Ed. Note: Welcome to our daily feature Trivia Question of the Day!
Which nearly 80-year-old San Francisco firm became the hottest law shop of the dot-com boom, handling hundreds of tech IPOs and sometimes even taking equity stakes in the startups it represented instead of cash, it nearly doubled in size, to roughly 900 lawyers, in just a few years. But when the bubble burst things came crashing down — its tech clients cratered (some into bankruptcy), a star chairman led a wave of partners out the door, and a last-ditch merger (with Morgan Lewis) collapsed. In January 2003, the partners voted to shut it down, throwing some 1,100 people out of work across 14 offices — the defining law firm casualty of the dot-com crash.
Hint: Founded in 1926, it was long one of San Francisco’s most prestigious firms. Its ousted chairman, Tower Snow, decamped to Clifford Chance with a group of partners. A Slate headline summed up its demise as “The Dot-Firm’s Dot-Bomb.”
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