New chairman in a new job at Ballard Spahr
Mark Stewart is taking over as chairman, which becomes a full-time post at the law firm.
After a long career trying cases on behalf of pharmaceutical companies and other corporate and institutional clients, Mark Stewart will hang up his litigation spurs July 1 and take over as chairman of Ballard Spahr L.L.P., the prominent Center City law firm.
Stewart, who has spent his entire career at the firm, beginning as a summer associate, will have to fill some large shoes.
He replaces Arthur Makadon, who will return to the full-time practice of law after leading the firm since 2002. Makadon is known as a mercurial and charismatic presence; it is anticipated that Stewart likely will present a more low-key profile.
The transition will be marked not only by a change of personalities at the top, but also by a change in the job.
Stewart, 55, will be Ballard's first full-time chairman, in keeping with an ongoing trend among larger Philadelphia firms to have lawyers who no longer practice much law serve as chief executive.
The thinking is that law firms have become too large and complex to be effectively managed by part-time executives.
In Stewart's case, the decision to make him a full-time chairman resulted from discussions with Ballard Spahr partners around the country, who spoke of the need for a chief executive who regularly visited the firm's scattered offices and touched base with important clients.
The 475-lawyer firm has 13 offices in the United States, but none abroad.
"The partners seemed to think that the firm was ready for a full-time chairman," said Stewart, who lives in Swarthmore with his wife and children. "I will do more traveling, and I will spend more time away from Philadelphia."
In contrast to the stereotypical image of a litigator as brash and confrontational, Stewart projects a quiet and disarmingly accessible personality. Paradoxically, that has served him well in the confrontational world of litigation, where highly charged emotions can obscure good judgment, says Ballard partner John Langel.
"They are slow to anger, and that is a wonderful trait," Langel, chairman of the labor and employment group at Ballard, said of litigators such as Stewart.
Besides his litigation practice, Stewart has served as the firm's partner for strategic planning, so he has long focused on trying to match the firm's practice areas and geographic footprint with the roiling legal marketplace.
He and Makadon worked together five years ago on the firm's expansion into Phoenix. It took some deft maneuvering to pull it off.
A planned merger with the Phoenix law firm of Fennemore Craig fell apart when the proposal failed to win a two-thirds majority of Fennemore's partners.
Ballard did recruit a group of key Fennemore partners and associates to form the core of a Phoenix office. Despite its focus on real estate, which has been particularly hard hit in the Phoenix area, the office has prospered through a strong corporate practice and surprisingly robust business in real estate workouts.
Real estate, as it turns out, has been a significant profit center for the firm, which reported revenue of $273 million last year and profit per equity partner of $525,000, which had increased 22 percent from the year before.
In March, in one $460 million transaction, the firm represented the buyer of eight apartment complexes in the Washington area.
While Stewart says it is nearly inevitable that Ballard will open offices in the Midwest and in New York, the firm for the moment will focus on filling important slots in its existing offices. He also expects to build out the firm's Washington office, with a greater emphasis on regulatory work.
Stewart says he expects the white-collar defense and consumer-finance practices to grow as government regulation and oversight intensifies.
"The primary focus," Stewart said, "is going to be to ask department chairs [about] gaps in practice areas and then to fill those gaps in existing offices."