McGlinchey Stafford vote to shut down reshuffles Louisiana legal landscape

The decision by McGlinchey Stafford PLLC leaders this week to shutter their powerhouse law firm after more than 50 years sent shock waves across south Louisiana’s legal community, and even took some of the firm’s attorneys by surprise.

It also began reshaping the local legal landscape. In the days since the announcement, at least two firms have announced that McGlinchey attorneys will be joining them, bringing lucrative practices and longtime clients along.

New Orleans-based Adams and Reese said Thursday it is hiring nearly a third of McGlinchey’s Baton Rouge office — 11 attorneys and two paralegals — from the real estate and corporate transactions group. More announcements are expected to follow, as firms try to snag top McGlinchey talent before the competition does.

Amid the reshuffling, the full picture of what caused McGlinchey’s partners who own the firm, known as equity members, to vote to dissolve is starting to emerge. According to attorneys familiar with the situation and a statement from the firm’s managing partner, Michael Ferachi, McGlinchey had been struggling for a while. It had lost several highly skilled attorneys that had lucrative client lists, announcements from rival firms show, and departures had accelerated in recent months.

Now, dozens of secretaries and back-office staff are scrambling for positions, according to social media posts. Some younger attorneys or attorneys without large books of business are also looking for work.

Loyola University law professor Dane Ciolino said they’ll be doing so in a Louisiana legal market that’s more competitive and less lucrative than it used to be.

“Big cases with high billable hours are fewer and father between than 30 or 40 years ago because we don’t have the big companies that generated that kind of work,” said Ciolino. “As the business community goes, so goes the legal community.”

Big dreams

It’s not unusual for mid-sized law firms like McGlinchey to experience ups and down, lose groups of attorneys and merge or sell to other firms. But according to 10 other attorneys in New Orleans and Baton Rouge who agreed to be interviewed for this is story but declined to give their names, it was surprising that McGlinchey’s owners voted to dissolve.

The New Orleans-based firm was among the most aspirational and aggressive in the city when it was founded in 1974. Back then, the city’s legal community was dominated by a handful of old-line firms populated by socially prominent attorneys.

McGlinchey sought to be different.

Founding partners Graham Stafford and Dermott McGlinchey were young, ambitious and smart, those who knew them remember. They wanted their firm to be taken seriously, setting up offices in One Shell Square, now the Hancock Whitney Center, then the city’s newest and tallest skyscraper.

The firm started out doing mostly insurance defense, which bills at a lower hourly rate and isn’t as prestigious as corporate transactions. But it quickly expanded as attorneys logged long hours and pursued out-of-state clients, which was less common then than today. They also sought to recruit the best and brightest young talent coming out of law school.

By the late 1980s, the firm had bought its own office building on Magazine Street in the newly trendy Warehouse District. In a nod to the New York-style firms it sought to emulate, McGlinchey had its own cafeteria, gym and showers, signaling that its attorneys were expected to live at the office.

Both founding partners died young. Stafford in 1987; McGlinchey, at age 60, in 1993. The firm continued to grow in their absence, but some longtime competitors said it didn’t hum with the same intensity.

String of departures

In a statement released Tuesday, Ferachi, a Baton Rouge-based commercial litigation specialist who became the firm’s managing member in 2021, said that no single factor had led to the vote to dissolve. Rather, troubles had been building.

“This is not because of any specific attorney’s departure, or any individual financial decision or leadership action that led us to this point,” he said. “This is the result of a combination of market factors, such as lagging collections, compounded with various internal factors over several years.”

The statement also said the firm’s leaders made the decision after “assessing several strategic alternatives.”

Ferachi declined to make additional comment or respond to additional questions. His predecessor, Rudy Aguilar, also a Baton Rouge attorney who is leading the group going to Adams and Reese, also did not respond to requests seeking comment.

Prominent departures have been ongoing for at least a decade and began building in recent months.

In 2015, two prominent attorneys in the real estate and commercial transactions division took their practice to Kean Miller, according to an announcement from Kean Miller at the time. In 2020, five partners from McGlinchey’s consumer finance litigation practice went to Hinshaw, a national firm based in Chicago with more than 500 attorneys across the country, a release from Hinshaw shows.

Around the same time, the firm downsized its footprint in the Pan American Life Center in New Orleans, where it had moved in 2008 after vacating the Magazine Street building, according to real estate sources familiar with the move.

According to Law.com, an online trade publication for the legal industry, the firm’s head count declined from 199 in 2016 to 37 in 2021, though it was back up to between 150-160 attorneys the time of the announcement.

In 2024, defense attorney Ally Byrd left McGlinchey for Jones Walker. More recently, in late November 2025, Deirdre McGlinchey, daughter of the late founding partner, moved her successful corporate litigation practice, which represented national clients and included three attorneys, to Jones Walker.

By then, the Baton Rouge McGlinchey office was already in serious talks with Adams and Reese, according to a statement from Adams and Reese.

On Jan. 2, three days before the McGlinchey vote, Hinshaw announced it had hired four attorneys from McGlinchey’s Washington D.C, and Fort Lauderdale, Florida offices, the firm announced. All specialize in defending consumer financial services companies in high stakes lawsuits.

At the same time it was losing some of its top rainmakers, the firm was continuing to sign new leases for offices. In 2023, it moved its Boston office into One Beacon Street, among the city’s most prestigious office towers, with estimated rents of near $50 per square foot.

In May, it moved its Baton Rouge offices from their longtime headquarters in One American Place to the newly renovated II Rivermark Centre down the street.

Late last year, the firm announced it had created four new administrative positions, hiring from within. The move, the firm said at the time, was designed to strengthen and improve back-office functions.

The firm had also “reconfigured its governance structure and compensation system,” Ferachi said in his statement.

‘Dignity and grace’

The effect of McGlinchey’s closure is already reverberating across the markets where it operated.

Adams and Reese Managing Partner Gyf Thornton said bringing on McGlinchey’s real estate practice in Baton Rouge will not only benefit the individual attorneys from both firms but create new opportunities.

“With these kinds of combinations, we have found that we typically get a one plus one equals three,” he said. “We start with their current book of business and together we grow to something bigger than the sum of the two parts.”

Partners may bring their associates and paralegals with them when they move, though they don’t typically bring back-office staff.

In a LinkedIn post, McGlinchey’s Chief Business Development Officer Heather Morse posted on behalf of her colleagues, saying “There are people, the #McGlinchey Family, who need to find their next beginning. Many of us are blessed with wide networks, but others are not.”

She tagged 20 colleagues from the firm’s administrative staff, noting she also was “open to new opportunities.”

There’s no word on how long the wind down will take, but Ferachi said the firm “was committed to comporting ourselves with dignity and grace during this process.”

Ciolino said it’s hard to say what exactly the departure of McGlinchey will mean for the market, noting it “does seem odd the way it all went down.”