Shifting legal practices shake firm foundations.

• Author: Tschida, Anne
• Position: North Carolina law firms

What a racket law firms have been making. They've been merging and moving, splitting and spitting, even learning new tongues in the last two years. No one, it seems, wants to be drowned out.

All of North Carolina's top 10 law firms have added lawyers since the start of 1996. And the state has picked up some major new players. Wall Street's 300-strong Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft and Davis Wright Tremaine, a Seattle-based firm with 275 lawyers, both set up offices in Charlotte in the past 19 months. Locals have spread out. Charlotte's Parker, Poe, Adams & Bernstein bought a German firm in May, giving it an office in Frankfurt.

Much of the commotion involves Atlanta. In June 1996, the state's biggest firm, Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice of Winston-Salem, sucked up a practice there, helping make it the fastest-growing law firm in the country last year. In February, Atlanta's Kilpatrick & Cody merged with Petree Stockton, also of Winston-Salem, making the new combo of 370 lawyers around the nation's 50th largest firm, based on The National Law Journal's 1996 ranking.

Things got cacophonous, though, when Atlanta's third-largest firm, Alston & Bird, merged with Charlotte patent-law firm Bell, Seltzer, Park & Gibson in August. Megafirm and general-practice status didn't sit right with Bell Seltzer's Raleigh office, so later that month 17 of the 19 lawyers there walked, taking much of the business with them. Their former employer sued them for $1 million, a jolting move in what has been a genteel Tar Heel industry. The rebel firm then made counterclaims, asking $1.4 million for back pay and stock holdings.

All the changes are enough to make cocktail hour downright edgy. Will the law field be whittled to a handful of huge firms and some small, penniless ones? Will it be dominated by faceless, out-of-state-based rivals that follow only the laws of the market? "I would say there's a concern about a cutthroat climate emerging," says Elizabeth Quick, a partner at Womble Carlyle and president of the North Carolina Bar Association. "No longer will the old handshake between two law graduates of Wake and UNC suffice."

The Bell Seltzer defection represents what everyone feared most from the urge to merge. Being slapped with a suit "was shocking," says Mitchell Bigel, a partner in the breakaway firm, Myers Bigel Sibley & Sajovec. Bell Seltzer partner Jack Sullivan answers that Bigel and company did "what no decent partners would ever do." There could be...