who we are and the quality that we deliver.
Ira Coleman:
And then the last one, and this is the goofy one, is this going to make the place a more fun, a happier place? And I'll talk to laterals and they'll look at me like I have three heads when I go, "These cultural things matter to me."
Ira Coleman:
So I make people pull out their telephone and I say, "What's your Uber rating?" And if somebody's under, and I'm not allowed to give that standard anymore, but you could pick a number and you kind of say, "Wow"-
Josh King:
Something better than Travis Kalanick's Uber rating.
Ira Coleman:
Right. You want them to feel that they treat people well. You feel really good when you're talking to somebody who pulls out their well used Uber rating and it's a 4-95 and you go, "This person's doing something right to the little guys," and that makes us feel good.
Ira Coleman:
So when you do these acquisitions, they are major. They can kind of break the spirit of the firm if you're not careful and you have to manage the culture on both sides, because the people coming in.
Josh King:
Yeah, the laterals are used to DLA Piper's culture and they've got to get used to the happiness factor of Ira Coleman. How does that work?
Ira Coleman:
It gets annoying very quickly, but I would say what you want to give them is you want to give them access and you want to give them introductions and you want to give them portfolio to get things done.
Ira Coleman:
But you also have to manage the culture of your own firm, where the new kids shouldn't get all the cookies and the new kid shouldn't always get all the shiny toys and you want people to feel like there's a fairness to it.
Ira Coleman:
I always say we want to treat people fair. That doesn't mean equal necessarily, but it means fair. And you know who's really good at this? Marty Lipton at Wachtell.
Ira Coleman:
Whenever I talk to Marty I learned something about managing people in relationships and the like. And he's just kind of a very humble guy who doesn't have to be and talk about a guy who's done all kinds of M&A on the biggest stage.
Ira Coleman:
And he's friendly and giving and spends time with me. And it's just a wonderful statement of the kind of character that led the most successful legal institution of our times.
Josh King:
So you're talking about ideas like the indispensability of your firm to your clients. You're talking about doing something right for the little guys. You're talking about asking someone for their phone and checking out what their Uber rating might be.
Josh King:
So from the lows of the lows, after the financial crisis, when McDermott might have rested on its laurels and got a little lazy. You've used a number, maybe I'm misremembering it, of $200,000 profit per partner.
Josh King:
The last number I'm looking at on one of your reports is 2017, 1.7 million in profits per partner. Where are you today? And what does that say?
Ira Coleman:
We crossed the line of $2 million profits per partner this year, which is really exciting this last year, 2019, which is really exciting. But it's not the profits because it means our partners make more money. It's the ability to invest the things that we need to invest in to really service the clients and hire the talent.
Ira Coleman:
And everybody says, "Oh, well, legal salaries are through the roof. And these kids are making a fortune." Yes, that's true. But go look at the tech companies, go look at the financial institutions, go look at the investment banks, all these kids are making more money and they didn't go necessarily to graduate school.
Ira Coleman:
So we're competing for talent with those folks as well. And I think when you look at it in lifestyle, in stress, in all that stuff, we're right up there. So our young folks, they're earning it, nobody's giving it to them. And our clients are being rightfully demanding of the best and brightest from day one.
Ira Coleman:
And it's heavy competition. And we want to be transformational in what we do in being able to say to our clients, "How do you want to be priced? How do you want to be serviced? How do you want to do things in the future? Are you comfortable with us using AI? Are you comfortable with us using outsource services?"
Ira Coleman:
We want to get there and make you comfortable with it. We're not here to say, "We will do everything except compromise our margin." That's not a good partner.
Ira Coleman:
What we want to be able to do is be successful and if we're successful in the manner in which makes you successful, we're worth every penny we get paid.
Josh King:
Worth every penny you get paid. McDermott Will & Emery is one of a few select law firms that is Mansfield 2.0 certified. How does a firm become certified? And what are some of the policies that you put in place to be recognized for your commitment to diversity?
Ira Coleman:
Diversity and inclusion is one of my big initiatives. It's been on the firm's mind for a while, but we try to be now very data driven evidence based in our decisions. So Mansfield 2.0 really helps us with that.
Ira Coleman:
It requires us, when we're considering laterals, to consider a certain amount of laterals of color and diversity. When we're interviewing for leadership positions, we have to interview a certain threshold amounts and clear those diversity thresholds and more than just interviewing, we're placing people in these positions.
Ira Coleman:
They've earned it but we're recognizing them. And we're also really pushing leadership rotations to get more young and diverse people into leadership positions earlier than ever.
Ira Coleman:
So Mansfield 2.0 is a great wake up call to law firms to help push us to do what we should be doing. Just like the Rooney Rule in the NFL.
Ira Coleman:
Hopefully we'll see some changes and we'll really push it forward. We know that diversity helps make better decisions, which is better for clients. So not easier but better.
Josh King:
Mansfield 2.0 exists. The Rooney Rule exists. A lot of critics of the NFL would say that despite the existence of the Rooney Rule, it hasn't been all that successful.
Josh King:
Back when Steven Bochco was writing his 172 episodes of L.A. Law, he created these great parts for Susan Day as Grace Van Owen and Jimmy Smits as Victor Sifuentes.
Josh King:
But that was fiction, Ira. What's happening in the entire industry of law about the state of diversity across the profession and is it happening fast enough?
Ira Coleman:
No, it's not happening fast enough. And Tony Upshaw, my good friend and partner in charge of diversity at our firm has put an edict out.
Ira Coleman:
He serves on our management committee, which is our board of directors. And Tony put an edict out when we were at MIT, we did a management committee meeting at MIT CSAIL, which is the Computer Science Artificial Intelligence Lab.
Ira Coleman:
And when you spend time with those folks, you feel really dumb very quickly. And Tony put out there that we should strive to be the most diverse Am Law 100 firm there is. And so we're using that as our benchmark.
Ira Coleman:
We're not using the fact that maybe we're 50% better in diverse equity partners. Okay, great. We're 3% and others of the 2%. That's not the measure. The measure should be when we get to kind of matching what society is.
Ira Coleman:
And it's not just on the hires. We do a really good job on the early ones in where we miss out, is why are they leaving the system earlier than others? And how can we get them back and how can we not only mentor them, but sponsor folks in this position?
Ira Coleman:
I wouldn't be where I am if I wasn't sponsored. And while I'm not a diverse kid, other than I had no connection to Miami, my parents were from Brooklyn, New York. I went down there to go to school and stayed.
Ira Coleman:
So I really had no network and others took me under their wing and helped make me. And I'll never forget that. And I want us to always do that for others.
Ira Coleman:
And I think especially diverse folks coming in to a law firm where even though it feels comfortable for us, it's got to feel really uncomfortable for some of them.
Ira Coleman:
So we got to make a difference and do the right outreach and not only do it statistically, but do it emotionally.
Josh King:
Talking about doing it emotionally. You've said that the most important trait for a law firm partner is love and compassion. Last year, there were a number of high profile protests at technology companies over the decisions that companies made to work on projects.
Josh King:
But there was recently a boycott of a major firm by Yale students who are unhappy with their client lists and what agency should new or potential lawyers have in deciding what clients to work on?
Ira Coleman:
I think it's hard because I go back to look everybody's entitled to a defense. I'd be careful going down that slippery slope. Can law firms do better? Can we do better? Yes.
Ira Coleman:
But I think it's quick to get ruthless. And that's why I say, "Look at it from a point of view, if you can have some love and compassion and bring that to the job and bring that to leadership, you'll probably do a little bit better." You got to balance that.
Ira Coleman:
Because we also play at my firm in the Ray Dalio approach of radical transparency, radical honesty and a meritocracy of ideas. So it doesn't feel like a lot of love and compassion when you're pointing out some failings.
Ira Coleman:
But if you do it in a way that you show people that you care, we're just trying to make everybody better. I think you're okay.
Ira Coleman:
As far as taking clients, we try to be pretty straight down the middle there. Do things just to make money. If it's completely repugnant then it's going to be very hard to get acceptance on it.
Ira Coleman:
But we also recognize that everybody's entitled to a defense. And even if that doesn't feel great while you're doing it, that's part of what makes America the greatest country on earth and what makes the American judicial system one of the greatest on earth.
Josh King:
We've talked about all these things that have happened to McDermott since the financial crisis, since your ascension to its chairmanship, and all the metrics that you look at that give you a precise view of where you are now.
Josh King:
But you got to go home back to Miami and think about where is my firm going from here? So both geographically and in your core practices, where do you see some of the most unrealized growth that you want to capitalize on?
Ira Coleman:
Well, I think the way we have plotted out healthcare in touching kind of all facets of that industry, we have to continue our ascension in that area. You can't rest on your laurels. So that's one.
Ira Coleman:
It's a tremendously fascinating, highly regulated, constantly changing industry. So you have to stay up on it and be expertise on it all the time, which means adding skill sets, hiring people from the government, hiring people from education, hiring the best and brightest.
Ira Coleman:
And we also, our power alley of trust in estates, is the normal words. But we call it private client where we represent 26th of the 50th wealthiest families around the world and probably acquiring more. These days they operate like businesses and you have to treat them very differently than businesses, but you also have to recognize the financial impact that they have.
Ira Coleman:
And then I would say service delivery models. The big four accounting firms are pushing into our big business. The big four technology firms can very well push into our business. The Google, Amazon's, Apples and Facebook.
Ira Coleman:
So even though it's a wonderful business, it's an amazing profession, you're not immune from that. There are already laws out there in several states that are saying you could have non lawyer partners as owners.
Ira Coleman:
So we're seeing that the guild kind of go away and I hope the apprenticeship model doesn't go away because that's a great way to learn and I would hate to see that go away.
Ira Coleman:
But I think being very savvy in technology wise, being able to represent companies, especially in the technology base, meet them where they are, service them in different ways.
Ira Coleman:
I think we're going to change from having all the answers to the best lawyers are going to ask the right questions. And why we have to ask the right questions? Because machine learning and AI are going to be able to produce answers for us.
Ira Coleman:
So we're going to have to frame the questions in such a way that they get us to the right answers. So I think that's an important thing. And I think developing these knowledge strategies around that and being able to really work with what clients need are going to be what's a key for the future.
Josh King:
We started our conversation, Coney Island, watching your dad, the public school principal dancing in the middle of his peers and his teachers and his students.
Josh King:
We've come down to Miami. We're now in one of the biggest law firms in the world talking about McDermott Will & Emery. Is the legal profession one that you hope that your kids, Zach and Alex, pursue and thrive in?
Ira Coleman:
Alex is a lawyer. So she's doing it. And my son's in the private equity world up here in New York and my wife's a recovering lawyer.
Ira Coleman:
So we have very interesting conversations at the dinner table and some of them are Supreme Court and stuff and some of them are the Kardashian family kind of stuff.
Josh King:
Whether this comes from the Coleman table or just in your reading and talking with your colleagues and partner, what do you think is the biggest issue facing the legal profession in 2020 and beyond?
Ira Coleman:
I really think that you got to take care of people and that take care of people is both physically and mentally. People talk of the war for talent. We talk about it as the love of talent.
Ira Coleman:
So I think folks like Alex Yang who talks about rest and recovery. I think if you hear LeBron James has got an active routine about getting hours of sleep and getting some naps in. Naval Ravikant talks about performing like an elite athlete, work like a lion in, work really hard, then rest a lot. Then repeat that, train for it, repeat that.
Ira Coleman:
I think that we're seeing folks really that's catching on in a big way and it's allowing teams to outperform other teams. So getting measurements around that and showing clients that I think is a pretty neat thing. And I think 2020 is going to deliver on quite a bit of that.
Josh King:
Taking care of people and the love of talent. Thanks so much, Ira, for joining us inside the ICE House.
Ira Coleman:
Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. This was great.
Josh King:
That's our conversation for this week. Our guest was Ira Coleman Chairman of McDermott Will & Emery. If you like what you heard please rate us on iTunes so other folks know where to find us.
Josh King:
And if you've got a comment or a question you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show, email us at [email protected] or tweet at us at ICEHousePodcast.
Josh King:
Our show is produced by Pete Asch with production assistance from Ken Abel and Steven Romanchik. I'm Josh King, your host signing off from the library of the New York Stock Exchange. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next week.
Speaker 1:
Information contained in this podcast was obtained in part from publicly available sources and not independently verified. Neither ICE nor is affiliates make any representations or warranties, express or implied, as to the accuracy or completeness of the information and do not sponsor approve or endorse any of the content here in.
Speaker 1:
All of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes. Nothing here in constitutes an offer to sell, a solicitation of an offer to buy any security or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. Some portions of the proceeding conversation may have been edited for the purpose of information clarity.
