When I was a cub reporter, I wrote my first big legal business story in 1998—a breathless account of the troubles facing the firm then known as Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro.

Pillsbury had lost more than 40 partners in two years and profits per partner were down 20%, even as competitors were thriving.

"Is Pillsbury on the verge of collapsing?" I wrote.

The answer, of course, was no. Twenty-two years later, the firm—now known as Pillsbury Winthrop—is just fine, thank you very much, with gross revenue of $677 million last year, according to The American Lawyer.

Some firms go through rough patches and rebound. Others - Brobeck; Coudert; Thelen; Heller; Howrey; Dewey - do not.

Where will Boies Schiller Flexner, which has seen almost 60 partners exit in the past year, fit in?

"Believe what you see, and not what you read in legal blogs," David Boies, 79, told me in a telephone interview on Sunday, acknowledging the current challenges but expressing confidence in the future of his namesake firm.

Two years ago, I met Boies in person at the bar in the lobby of the Ritz Carlton in San Francisco for a leisurely cocktail-hour interview.

Over a Ketel One vodka with fresh-squeezed orange juice (him) and iced tea (me – I was driving), Boies at the time laid out the elements for a successful transition to the firm's next generation of leaders. At the top of his list was "recruit and retain first-rate people."

The retention part has turned out to be a challenge.

He mentioned five firm partners that day to me—lawyers he said he knew right away that he wanted to work with.

Three of them, firm vice chairman Bill Isaacson, management committee member Karen Dunn and partner Quyen Ta, earlier this year made lateral moves to other firms. A fourth, executive committee member Karen Dyer, announced her departure, along with Nick Gravante, the firm's co-managing partner, to Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft on Dec. 2.

(Dyer said in an email she was "sad to be leaving" colleagues at Boies Schiller and "excited about joining" Cadwalader. Gravante, who called Boies the "greatest litigator of our generation," said he was eager to move to the full-service firm of Cadwalader.)

Of the five lawyers Boies singled out, only co-managing partner Natasha Harrison, now on tap to be deputy chair, remains.

Such an exodus of talent, which has dropped the firm's headcount from about 320 lawyers two years ago to just over 200 today, is an obvious a red flag.

Many of the roughly five dozen Boies Schiller partners who've left were underperforming and counseled out, Boies told me in a prior interview this fall. But others were clearly valued members of the firm - the next generation of leaders.

Like almost any organization, law firms "can take a certain amount of fluctuation or movement," bankruptcy expert Jonathan Landers of Scarola Zubatov Schaffzin, who represented Citibank in the dissolution of firms including Heller; Thelen and Brobeck, told me. "But when you see people leaving who are good, who bring in business … it's hard." He added, "Once things start to go bad, it can go downhill very quickly."

But he said there's a common thread in firms that he's seen go under: Debt.

"The most common situation is where a law firm had a line of credit which they couldn't pay because the market turned or something happened," Landers said.

In this respect, Boies Schiller appears to be on solid ground. The firm "has no external debt," Boies told me. "The managing partners have sometimes deferred income for cash flow purposes, but we have never borrowed." (Boies Schiller was among the some 15,000 law firms approved to receive money through the U.S. Small Business Administration's Paycheck Protection Program.)

Unlike virtually every other large firm, Boies said, only he and co-founders Jonathan Schiller and Donald Flexner have made capital contributions. That means that when partners depart, the firm doesn't take a capital withdrawal hit.

Moreover, Boies said, "In aggregate, the partners who left had a higher percentage of equity than business generation," (though he noted that there are exceptions).

Does this mean the firm's profits per partner could actually rise this year?

Boies hedged. The second and third quarters—March to September—were slow, he said, citing the impact of the pandemic on the firm's litigation-only practice. He also said that contingency fee collections—always volatile--this year are "way down."

In the last eight years, he said, such payouts have topped $100 million for "a number of years." But he also said the flush times were interspersed with two or three years when contingency fee cases yielded less than $25 million.

"That's a swing of $80 to $90 million," Boies noted, not because of any failure by firm lawyers, but simply due to the vagaries of the work.

A nine-figure payday is on the horizon—the $2.7 billion Blue Cross Blue Shield antitrust settlement, where the firm is co-lead counsel for the plaintiffs. A federal judge in Alabama gave preliminary approval to the deal last week.

But Boies said that even if that case "fell in a black hole" (which it won't, he hastened to add), the firm would still be solvent.

The inflection point from solid to shaky isn't exclusively financial, though. Law firms thrive under strong leadership, said Leslie Corwin, an expert on law firm mergers and dissolutions and author of the seminal treatise "Law Firm Partnership Agreements."

Corwin, who is managing partner of Eisner LLP's New York office, recalled the demise of Boston-based high-tech firm Testa, Hurwitz & Thibeault, which at its height had 400 lawyers and enviable profits.

Founding partner Dick Testa died unexpectedly in his sleep in late 2002 at age 63 with no succession plan in place. As tech work in the Boston area temporarily waned, firm partners voted to dissolve the firm in January of 2005.

"I'm very Machiavellian about law firm leadership," Corwin told me. "Firms that don't have strong leadership don't make it."

Boies acknowledges that passing the torch after 23 years as founder and chairman is difficult for all involved.

"It's something every new law firm faces. How can it as an institution ... replicate its success and also preserve its culture?" he said.

But he is confident that the firm has rounded the corner.

"We're at the beginning of the end," as he put it—in its quest to solidify new leadership, praising Harrison as "superlative, the whole package."

He is gracious when speaking of those who have left, recognizing that they "thought their practice would be better in a larger, broad-based firm."

Boies acknowledged that Gravante (whom he described as "a friend before he was my partner, and he will be a friend after he is my partner") had pushed for a merger with Cadwalader. But Boies does not see a merger as the path forward.

"The predominant view has been and is that we think we have a unique culture of collegiality, of world-class dispute resolution," he said. "We are not conflict-free, but we reduce conflicts by being litigation-only focused—and we preserve collegiality by not being part of a 1,000-lawyer firm."