Our practice began in New York in 1987, as the disputes boutique Nils Pakt ran for more than two decades. Pakt was a trial lawyer of the old kind, who took work on a handshake, kept the firm to a dozen lawyers on principle, and refused corporate instructions on the ground that they made a firm timid. In 2010 Eileen Halloran and Tomás Reyes merged their trial practices into it, and the firm took its present form and name. Pakt retired in 2015 and died in 2022.
Halloran and Reyes had both spent their careers inside full-service firms, and they came to Pakt because they had seen the problem he had spent thirty years avoiding. Keeping his name on the door is not sentiment. The constraint he imposed is the one the firm still runs on.
All three had spent years trying cases inside full-service firms. In a firm with a corporate practice, the most valuable client is rarely the one in the courtroom. Conflicts accumulate quietly, the list of parties the firm would rather not sue grows every year, and advice on the merits arrives shaped by relationships the client cannot see.
Taking the transactional practice out removes that problem. It also removes a great deal of revenue, which is why few firms do it. What we get in return is the ability to act against almost anyone, and to tell a client what we actually think a case is worth.
Capacity
The first question a large opponent asks about a firm our size is whether we can absorb the document load, and whether we can run two heavy matters at once. It is a fair question and the answer is structural. We run our own review platform rather than outsourcing it, staffed by fourteen contract lawyers and two analysts under partner supervision, which is where most of a case's cost sits at a full-service firm. On the largest matters we retain a second firm for volume work and keep the argument, the witnesses, and the strategy here. We have run three trials in a twelve month period twice since 2018.
What we do not do is take a case we cannot staff. That is the real constraint on how many instructions we accept each year, and it is why we say no more often than we would like to.
How we staff a case
We are 62 lawyers, 18 of them partners, which is roughly two associates to every partner. The median case is run by five of us, two of them partners, and the lawyer who takes the first witness is the lawyer who read the first document. We do not build teams in order to fill them, and we do not rotate associates through a case to spread training across the year.
In England our own solicitor-advocates appear in the Commercial Court. We instruct the Bar where a specialist advocate improves our client's position, not as a matter of routine.
One consequence is that we turn work away. Another is that our partners carry fewer cases than they would elsewhere, and are expected to know the record without being briefed on it.
