Wall Street Law Blog

Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch Expected Housing Disaster (our all-time most viewed post; first published Oct. 2010)

"These aren't simply the comments of some junior level analysts" Lee Sherman, securities litigation consultant

the question of foreseeability asks at what point in time senior management at these investment banks should have foreseen the possibility of the disasters that eventually befell them.

the significance of these reports is that they conclusively establish the views of top economic analysts at Merrill Lynch and Bear Stearns. Whether plaintiffs' attorneys prove that senior management at the two investment banks actually read the reports ought to be immaterial.

UPDATE: Because Bear Stearns Execs' FCIC testimony largely focused on allegedly unforeseeable, "unprecedented" market forces to defend their lack of competent management, Wall Street Law Blog decided to re-post one of our favorites. 

Long before their respective employers ceased to exist as independent companies, former Merrill Lynch Top North American Economist David A. Rosenberg and former Bear Stearns Chief Equities Investment Strategist Francois Trahan published research reports with explicit warnings about asset and credit bubbles in the U.S. housing and mortgage markets.

As early as August 2004, Mr. Rosenberg, Chief Economist at Merrill Lynch for North America, published a detailed analysis regarding the precarious state of the American housing market. Rosenberg warned that there could serious problems ahead in an Economic Commentary entitled: "Housing: If not a Bubble Then an Oversized Sud."

Former Bear Stearns Chief Equities Investment Strategist Francois Trahan first published a report that raised serious questions about housing and real estate investments in a May 2005 report called "REIT all About it." Trahan and his team at Bear Stearns followed their 2005 report with publications in 2006 that explicitly warned about the difficult future facing the U.S. housing market and even raised the possibility of a global credit crisis. The 2006 Bear Stearns reports definitively described the housing market as an unsustainable "bubble" and further cautioned that the term bubble was not one the Bear team used lightly.

It was not until 2008 that overcommitments to mortgage-backed securities (a byproduct of the housing boom), CDO's and related products tied to residential and commercial mortgages caused Merrill Lynch and Bear Stearns to suffer backbreaking losses so severe that Merrill sold itself to Bank of America and Bear Stearns narrowly avoided bankruptcy with a Fed-assisted fire sale to JP Morgan.

--Background

Along with a number of other Wall Street firms, Merrill Lynch and Bear Stearns lost tens of billions of dollars because of their firms' respective commitments to securities backed by mortgages in the "subprime" and "Alt-A" categories. Subprime and Alt-A residential mortgages are considered risky loans because they carry higher default rates than "conforming" mortgages (also called prime mortgages, or agency-quality mortgages). Typical subprime or Alt-A borrowers cannot qualify for a conforming mortgage due to factors that include, but are not limited to, bad credit histories, personal bankruptcies, insufficient income, and the inability to make sufficiently large down-payments.

--Significance of the Merrill Lynch and Bear Stearns reports

While the ultimate import of the reports remains to be seen, The Sherman Law Firm says there is no doubt that the documents are crucial to the touchstone litigation element of foreseeability. "In a litigation sense," said Managing Attorney Brett Sherman, "the question of foreseeability asks at what point in time senior management at these investment banks should have foreseen the possibility of the disasters that eventually befell them."

According to The Sherman Law Firm, the reports at issue may show that senior management at Merrill Lynch and Bear Stearns should have foreseen the liklihood of a looming financial crisis with ample time to permit business model shifts that may have prevented crippling losses and, ultimately, the end of these former pillars of Wall Street as independent companies.

--Likely Defenses and Response

When confronted with documents like the reports at issue, senior managers may respond that they cannot be expected to read the huge volumes of research produced by their companies. The view of Brett Sherman, securities fraud lawyer and Managing Attorney of The Sherman Law Firm is that "the significance of these reports is that they conclusively establish the views of top economic analysts at Merrill Lynch and Bear Stearns. Whether plaintiffs' attorneys prove that senior management at the two investment banks actually read the reports ought to be immaterial."

Litigation strategist and recently retired attorney Lee Sherman - a frequent consultant to The Sherman Law Firm, former municipal court judge, and founding partner of a top Philadelphia area firm - concurred. "These aren't simply the comments of some junior level analysts," Sherman said. "I mean, we're talking about the Senior North American Economist of Merrill Lynch and the Chief Equities Strategist at Bear Stearns. Any claims by their CEOs and the other senior decision makers at these banks to the effect that they should not have been well-aware of the opinions and outlooks of the top economic and market experts at their companies are simply not credible." 

Lee Sherman continued: "Remember, from mid-2004 until the subprime crisis had clearly arrived, the Fed steadily raised interest rates. For lesser quality borrowers, most of whom had adjustable rate mortgages, higher interest rates meant higher default rates. To say the least, there was great uncertainty as rates were rising about where we were headed. Then, the housing market slowed. I'm talking about 2005 now, before home values really fell off the table. It strikes me as incredible that the kinds of warnings in these reports were out there for years, yet seem to have gone unheeded."

The Sherman Law Firm represents investors in securities fraud / investment loss claims of all types, including claims against investment banks for losses related to mismanagement and other misconduct during the housing and credit bubbles.

Brett Sherman, The Sherman Law Firm

American history - The 4th of July and Financial Bubbles

On America's birthday, A Brief Reflection on the Same Old Same Old...

By Brett Sherman; The Sherman Law Firm

How and why do we let them get away with it?

By "them" I mean the world's most powerful financiers.  By "it" I mean shrugging their shoulders, playing dumb, and walking away out of the ashes with their personal fortunes secure when, inevitably, the bubbles they create blow up.   

Booms, as a rule, are very good for the personal bank accounts of the lords of finance. Bubbles are even better.  

Why are bubbles so good for Wall Street aristocrats?  Because (a) the longer the good times last, the longer the paydays keep coming, and (b) a bubble is a boom that lasts longer than it should based on an informed and realistic analysis of the underlying economy. (A bubble is, in other words, is a boom that keeps booming beyond the point in time when, rationally, it should be over.)

And so, knowing that bubbles ALWAYS go bust, the titans of Wall Street have -- again and again and again  throughout the history of this great nation -- prodded booms into bubbles like ranchers prodding cattle to the slaughter.

From real estate to railroads to stocks (and just about any other item on which human beings can speculate), the  controllers of the businesses that control the money have created and seized opportunities to enrich themselves at the expense of others.

We can excuse John and Jane Doe on Main Street if they fail to grasp the nuances of market cycles generally, and of asset bubbles in particular. Not so the syndicate in command of the banking world. After all, it is the job of these people - the Wall Street elites -  to manage their companies theough the ups and downs of the market's predictably unpredictable cycles.  

Was it the Fifth Dimension that sang that 70's classic "What goes up must come down..."?  While (given the time period) they may not have singing about the capital markets, Wall Street's top executives certainly understand that, in finance, what goes up truly does eventually come down.

Still, these people shrug their shoulders and claim to be victims themselves  (as an aside, we invite anyone who wishes to take the position that Jimmy Cayne actually lost $1 billion to a debate via the comments section below).  And then, when their bank and brokerage statements arrive each month, oh how they must smile.  

Wall Street was once in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty. Now Wall Street casts its own shadow, not just over the iconic statue, but from sea to shining sea.

Unlike the 4th of July, the boom-bubble-bust cycle is nothing for most of us to celebrate.

The Fight Was Fixed - Risk Managers had no chance v. CEO's

By Brett Sherman, The Sherman Law Firm

I know it may be hard to remember at this point, but it wasn't so long ago that the sight of drywall and the sound of hammer striking nail was as common as the ubiquitous "For Sale" signs are today.  The economy was was moving forward so quickly that it was sweating.

During the height of the housing bubble, how many of you forgot the lessons of the technology stock implosion?  As a general rule, we tend to ignore/block out/forget the lessons of past financial traumas whenever the markets are humming and money is flowing. Risk managers are paid to disregard that general rule.

While the rest of us enjoy a bull market, risk managers must be corporate police officers.  A vital part of the risk management function is to guard against a business strategy that capable of crippling a company when the boom market cycle ends (and they always end).

During a boom, risk managers are unpopular.  Hardly anyone wants to hear that a sizzling market will eventually burn out.

The unfortunate reality, however, is that market bubbles have always popped.  Not only do economic boom cycles fizzle sooner or later (often abrubtly), but it is nearly always impossible to predict why or when the end will come. The unfortunate truth is that, no matter how strong a bull market may seem, we can never know for sure that disaster isn't lurking around the bend.

The future is now and always will be a mystery. Therefore, corporate risk managers must manage risk by devising strategies to mitigate potential negative consequences in the event of a market downturn.

Consider the last market bubble, the tech-wreck.  Remember how many people were convinced that we were in a new age of prosperity, a "new economy" in which the old rules of Wall Street no longer applied?

Remember all the "paper millionaires"? Remember Dow 36,000?  Remember how it all ended?  Of course you do.  And so do Wall Street CEO's (and former Wall Street CEO's) and risk managers.

The tech-wreck is a textbook example of a market bubble.  On its heels (thanks to the Fed's loose monetary policy) came the housing and mortgage boom.  Subprime-based mortgage- backed securities were the perfect investment to sell to unwitting investors.  So don't believe Wall Street investment banks when they tell you that they didn't think the housing boom would eventually end like the tech-wreck and so many other market bubbles.

Wall Street firms reported record profits during the housing boom.  High annual profits meant high annual incentive-based compensation for senior Wall Street executives.  Therefore, the risk management function (protecting investment banks from the risks of business models that could lead to the kind of corporate implosions that will forever mark 2008) was at odds with the interests of senior Wall Street executives, who made more money by maximizing short-term returns.  Guess who won that battle?

As someone once said, the brightest stars burn out the fastest.  With effective risk management, Wall Street profits may not have reached the stratosphere during the housing boom. Then again, former investment banks like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers still may still have been profitable and lived to make more money another day.

In this day of ultra-sophisticated engineered securities, risk management is vital to the long-term success of any financial institution. Maybe corporate managers will realize that one day soon.

WALL STREET LAW BLOG WELCOMES YOUR COMMENTS.

 

Forget Hindsight - Housing bubble was foreseeable (updated)

Wall Street Law Blog responds to FCIC Testimony of Bear Stearns execs and others...

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NOTE TO WALL STREET CEO'S:  FRAUD BY HINDSIGHT? SERIOUSLY?

One of the primary arguments Wall Street executives have been asserting to defend themselves before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission goes something like this- 

We could not foresee the collapse of the housing market, and therefore any allegations of fraud are merely impermissible claims of "fraud by hindsight." 

Survey Says? - X (pop culture reference)  Wall Street Law Blog doesn't buy it. 

 

(Brief digression -GO PHILLIES - despite recent inability to score a run, we have faith)

The Fraud by hindsight defense is asserted by defendants in many securities fraud cases.  The meaning of the defense is (as you guessed) that there is no fraud (i.., intentional or reckless misrepresentations or material omissions) if the alleged fraud can only be discerned after the fact.  Hindsight is, as they say, 20/20.  

*****

Returning to the housing and mortgage markets, and the marketing / sale of mortgage-backed securities, cdo's and related products...

Wall Streeters insist that they did not believe, and could not reasonably foresee, the housing and mortgage bubbles that expanded and ruptured in recent years.  

Umm, let's look at some facts:  

• From 1895 through 1996 home price appreciation very closely corresponded to the rate of inflation (roughly 3% per year).  

• Then, from 1995 through 2006 alone - even after adjusting for inflation - housing prices rose by more than 70%.  
  

How could such an unprecedented increase in the rate of home price appreciation rationally occur without alerting the self-anointed experts on "The Street" to watch out for signs of a massive housing bubble?  

For that matter, how would Wall Street executives and risk managers explain their alleged lack of bubblevision in light of the quite relevant fact that the greatest "boom" in the history of U.S. housing was peaking just a few short years after a little event we like to call the tech-wreck.  Remember the great technology stock bubble that ruptured at about the same time many of us were just recovering from the hoax that was Y2K?    

If their collective memories are so short, what the hell were they doing running our largest financial institutions?  (Rhetorical question)

Come on, Wall Street.  You need to come up with something better than the fraud by hindsight defense.   If you can...

A Tale of Two Market Bubbles...(encore post)

WHAT THE HECK HAPPENED?     

By Brett Sherman

 As a general rule, we tend to ignore the lessons of our financial past whenever markets are humming and money is flowing.  Economists have long believed that market bubbles come along every 15 - 20 years, the approximate length of the financial memory.  After 15 years or so, unpleasant consequences of the previous bubble are forgotten and a whole new generation of con artists and suckers come along, full of hot air and ready to blow.   Presto, a new bubble is inflated.

Something about bubbles clearly has changed in the first decade of the new millennium.  15 years between huge bubbles?  Hah.  This decade saw the implosion of two massive bubbles.  First tech stocks went ka-boom.  Then, almost immediately, the housing bubble began to inflate.  And, well, you probably know how that ended.

Consider the last market bubble, the tech-wreck.  Remember proclamations of a a new age of prosperity, a "new economy" in which the old rules of Wall Street no longer applied?  Remember all the "paper millionaires"?  Remember Dow 36,000?  Remember irrational exuberance?

Remember how the tech stock driven new economy ended?  Of course you do.   The bubble popped, the market deflated, billions were lost.  

Wall Street executives (not to mention financial risk managers) may have short memories, but we're talking about recent history, the immediate past.  The tech bubble received quite a bit of media attention too.   It was a textbook market bubble.  And it was fresh in Wall Street's collective memory.  So don't believe the nonsense about the housing bubble being a surprise or catching anyone off guard.  By 2005 at the latest, the housing market bore the classic hallmarks of a market bubble.  By definition, all bubbles are unsustainable.  

Even if Wall Street execs didn't foresee the extent of the current disastrous financial crisis, they sure knew the unprecedented inflation of home prices and home ownership was a mammoth bubble.  They knew it would end badly.

How could Wall Street be so naive as to allow a huge asset bubble to inflate on the heels of the tech-wreck?  Naivety had nothing to do with it.  What happened to the 15 year financial memory? Not a thing. Wall Street forced the housing bubble on the American people.  Investment banks needed lots of mortgages to stuff into mortgage-backed securities.  

But how, you ask, could Wall Street knowingly play a leading role in the inflation of the housing bubble if it was certain to end badly?  Hints - Look up the antonym for altruism and think about multi-million dollar paydays.  

Black Swans*, Fraud by hindsight, and Mortgage-Backed Securities. (greatest hits collection)

Events are not unforeseeable merely because they are unprecedented... 

One of the primary arguments upon which Wall Street firms rely to defend themselves from securities fraud allegations is something like this -

We could not foresee the collapse of the housing market, and therefore any allegations of fraud are merely impermissible claims of "fraud by hindsight." 

The fraud by hindsight defense is pretty much automatic in securities fraud cases.  The meaning of the defense is, as it sounds, that there is no fraud if the alleged deceit can only be discerned after the fact. Hindsight is, after all, 20/20.  The legal issue is foreseeability.  

In financial crisis litigation, Wall Streeters insist that their actions (like marketing CDOs stuffed with subprime mortgages as ultra-safe investments) are not fraudulent because banks that sold toxic waste allegedly could not reasonably foresee the housing and credit bubbles or the consequences that would rain down when the bubble inevitably ruptured.

Further, Wall Street execs insist that mass defaults of subprime mortgages were not foreseeable simply because (they contend) the U.S. has never experienced a nationwide housing slump.  Presumably, these same Wall Street executives would argue that they cannot foresee the possibility that they will one day die because they haven't yet been dead.*     

OK, Wall Street:  From 1895 through 1996 home price appreciation very closely corresponded to the rate of inflation (roughly 3% per year).  From 1995 through 2006 alone - even after adjusting for inflation - housing prices rose by more than 70%.  That type of housing growth certainly is unprecedented.  Why shouldn't such an unprecedented "up-cycle" in the housing market end in an unprecedented way?  The answer is that there is no reason.  

In fact, the housing boom was so far out of line with any previous housing cycle that one could easily argue that a reasonable economist, real estate professional, or CEO of an investment bank should have anticipated that a the story of housing's record-smashing growth would eventually come to a very ugly ending.   

The fact is that a huge number of respected experts from private industry and academia publicly warned of a huge housing bubble that could only end badly.  Certainly, many others kept quiet, wary of rocking the boat while the profits poured in, even though they too foresaw the end of the housing bubble and predicted its devastating impact on mortgage-backed securities.  

The fact is that, once the MBS industry became dependent on subprime mortgages, an eventual disaster was unavoidable.  Until the bubble popped, however, Wall Street was raking in far too much money to worry about the ramifications of the immense risks banks were taking.  

Fraud by hindsight is inapplicable in most financial crisis litigation.  Why?  Because choosing to ignore the apocalypse is far different from failing to foresee it.

      

*Inspired in part by the writings of Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

By Brett Sherman, The Sherman Law Firm

Financial Disaster, Foreseeability, and Frankenstein (greatest hits)

Mortgage securities rise and fall, a Story Mary Shelley would love...

Confluence is a great word.  It means, in essence, a "coming together."  Most often, the term confluence is used in connection with rivers.  Probably the most famous confluence of rivers is in Pittsburgh, where three major American rivers eventually merge somewhere around the Steel City's semi-famous (at least to geography buffs) golden triangle.  

One gold star goes to the first person who can name the big three rivers.  Comments are open below.  But we digress.

The confluence discussed in this post has to do with financial disaster, not rivers. This piece is about a very rare confluence of economic conditions, electrified by almost unbelievable opportunism and greed by investment banks and others, that pushed the world into the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression.

Wall Street executives frequently blame the financial crisis on events that were impossible to foresee during the years they pocketed multi-million dollar paychecks and, at the same time, laid a foundation for disaster.  Former CEOs invoke terms like hundred year storm, or perfect storm, or act of god when they deny responsibility for jeopardizing the entire world economy.

Wall Street money is behind the low documentation, low quality subprime loans that defaulted en masse when interest rates rose and home prices stopped their race to the moon.  Wall Street leveraged itself to the hilt to enhance return on equity and, by extension, executive compensation.  The subprime crisis, RMBS crisis, and - ultimately - the credit crisis were foreseeable events.   They were, in fact, actually predicted by more than a few folks.  

If there was a hundred year storm, it was the confluence of unique economic conditions that Wall Street investment banks exploited to fuel the housing bubble.   

    *** 

Consider what happened to open the door that, in the end, was kicked in by Wall Street Greed (and where have you gone Gordon Gecko?) -

• First, the end of the internet stock bubble followed by the humongous shock to U.S. economy from the September 11 terror attacks resulted in the Fed taking interest rates to historic lows, and holding rates there longer than ever before;  

• Second, low interest rates meant Treasury yields were so low that pension funds and other major institutional funds needed investment grade instruments with significantly higher returns than United States bonds in order to avoid invading their funds’ corpus (principal) to make required payouts (expansion on this topic requires its own blog post).  For purposes of this post, it is only necessary to understand that fixed-income fund managers restricted by law or charter to investment grade securities were desperate for yield.  This situation, if not unprecedented (I am a lawyer, not an economist) is extremely unusual.  

 

• Third, Again thanks to low rates, money was so easy and cheap to borrow - especially for banks - that it was practically free.

 

• Fourth, Cheap money (low interest rates) almost always is manna for the housing industry. Easy credit and low interest rates (and a host of similar factors too long to spell out here) allowed people to afford monthly mortgage payments on homes they never thought they would be able to afford. Housing went through the roof, and people accumulated amazing amounts of home equity (sometimes called found money) due to the increasing value of their homes. In short, most individuals could tap into the wealth produced by their homes to avoid possible mortgage delinquencies (and to put in pools, surround sound, etc.).

• Fifth (and you thought the confluence of three rivers in Pittsburgh was impressive), broker-dealers like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers were very experienced with a set of financial products that they believed they could market and sell to “greater fools” – especially all of those fund managers desperate for yield.  These products – perhaps you’ve heard of them - have names like mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and collateralized debt obligations (CDOs).

• Sixth, If Wall Street excels at anything, it is spotting an opportunity to exploit others for profit. In this case, subprime borrowers, many of whom would eventually face disaster, and institutional fund managers two classes of "fools."  As long as Wall Street banks could get investment grade ratings with securities made from pools of less than investment grade quality mortgages. Enter the quants (actually, they had been working on this stuff for a while already). With complex mathematical computer programs, and a lot of money in "fees," investment banks were able to bribe, err, "collaborate with" the credit ratings agencies to obtain the much needed "investment grade" stamp of approval.  

Now, all the pieces were in place and the money train pulled onto Wall Street.  It arrived regularly for about five years.  And then Frankenstein's Monster came along.  Read about that in part II.

By The Sherman Law Firm, Contact us

 

Smoking Gun? Mortgage Meltdown Predicted by Bear Stearns in 2005-06.

Updated 9/14/09

THE INTERVIEW THAT FOLLOWS IS SCRIPTED (part of our forthcoming screenplay, or not). NEVERTHELESS, THE UNDERLYING FACTS AND CONCLUSIONS ARE 100% GENUINE. 

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"[H]ousing activity is only just beginning to cool, and... there is no end in sight for a year or two."

-Francois Trahan (Former) Chief Investment Strategist, Bear Stearns

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Q:  OK, I can't stand the suspense.  So who sounded alarm bells about the end of the housing bubble, credit bubble, the world economy and so on?

A:  What if I told you it was Francois Trahan, Kurt D. Walters, Caroline S. Portney.

Q:  I'd ask you who those people are. [Pauses, gets no response, continues...]  OK, Who are Trahan, Walters, and Portney?

A:  Senior Wall Street Research Analysts.  In fact, Trahan, at the time, was a highly regarded Chief Investment Strategist for a major investment bank.

Q:  [Yawn].  You've told us about your "smoking gun" research reports before.  Deutche Bank.  HSBC.  Even Merill Lynch. 

A: Ah, but this time is different.  This time I've seen the evidence.

Q: OK, ok - enlighten us.

A: BEAR STEARNS.

Q:  Come Again?    

A:  Bear Stearns.  In a September 13, 2006 issue of the Bear Stearns "Investment Strategy" research report called -

"RAMIFICATIONS OF A U.S. HOUSING SLOWDOWN FOR EQUITIES," 

Chief Strategist Trahan and his colleagues emphasized that they had identified a housing bubble in 2005.  That report was called "REIT ALL ABOUT IT."  

Trahan described the growth of the housing bubble in detail, and concluded with conviction that the bubble was deflating.  Finally, Trahan and company predicted possible dire consequences for the global economy.

Q:  And this is important, why?

A:  Because these are BEAR STEARNS RESEARCH REPORTS.  Because they are from 2005 and 2006, when Bear continued to report record profits from selling junk mortgage-backed securities while its own senior people were (no pun intended) very bearish on the housing and mortgage markets.  The 2006 report says, among many other things-

"[H]ousing activity is only just beginning to cool, and... there is no end in sight for a year or two."

That's on page 6, by the way. The report also warns that

(a) rising interest rates have long been an indicator of a coming down-cycle for housing, and 

(b) the expected deflation of the housing bubble would drag down the mortgage market, restrict liquidity, and have serious negative impact on the U.S. economy and the global economy. 

THE BEAR RESEARCH REPORTS ARE FLASHING NEON LIGHTS.  THEY SIGNAL THAT BEAR KNEW IT WAS APPROACHING THE END OF THE LINE FOR ITS MORTGAGE-DRIVEN BUSINESSES. I REPEAT, THE REPORTS PROVE THAT FAILURE OF BEAR'S BUSINESS MODEL WAS FORESEEN BY BEAR STEARNS. 

Q:  OK, I get it.  But aren't the opinions of a few Bear employees just that?  You don't expect the CEO to read every research report, do you?

A:  Not sure.  Maybe.  Maybe not.  But I certainly believe that the senior officers and the Board of Bear Stearns had the obligation to, at the very least, be familiar with the opinions of Bear's Chief Equities Investment Strategist regarding current state of the world economy, and the Chief Strategist's views about the immediate future.  

Q:  That sounds good.  You have me 95% convinced.  But you're missing the one thing that would lock it up for me.

A:  Really?  What's that?

Q:  If you could only show me on the report some sort of adoption and approval by Bear Stearns itself, that would do it.  I mean, that would tell me that the report is the opinion of Bear Stearns and not just Francois Trahan and his team.  You know what I mean?

A:  Sure. I understand.  

The best I can do is here, on page 14, where the report states that it "has been adopted and approved for distribution within the United States by Bear, Stearns & Co. Inc. for its and its affiliates customers."

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By Brett Sherman 

FOR A COPY OF "RAMIFICATIONS OF A US HOUSING SLOWDOWN...", CLICK HERE AND LEAVE YOUR NAME AND A FAX Number OR EMAIL Address, or call The Sherman Law Firm.