WHAT WENT WRONG

In the aftermath of Morgan & Finnegan's dissolution, the search for clues that might help explain the death of the firm points in several different directions.

By Dan Slater

From the outside, Morgan & Finnegan's future looked bright.

It was January 2004, and the venerable IP firm had just signed a 20-year lease to take over the twentieth and twenty-first floors at Three World Financial Center in lower Manhattan. The lease wasn't cheap-$327,OOO a month in the first year-and the firm had been lured back downtown in part by a $1.5 million state grant aimed at reviving a neighborhood still reeling from the events of September II, 2001.

Relocating from the Park Avenue offices it had inhabited for 35 years marked a homecoming for Morgan & Finnegan, which, throughout much of its early history, had been located downtown. But the firm's partners didn't see the move as just a chance to reconnect with the past. "This is an important move for our firm," partner John Sweeney said at the time, "one that brings us back to our roots in lower Manhattan, and one that offers us more space for future growth."

It made sense that growth was on the firm's collective mind. In 2003 a survey of senior IP officers at Fortune 100 companies published by IP Law & Business ranked Morgan & Finnegan number two among the firms hired for IP work, behind only Foley & Lardner. Companies that cited Morgan as lead counsel included AT&T, Citigroup, Exxon Mobil, Fujitsu, Procter & Gamble, and Sumitomo. …