Weil, Gotshal & Manges

I'm your host, Victor Wong.

On this episode, I present to you Andrew Simon, the Chief AI and Innovation Officer at Weil, Gottschall, and Manges.

Andrew has one of the most interesting career paths that I've come across.

He started in BigLaw, then left to become an entrepreneur, and then spent a decade at Boston Consulting Group as a partner.

So we're very excited about that.

And so I just did it myself because I go, rather than explain this to somebody, let me just... knock it out.

And just to further take you through how the process works at Weil, the IS application development team, and I think that crew is awesome.

They took what I did and then they put the things you need in enterprise around it, like the Entra authentications, right? So the Entra IDs and the other hooks we need to make sure it works in the current cloud environment while we're in the midst of standing up a more advanced, you know, AI platform.

I moved to the Boston office of the firm a few years later.

So I was at Weil for about nine years total.

I became a partner at Prince Lobel, a Boston-based firm where I continued to be a litigator.

And then I ended up having the opportunity to move in-house about 12 years or so into practice.

Boston, people tend to know each other more.

It's a little more tight-knit.

When I transferred into the Boston office of Weil, I didn't have much of a network at all in Boston.

I grew up in New England, so I have roots here, but I went through college quickly and then moved to New York and didn't have a deep professional network in Boston.

Under BC's proposal, the PIF walks away with nothing except maybe releases...

so we can avoid having the sheiks deposed by Bryson's counsel at Weil,

if there are any lawyers left at Weil, by the way.

Not nice.

But you kind of need golfers to have a golf league and Liv immediately asked the judge, again, friend of the pod, Michael Kaplan, to recheck every one of those big guaranteed contracts.

I can't express how little that's true.

So let's talk about Weil.

I mean, we've talked about this a lot over the last week.

We've had a few stories.

so much more happening.

Yeah.

So let's get into what's going on with Weil Gottschall.

Yeah, we talked about it last week, but as a quick reminder, while Gottschall lost its biggest rainmaker to the lateral market, the white hot lateral partner market, Mike Aiello took his book of business and I believe five attorneys, partners to Cravath.

I'm Christian Smith, the lawyer's litigation editor.

And today on the podcast, we are joined by the Lawyers' Director of Insight, Matt Byrne, and our Deputy Editor, City, Rachel Maloney, as we ask whether Weil's wobbles are here to stay.

And as is customary, let us start with a little bit of a recap to understand the extent of the wobbles at Weil, Rachel.

Yeah, it's probably not been a week that Weil got so wanted to have.

A wobbly week?

A wobbly week, yes.

And I would say that the key moment when people really have started looking was just over a week ago when Mike Aiello's move to Cravath was reported.

And he's this very big, important corporate partner in New York.

Sure

... uh, which is let's talk about, uh, Weil, uh, who, uh-

Yeah, let's talk about some lateral partner mania, right?

Yeah.

We never tell a joke

... [laughs] this one, I, I really, I really stopped when I read this, read this one.

So, um, Mike Aiello, uh, formerly of Weil, uh, moved to Cravath.

Uh, he was the corporate, uh, the partner in charge of the corporate department, whatever, so he moved.