Last August, when the renowned trial lawyer David Boies announced the hiring of David M. Bernick, general counsel at the tobacco giant Philip Morris, he called the move a “huge step†for his firm, Boies Schiller & Flexner.
But after just a year at Boies Schiller, Mr. Bernick is leaving. He is expected to announce on Friday that he is moving to the law firm Dechert, according to people briefed on the matter.
“David is simply one of the best lawyers out there,†Andrew J. Levander, the chairman of Dechert, said in a statement provided to The New York Times. “He is one of a handful of elite lead trial lawyers operating on the national stage.â€
It is the third time in recent months that a well-known partner has left Mr. Boies’s firm. In April, Matthew Friedrich, a defense lawyer who formerly served as acting head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, decamped to Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer. And David W. Shapiro, a former interim United States attorney in San Francisco, started his own firm.
The moves are raising eyebrows in the corporate law world, given that few partners have ever left Boies Schiller, which Mr. Boies started in 1997 and built into one of the country’s most profitable law firms.
Last year, Boies Schiller partners earned an average of $2.7 million, according to the magazine American Lawyer.
Mr. Bernick’s departure is in large part because conflicts of interest with existing Boies Schiller clients prohibited him from representing certain other companies, said Dawn Schneider, a spokeswoman for Boies Schiller.
“We wish him well for the future,†Ms. Schneider said.
Still, the departures highlight the transformation that has taken place at corporate law firms over the last several decades and has only accelerated in recent years. Once staid partnerships where lawyers spent their entire careers, firms are increasingly collections of individuals with portable books of business. It is an era of free agents, where partners commonly switch firms, sometimes obtaining multimillion-dollar guaranteed contracts. Dechert, the firm that Mr. Bernick is joining, has grown rapidly by aggressively recruiting lawyers from rivals.
All of the movement comes at a challenging time for the law industry.
The market for high-end legal services continues to shrink, according to a recent report by the law firm group at Citi Private Bank.
Industry analysts say there are too many lawyers at the country’s largest firms, with some estimating the excess capacity at as much as 10 percent of the lawyer population.
Many expect a round of law-firm layoffs. Earlier this year, Weil Gotshal & Manges became the first large firm to announce heavy cutbacks. A leading firm with about 1,200 lawyers, Weil let go of 60 lawyers and more than 100 support staff and also cut compensation of some of its partners.
The partner moves at Boies Schiller are unrelated to any economic weakness at the firm, people briefed on the matter said.
Mr. Boies and his partners are working on a number of prominent assignments. Jonathan D. Schiller is leading the firm’s representation of the nutritional-supplement maker Herbalife in its battle with the activist investor William A. Ackman. He is also defending Barclays in cases related to the possible manipulation of the interest rate known as Libor. Mr. Boies continues to handle numerous lawsuits for Maurice R. Greenberg, the former head of the American International Group, and is expected to represent the British financier Guy Hands in a retrial of a fraud case against Citigroup this fall.
Rather than reflecting problems at the 250-lawyer firm, people say, the departures are explicable on a case-by-case basis.
Conflict-of-interest issues aside, Mr. Bernick’s hiring was always seen as something of a “wild card†inside Boies Schiller because the firm rarely brings in partners from the outside. Mr. Bernick joined Philip Morris in 2010 after 32 years at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis, where he defended tobacco makers, breast implant manufacturers and asbestos companies. Then, after only two years at Philip Morris, he joined Boies Schiller, saying that he missed trying cases.
At Boies Schiller, Mr. Bernick earlier this year lost a trial defending Dow Chemical in a urethane price-fixing lawsuit. A federal judge ordered Dow to pay a $1.2 billion judgment in the case, triple a $400 million jury verdict. Dow is appealing the order.
This week, Mr. Bernick, 59, filed a lawsuit on behalf of two American Indian tribes against New York state’s financial regulatory agency, challenging its crackdown on Internet lending businesses, several of which are owned by tribes. He is expected to take that case to Dechert.
As for Mr. Friedrich, the white-collar criminal defense partner in Washington, he left for Freshfields, a larger firm, because he wanted a bigger platform to handle large international investigations, said a person familiar with his thinking. And Mr. Shapiro, who spent a decade at Boies Schiller in San Francisco, had long wanted to hang his own shingle, a person said.
Mr. Friedrich, who is on vacation, could not be reached for comment, nor could Mr. Shapiro.
A lingering concern at Boies Schiller is planning for succession once Mr. Boies decides to retire. Mr. Boies, 72, is one of the country’s most celebrated lawyers, having represented the former vice president Al Gore at the Supreme Court over the contested 2000 presidential election. He shows no signs of slowing down, having recently represented the software maker Oracle in several matters and helped to lead the successful challenge of Proposition 8, California’s ban on same-sex marriage.
Boies Schiller has other leaders besides Mr. Boies in place, with Mr. Schiller and Donald L. Flexner serving as managing partners. It has begun transitioning some management responsibilities to other partners, and continues to grow, with plans to open a London office in the coming months.
