It’s been a tumultuous period for Quinn Emanuel, the world’s largest litigation firm.
Business has been great. In the past year, the firm has represented Elon Musk in his takeover of Twitter and FTX in the crypto exchange’s bankruptcy proceedings. It’s in discussions to represent Credit Suisse investors against the Swiss government.
But behind the scenes, a shift in power at QE has been the talk of elite law firm circles. Last year, the firm installed two comanaging partners to serve alongside its founder John Quinn — marking the first time in the firm’s 37 years that Quinn would share the helm of the litigation giant he founded.
Indeed, the firm — known as a singular, even freewheeling, institution that brands itself as the “#1 Most Feared Law Firm in the World” — may appear to be less in the image of its founder as a generational shift brings changes.
“I have a growing recognition that this enterprise is huge and that I’m missing things,” says Quinn.
“There are things that I’m sure I didn’t pay enough attention to. And those guys have their own ideas. They’ll look at things and they’ll have views and speak up.”
Quinn has invited me to his home high up in the hills of Pasadena, California. From here, at the edge of his sprawling property, one of America’s most successful trial lawyers has a miles-wide view of the mountains, a golf course, and the Rose Bowl stadium, where he likes to run steps. A protein drink, laptop, and a cigar smoldering on the edge of an ashtray are all within reach. At 71, the once fire-breathing litigator seems at ease.
In addition to Quinn, Insider spoke with 60 current and former QE attorneys, as well as dozens of others, including competitors, friends, and law-school classmates of the firm’s senior management. Together, they revealed previously unreported internal firm rivalries, tensions stemming from the generational changing of the guard, and insights into a revamping of the firm’s partnership.
They also offered the definitive account of how Quinn loosened what some saw as his viselike grip on the business.
The story traces back to the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when attorneys grew concerned about the firm’s financial health. The moment served as a catalyst that brought more lawyers into firm management. Until then, Quinn was its sole managing partner, well known for taking his four-lawyer boutique and transforming it into a 1,000-lawyer giant.
Sitting on his Pasadena bluff, and later from Quinn’s home library, with its set of Japanese armor from the 1700s, Quinn reflected on his firm’s future, his career, and a competitive drive that still burns as deeply as it did when he was in kindergarten, training hard for a skipping contest at field day.
‘Once you let people into your tent, it’s hard to get them out’
For years, Quinn had made his views on the matter known: He wasn’t a big fan of committees.
While he often consulted with partners on business decisions, Quinn liked to think of the firm as scrappy — without the layers of bureaucracy that he saw at his Big Law competitors. It wasn’t like his firm was developing products or managing portfolio companies like its larger private-equity clients. All it had to focus on was bringing cases and scouting out new opportunities.
“We are taking people and putting them together with people who have legal problems,” says Quinn. “There isn’t a whole lot to it.”
By the time COVID hit in 2020, QE had more than $1 billion in annual revenue. A partner’s compensation could go well into the eight figures. Its head count, fueled by fees from bet-the-company cases, had swelled to 900 lawyers in 30 offices around the world.
But the pandemic posed unique challenges. Courtrooms had shuttered around the country and depositions were placed on hold. With billable hours down and no clear answer for how long the crisis would last, layoffs and pay cuts were announced across the industry.
To keep his sprawling operation updated, Quinn issued voicemail and video messages. While associates appreciated the transparency, some partners thought his pep talks lacked specifics. These naysayers weren’t starry-eyed 20-somethings fresh out of law school; they were some of the heaviest-hitting trial lawyers in the world, and their egos were even bigger than their bank accounts.
Inside QE, lawyers worried that Quinn was handling too much on his own.
Some of them approached Quinn with their concerns. Together, they came up with a plan to amass a cash reserve: Partners agreed to temporarily forgo pay, according to people who were involved. They also fetched a line of credit from City National Bank.
By the end of 2020, business snapped back and they avoided a cash crunch.
“The pandemic was a good time for all of us to reflect on life and its lack of permanence and we had a lot of discussions,” says Susheel Kirpalani, a partner who was involved in the talks. “We all thought it was important that the world understands this is not a one generation law firm.”
For the first time in its history, QE had formed something resembling a management committee. Called a “service committee,” it consisted of some of the firm’s biggest business generators, and its purpose was to serve the partnership.
Quinn says he embraced the idea. “It’s made my life a hell of a lot easier,” he says.
At least one partner who was involved, who like many lawyers interviewed for this story insisted on anonymity to avoid offending colleagues, questioned just how welcoming Quinn had been to the change.
“Once you let people into your tent, it’s hard to get them out,” the partner said.
The rainmakers
One lawyer from New York was known for his propensity to challenge Quinn.
And as the COVID-19 pandemic dragged on through 2021, that lawyer and his fellow partners believed there needed to be changes to the firm’s partnership, including raising the bar for entry, installing a more rigorous vetting process, and weeding out underperformers.
Michael Carlinsky had joined QE in 2003 from the law firm Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe. He had quickly established himself as a key rainmaker, handling many of the firm’s biggest financial disputes and helping to put New York on a path to outproduce QE’s Los Angeles headquarters.
Carlinsky and Quinn were known to support and respect each other, while also going through periods when they weren’t on speaking terms. (Such periods rarely went on for longer than 48 hours, at least according to Carlinsky.) Quinn’s email etiquette, specifically his habit of sending curt, subject-line-only messages, was among the things that created friction between them.
“I love John,” Carlinsky says, leaning back in his chair in his New York office.
“I consider John to be one of my closest friends.”
For his part, Quinn believes he and Carlinsky share many of the same qualities. “Mike is a brilliant guy,” he says. “He’s like me in that if there’s more time and more things that can be done, you’re never gonna say no.”
But Carlinsky also wasn’t a yes-man. Known for his blunt demeanor, he was one of the few partners who lawyers could turn to if they wanted to take up a grievance with Quinn.
As the world began to return to normal in 2022, a number of partners approached Carlinsky with concerns.
Some of their competitors had surpassed QE in the profit rankings, thanks to a deluge of mergers-and-acquisitions work. Meanwhile, there were concerns that the QE partnership had become bloated: The firm had just promoted 18 associates to partner, the highest number ever, while some existing partners — many on the West Coast — weren’t pulling their weight, some thought.
Carlinsky often discussed these matters with Bill Burck, a high-flying Washington, DC, lawyer who represented more than ten top Trump officials, including Steve Bannon, in the Justice Department’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. His other clients have included the hedge fund Citadel and the NFL owners Robert Kraft and Stephen Ross.
On paper, Burck and Carlinsky couldn’t be more different.
Carlinsky dug his career out of the dirt. He grew up in a rough neighborhood in Brooklyn and went to Susquehanna University and Hofstra Law School, ultimately landing at the New York firm Weil Gotshal with the help of a reference from a professor. He clawed his way into the circles of the Wall Street elite, eventually taking on AIG as a client.
“I didn’t have a silver spoon or a plastic spoon,” says Carlinsky. “I had nothing. I accomplished what I have against all odds, through many challenges, and I’ve just succeeded.”
Burck, on the other hand, has a softer touch than the grizzled street fighter. Carlinsky jokes that meeting Burck is like meeting the next president of the United States.
Burck went to Phillips Exeter and Yale University. He was editor in chief of the law review at Yale Law School, clerked for a Supreme Court justice, and joined the US Attorney’s office in Manhattan. He worked on the prosecution team that sent Martha Stewart to prison on insider-trading charges, and went on to serve as deputy general counsel to President George W. Bush.
Carlinsky had assumed he wouldn’t like him. “I’ve just never seen a résumé like that,” says Carlinsky. “It was the most ridiculous thing.” But they chatted for 90 minutes in a conference room, and Carlinsky was sold.
“That night, my wife goes, ‘You gotta stop talking about this guy. It’s like you have a man crush on him,'” recalls Carlinsky. “And I said, ‘I think I do!'”
Before they knew it, Carlinsky and Burck were meeting for summer barbecues at Carlinsky’s home in the Hamptons.
The two men were clearly closer to each other than they were with Quinn. And after Burck joined the firm, they often commiserated about internal firm politics. At one point in recent years, they even discussed leaving QE and forming a boutique firm together. Both men say the discussions never reached a serious stage. But each lawyer commands more than $100 million in business, and their departure would have been cataclysmic for QE.
When they spoke with Quinn about becoming comanaging partners in early 2022, neither presented it as an ultimatum.
They didn’t have to.
Quinn already knew through his own channels that Carlinsky, at least, was talking about leaving, though he insists the prospect of a departure is not what drove Carlinsky’s promotion at QE. It was well thought-out, Quinn says, and conversations took place over multiple phone calls. At one point, Quinn even considered whether they should form an executive committee of four or five people, a larger team than what they eventually settled on.
“My goal was consensus, consensus, consensus,” says Quinn. “Everybody should be happy to the extent possible. I stand by the results.”
‘The Benevolent Dictator’
Over three decades at the helm of QE, Quinn was known in some circles as the firm’s “Benevolent Dictator.”
Quinn settled everything from how attorneys were compensated to which party the firm should represent in cases where its services were sought by opposite sides of a dispute. If a lawyer wanted to attend a conference or write off a bill to a client, those things required Quinn’s approval, too.
Quinn, who took home more than $15 million during the firm’s best years, disputes this characterization, saying that he only has a job if his partners respect and trust him. And, indeed, many of the QE lawyers interviewed for this story credited Quinn’s leadership, saying he assembled the firm by identifying talent and then giving them sufficient runway to build out their practices.
“When we prepare for a trial, he listens to everyone in the room; it doesn’t matter whether you are senior or junior,” says Victoria Maroulis, a longtime QE partner who worked with Quinn on behalf of Samsung in an intellectual-property fight with Apple.
“He wants to hear everyone’s input.”
As consensus-driven as Quinn may be, however, the firm has grown fast. Some partners have felt cut out of the loop.
For instance, when Quinn has circulated how much he paid partners in a quarterly email, they were sometimes surprised to see the hefty sums going to some of their colleagues. Unlike other law firm leaders who zero in on their attorneys’ client generation, Quinn paid lawyers more subjectively, taking into account an attorney’s skills in the courtroom and their reputation in a certain market. But he also didn’t disclose how he arrived at the figures, leading some to grumble about favoritism.
One former firm partner in California says he believes Quinn’s inner circle generally got better deals.
“I could name off the bat 12 partners who are massively overcompensated, based on merit, book of business, or based on anything,” the former partner said.
“It’s a question of who John has loyalty toward.”
Quinn rejected this characterization, saying he constantly solicited feedback and surveyed partners to confirm they liked the system.
Their approval rating never fell below 86 percent, he says.
A bitter split
Five years ago, an upheaval in QE’s New York office showed what could happen if partners became unhappy.
In January 2018, a group of some of the firm’s biggest business generators, including Philippe Selendy and Faith Gay, unexpectedly announced they were striking out on their own.
Selendy was known for suing the big banks in the wake of the financial crisis over mortgage-backed securities fraud; Gay’s clients included Novartis, Colgate, and Coca-Cola.
“Everyone was like, ‘Whoa,'” recalls one former QE attorney.
Quinn, in particular, didn’t take the news well. When Gay circulated a goodbye poem to her colleagues, Quinn replied with a scathing firm-wide email.
The firm, he wrote, had made Gay a star. He accused her of ingratitude, revealing that QE had paid her well over $100 million during her time there. After the email circulated, it was published on the website Above the Law.
“I practiced law at a bunch of places and I never saw a partner make an ad hominem attack like that in a firm-wide email,” says the former QE attorney.
The firm also sued Gay and Selendy, with QE claiming they owed the firm a cut of their client billings, citing a provision in the partnership agreement that claimed 10% of revenue from clients they originated at the firm. (The matter was later sent to arbitration, a private forum where parties can hash out their disputes in secrecy. Gay and Selendy declined to comment.)
With the benefit of distance, Quinn now downplays what happened, saying he’s in touch with them and they may even refer business to one another.
In the months after the departures, though, some partners criticized Quinn’s response.
“It was kind of a shock to the system,” one QE partner recalls.
“If they’re not happy, what’s going on? There was a feeling that part of the reason they left was that they didn’t want to be under the yoke of John from a management perspective.”
‘If you had a concern, he was the guy you’d go to’
Well before Carlinsky served as a messenger to Quinn, there was a more senior lawyer who had occupied that position for many of the firm’s growth years. Bill Urquhart had been Quinn’s No. 2 since the 1980s and had long served as the glue that kept partners together.
Disarmingly casual, Urquhart was the sort of lawyer who might show up to a meeting dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and flip-flops. He liked to tell people that there are many talented lawyers in the world, but clients tended to hire people who they enjoyed spending time with. He had a knack for seeing the potential in people and recruited many of QE’s top partners.
“When you met him, you couldn’t help but like him,” says Ken Chiate, a QE partner. “He persuaded people one by one.”
When Urquhart died in 2019, from complications stemming from a bone-marrow transplant, he left a chasm at the firm that was difficult to fill. In one sense, the concerns about Quinn’s management might be traced back to the firm losing a key counterbalance to its short-fused founder.
Urquhart often served as a buffer between Quinn and other partners, some of whom found Quinn’s management style abrasive, one partner said. Another partner recalled once clashing with Quinn during a firm meeting and then getting a call from Urquhart, who tried to smooth things over.
“If you had a concern, he was the guy you’d go to,” one partner said of Urquhart. “So when he died, that kind of went away.”
Quinn and Urquhart’s friendship dated back to the 1970s when they both worked as associates at the New York firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore. It was there that Urquhart encouraged Quinn to become a litigator, telling him that transactional work required compromise — something he thought Quinn was incapable of.
“John is very wise, but he’s a gladiator at heart,” Urquhart told me in an interview at his Los Angeles office two years before his death.
“I call him the Terminator myself. You remember the Terminator? There was nothing he couldn’t wipe out.”
For decades after that, the two traveled together on international trips, including one where they joined the running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain.
“Frankly, my life has been much lonelier without him,” says Quinn. “He and I used to go everywhere.”
The early years
In the firm’s early years, associates looked to Quinn like he was an oracle, remembers one colleague from that time.
Quinn grew up in a Mormon family in Greenwich, Connecticut, and Bountiful, Utah, then headed east to study at Harvard and land his first job, before returning to the West Coast, where he settled.
In opening what was then called Quinn and Emanuel, in 1986, Quinn hustled to bring in clients. He had launched the firm with four associates from the LA office of the New York firm Reboul MacMurray, and they brought with them clients such as the defense firms Lockheed Martin and Parsons Corporation, as well as the toy maker Mattel. Within the first year, Quinn had landed the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, the organization that produces the Oscars.
“John ran essentially every aspect of the firm,” recalls Doug Kuber, an attorney who worked at the firm in the 1990s. “He made every major decision, from office space to phone service. And it was, you know, manageable for quite some time.”
Kuber and other lawyers say Quinn was a caring mentor. He used to order the transcripts of depositions and review them with associates, making helpful critiques, one of them said. When the firm grew, he had a way of making people feel valued, and the firm experienced relatively little turnover.
“He was the most supportive managing partner I’ve ever experienced, really,” says Adrian Pruetz, an intellectual-property attorney who worked at QE through the 1990s and 2000s.
“He introduced me to so many clients.”
As is the case with many startups, the firm also had its growing pains.
Some of its early hires didn’t pan out.
Once, they brought on an associate from Cravath who appeared to have great credentials, having graduated from Ivy League schools. Not long into his tenure, he borrowed some cash from a partner. The associate told a colleague he was taking off to a small fishing village in Japan. “He disappeared,” recalls one former QE partner.
“That was when we discovered he had never graduated from law school.”
Something similar happened with the firm’s bookkeeper, an older Dutch woman with a thick accent. An associate noticed something was off when the bookkeeper appeared at a partner’s wedding in a Ferrari, a pricier ride than he would have imagined. Then, she suddenly went missing. She had stolen more than $1 million from the firm and took off to Mexico.
As chaotic as the firm’s internal affairs could be, however, Quinn was laser-focused in the courtroom. One of his early tactics entailed looking up at the ceiling when an opposing party shared damning documents with a jury. Since it appeared he was drowsy and uninterested, the jury paid no attention to the documents, said a lawyer who worked with him.
What really catapulted the firm to the big leagues, though, was a case in the ’90s, when General Motors sued competitor Volkswagen, seeking $5 billion over claims that the company stole its trade secrets. VW agreed to pay GM $100 million, and the case thrust Quinn into the spotlight.
In time, the firm’s client list grew to include many of the world’s largest corporations, such as Google, Samsung, and AIG. It also had a role in high-profile criminal cases, like defending Bill Cosby in his sexual-assault trial. “That was pre-MeToo,” Quinn notes.
Whereas Quinn had his head down preparing for depositions and discovery, Urquhart, who joined the firm in 1988, was recruiting clients and lawyers in QE’s quest for “world domination.” He was known for his persistence, like calling prospective hires repeatedly on their cellphones. He once even sent the former dean of Stanford Law School a pack of QE business cards with her name on them. (She later joined the firm.)
“You look back on it and those years were just a blur,” Quinn says. “It was like 24/7.”
In 2000, QE sent marketing packages to prospective clients in the form of fake hand grenades. The items arrived in a box, with pictures of soldiers inside and a note saying, “Going to court is like going to war; arm yourselves.” The firm had cleared the packages with a postal inspector, but that didn’t stop bomb squads from later descending on the recipients’ offices.
“I spoke to each and every one of the bomb squads,” recalls Steve Madison, a QE partner who has close ties with law-enforcement agencies, having represented Los Angeles, its police department, and mayor.
“I told them all the facts,” he adds. “I said we feel terrible. If we could pay the cost of the response, we’d be happy to do that.”
“None of them took us up on that.”
One former firm lawyer took issue with what he believed was a false sense of machismo. Some lawyers at QE made analogies between the practice of law and warfare, he said, sometimes referring to themselves as SEAL Team Six.
“You’re sitting in a chair,” this person said. “It’s not Afghanistan.”
A new era
Urquhart recruited Carlinsky and Burck, and both men looked to him as a mentor.
“I’ve never met a human being who could embrace people and turn them into his close friends like Bill Urquhart,” says Carlinsky.
Carlinsky, by contrast, can have little patience with people. And in his current role of managing partner, he often delegates the mediation of internal disputes to Burck, who is more of a diplomat.
Carlinsky and Quinn, meanwhile, have clashed over personnel decisions.
Carlinsky has pushed for pay cuts to partners who Quinn has handsomely compensated. As fiery as Quinn can be, he is also known for his loyalty. When a partner had a stroke and became disabled, Quinn kept him on payroll and retained his partner status. When another attorney suffered from a drug problem, he paid to put him through rehab. Carlinsky took no issue with those matters. In fact, the disabled man was his friend. But in other cases, Quinn was simply close with partners who Carlinsky felt were past their prime, and should be respectfully managed out.
In some ways, the friction traces back to how QE expanded over the years, adding New York and DC litigators who ultimately became some of the firm’s biggest business producers.
“There was certainly a feeling in the California offices that the people in New York thought they were head and shoulders better than anyone in California,” recalls one former firm partner of the inter-firm dynamics of the 2000s and 2010s.
“We felt we were viewed or treated as chopped liver.”
This rivalry also put a strain on Quinn’s leadership.
One lawyer in New York said that lawyers could get irritated receiving orders from Quinn. Part of the frustration had to do with the fact that Quinn was working remotely from Los Angeles and couldn’t speak with lawyers in person. But it also stemmed from the belief that Quinn wasn’t as big of a rainmaker as some of the New York partners.
As one of their first agenda items as comanaging partners, Carlinsky and Burck are taking a fresh look at QE’s partnerships.
They’ve had discussions with certain individuals about production levels and created a committee to review partnership applications from associates throughout the year.
Working with Burck and Carlinsky could help Quinn navigate the firm’s generational transition, which can require difficult conversations with people who played an integral role in the firm’s creation. But some wonder how stable the firm will be if it were to lose some partners who may have benefited from Quinn’s protection. Since the firm expanded by poaching competitors, some believe there’s not much glue holding people together, outside of money.
Relationships broken and forged
During a family trip to Croatia in 2015, Quinn visited the Museum of Broken Relationships and immediately identified with what he saw. So much about practicing law and sitting at the helm of a huge firm is about relationships.
The following year, he opened an offshoot of the museum in Los Angeles, a series of crowdsourced exhibits displaying items from breakups, such as a wedding dress from a marriage that lasted three years, red heels worn by a dominatrix, and a teddy bear holding an “I Love You” heart, according to a New York Times profile of the project.
The museum was short-lived and shuttered in 2017. But Quinn still thinks about it, having dealt with breakups of his own.
When asked about the 2018 departures that got him so riled up, he likens the episode to a girlfriend emailing to say that she’s leaving you. He received the news of the departures as he was driving to a lunch meeting in Century City, and it sent him into a fury.
“It’s like breaking up,” he says.
“We had so much to be proud of what we had done in that New York office.”
When it comes to Quinn’s relationship with Burck and Carlinsky, Quinn says they mostly agree on decision-making. And when they disagree, the split varies. Sometimes he agrees with Carlinsky; other times he agrees with Burck.
“You hear of some firms where they’re like factions,” says Quinn, “and they even kind of take pleasure in some other lawyers’ mishaps or failures. And I really don’t think there’s any of that at our firm.”
On the other hand, Quinn says his own future at the firm hinges on his colleagues’ continued respect for him. How they perceive his value is ultimately going to be what determines how long he stays.
Quinn says he’d like to continue in his role. “But that’s going to be up to, well … Can I deliver?”
(This story has been updated.)
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