March 12, 2010
THE DAILY JOURNAL
By Rebecca U. Cho
SAN DIEGO – The legal talent who jump from firm to firm may grab the headlines. But often the man behind the moves in California, making the calls and tapping into the highest levels of law firm leadership to influence the make-up of the state’s legal market, is San Diego-based legal recruiter Larry Watanabe.
His firm, Watanabe Nason & Schwartz, dominates the legal recruiting market in California. A smattering of its San Diego deals alone read like a modern history of major events in the region’s legal services industry: Foley & Lardner’s capture of a 10-attorney intellectual property group from the dissolving Heller Ehrman in San Diego in 2008, the opening of Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker’s San Diego office in the wake of Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison’s dissolution, and Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo’s 12-attorney grab in 2006 from fellow Boston-based firm Fish & Richardson.
Watanabe Nason, which solely brokers partner moves, has consistently placed in recent years between 45 to 60 lawyers per year, according to the firm. Watanabe brokers about 15 to 20 of those deals himself.
And Watanabe says he got to where he is not by being the smartest guy in the room, but by working harder than the person next to him.
“I’ve had competitors tell me, ‘You’re crazy. I can’t believe after all these years you’re still running so hard,'” Watanabe said.
One of the keys to Watanabe’s success is his heavy dependence on technology. His database of about 6,000 clients and candidates is well-known in legal circles. If a potential lateral partner has a question about a law firm’s profits in the last year, Watanabe pulls up the data in seconds. In the same way, he can tell a law firm interested in a candidate whether that lawyer gets along with other firm attorneys or has a good reputation in the state. He possesses two blackberries, just in case he overloads one, and works off of three computers.
“He drives our IT guy crazy,” said Bill Nason, Watanabe’s longtime partner in the business.
He also uses his gadgets to be accessible to his clients 24/7.
“Whether he’s in Hawaii or the mountains or at his son’s baseball game, he’s always on the phone,” said Guy Halgren, the managing partner of Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton, who is based in San Diego. Halgren said his firm’s use of Watanabe pre-dates his nine-year term.
Unlike many other recruiters who come into the business as a second or third career after the law, Watanabe did not get into the business from practicing law. In the 1960s, his parents moved from Maui to Inglewood, where Watanabe was born. After college, he began working for a telecommunications company. When that company was acquired, a call from a head hunter piqued Watanabe’s interest in the field of recruiting. He joined an executive search firm in Los Angeles where he recruited chief financial officers for construction companies. He transitioned into placing construction attorneys and met Gregg Ziskind, a top Los Angeles-based legal recruiter, on one of the deals.
When he joined what is now Ziskind Greene in 1990, Watanabe met future business partner Nason. They spun off into their own legal placement company focusing solely on partner moves in 1997. The firm soon added Ken Schwartz as a recruiter and together, the team set a pace that included long work days and 50 calls a day to potential client law firms and candidates.
“All we did in the early years was pin our ears back and work, mostly out of fear,” Nason said.
Watanabe also began collecting the information on law firms and legal talent that would come to make up his massive database. Eventually, as Watanabe and his team built credibility with firms through one placement after another, Watanabe’s influence with firms began to build.
Keith Wetmore, the chairman of San Francisco-based Morrison & Foerster, said Watanabe has gone to great lengths to know his firm. Watanabe developed the deal that allowed Morrison & Foerster to open a San Diego office in 1999, which has grown to about 70 attorneys.
“He can describe our compensation system almost as well as I can,” Wetmore said. “I think he has a very high profile. You get the feeling that people return his calls.”
Yar Chaikovsky, a prominent intellectual property litigator who Watanabe placed in December at McDermott, Will & Emery in Silicon Valley, said he called upon the recruiter when he was looking into a move from Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal. He said Watanabe knew how to cut through the red tape at law firms and clear conflicts before setting up a meeting.
“He’s one of the few recruiters in the state of California who has the recruiting process down to a machinery operation,” Chaikovsky said.
Watanabe’s great loves are his work and his family, which includes his wife and two sons, Nason said. But his vice is his weakness for cars. As a young recruiter, Watanabe had plastered a picture of a Porsche on his office wall, hoping to work hard enough to be able to afford the real thing someday. About 20 years of sweat, late nights and hard-fought deals later, Watanabe is on his 11th Porsche.
And he has no intentions of slowing down.