Larry Campagna has established a reputation as an authoritative litigator in matters of business litigation and white collar criminal defense, as well as federal, state and local tax controversies. For more than 45 years, he has resolved thousands of civil and criminal litigation matters, many of which involved sophisticated and complex legal issues that established precedent in courts at the federal, state and local levels. He manages offices in Texas, Georgia and Pennsylvania.
Larry, can you tell me a little bit about Chamberlain Hrdlicka as a whole and where you fit into the firm?
Well, we are a mid-size firm, but we compete with much larger firms for business because we have really talented lawyers. While we focus on tax, corporate, and litigation, we are pretty much full service these days. Where do I fit in? I’ve been here since 1974, in some capacity or another. I have gone from being the mailroom clerk to the managing shareholder. So I’ve seen every side of this firm over the last 50 years or so.
So when you started at the firm, did you have a legal education or did you start and then then get your degree?
I started after college, the summer before I started law school, when I was looking for a chance to work in a firm. Because I didn’t have any close relatives who were lawyers, I’d never been around the law, but I knew I wanted to be a lawyer. And I was pretty sure I wanted to be a trial lawyer. So I was peddling my resume all over town trying to get in the door somewhere, and through a chance meeting my father got an introduction to George Hrdlicka. I called George and asked for an interview, and here we are, 50 years later.
So why were you attracted to the law?
In college I was very interested in legal and public policy Issues, constitutional law issues, all sorts of political issues, but I really think the heart of it was that when I was a young person, I watched a program on television called The Defenders. I don’t know if you’re old enough or had any opportunity to see it, David. EG Marshall and Robert Ryan played two lawyers – the senior partner and the young upstart – who were defending people week after week. It was made for television drama and enthralling. And I just thought, that’s a noble profession. That’s something that I’d like to think about doing. And the more I learned about constitutional law and other disciplines, the more I was drawn to it. And about my junior year in high school, when I started looking at colleges, I had a chat with my dad and told him I didn’t want to be an engineer like him – I wanted to think about law school.
Does your practice today centre around litigation?
It does. I always knew I wanted to be a trial lawyer. I just didn’t know what kind of trials I was going to do. But when I was finishing law school and deciding where to work, I knew one thing about myself, which was that I always learned best when I sought out the best mentors and professors. I didn’t mind how challenging they might be as long as I was really going to learn something from them. A fellow named Bob White was one of the founding shareholders of our firm, and he was nationally known as an outstanding trial lawyer. He happened to do tax litigation and happened to have a special expertise in defending criminal tax cases, which is not a common discipline. So, I hedged my bets, not knowing if I could actually be a tax lawyer, and I did about 50% of my work with Bob and 50% of my work with the other trial lawyers in the firm who did general commercial business litigation. Over time, after about 10 years, I guess, I started slowly increasing the amount of tax litigation that I was doing and decreasing the amount of business litigation, and I kind of moved into my own niche practice, which is mostly tax controversy and criminal tax defense.
And is that federal or Texas focused?
It’s mostly federal. There are occasional tax controversies with the Comptroller of Public Accounts here in Texas that I’ve handled. But most of my practice has been federal.
That must mean a fair amount of travel. Are you back to pre-pandemic levels?
I think since the pandemic we’ve all learned to practice more remotely than in the past. Maybe a few years ago you and I would be sitting together somewhere having this interview rather than talking to each other by Teams, right? If it were before the pandemic. So I used to travel a lot more than I do now. Now, I certainly try to get to our other three offices since I’m the managing shareholder. But there’s less travel for client work than there used to be. Not quite as much travel for presentations and speeches as there used to be, because some of those are done remotely too. But I do travel quite a bit compared to the average person.
As a firm are you predominantly back in the office now or have you got some sort of hybrid arrangement in place?
We are flexible and allow for a hybrid system. I think most people come in three or four days a week. I think many of the young lawyers coming up have missed out on the mentoring, just bumping into the likes of you and me in the corridor and having a chat. The law firm has formal mentoring programs, but just that interaction with people on a daily basis, not like this, not on the screen. I think the especially the youngsters really missed out during remote working.
It’s harder to keep the firm culture alive with remote working, isn’t it?
The culture of the firm is what holds it together, right, not just the clients and the work. I It’s the culture and the way you transmit that culture is person to person, and the more you’re together, the more bonds you build with each other. So it was difficult working remotely, but you know we were lucky that we have a strong core of people who’ve been with the firm a long time, and we found a way to keep the culture vibrant and alive during the pandemic. Now that we are all back together, it feels just like the old days and doesn’t feel like we’ve missed anything.
How long have you been the Managing Shareholder now?
We have a rule of three-year terms and a maximum of two terms, so I just started a second term of three years.
With those rules of two three-year terms does that allow you to stamp your brand on the firm?
I don’t know if there’s much stamping my brand and whether it’s making a difference, but under my leadership we adopted a new strategic plan for the firm. I expected to do that immediately upon starting in 2020, and instead I was dealing with a pandemic. But as soon as soon as I could get that better under control, we started a strategic planning process for the firm, and we’ve been implementing those goals.
The firm looks a little different and operates a little differently since the start of my time and management, but stamping my brand? I don’t look at it that way. I think we have moved in a good direction strategically together.
And what do those differences you’ve instilled look like?
The plan involves one primary structural difference and then six strategic goals. The structural difference is that we’ve increased the authority and responsibility of our practice group leaders to manage their practices. It used to be that we had a management committee or board of directors and although we had section leaders, they really didn’t have much authority. The authority was all in the board. Now we’re empowering the practice group leaders to actually manage the different practices of the firm.
The strategic plan we’re implementing focuses on six goals. The first one is to grow strategically. For us, that means that we want to remain a mid-sized firm with a nationally recognized tax and corporate practice, but we want to build those practices and use those practices to leverage up other areas of the firm. Goal two is to raise the firm’s overall profile. I kind of segway into this one by taking advantage of our nationally ranked practices and tax and corporate work. We want to raise the firm’s overall profile and differentiate ourselves from other firms. Goal three is to enhance accountability and improve the firm’s financial performance. Goal four is to foster more talent development among all of our personnel, including our lawyers. Goal 5 is an affirmation of our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion, and Goal 6 is to expand collaboration throughout the firm through the way we practice and the way we manage the practices.
Is goal 6 a new way of saying cross selling across practice groups?
That’s part of it, but I think it’s not just that. It’s the way we organize projects within our own groups and the way we collaborate and work with each other throughout the firm. It’s not so much cross selling as it is in part, David, we’re trying to take advantage of our talent in all of our offices for the good of our clients.
I think most lawyers, when they get a new piece of work and need help think first of the person in the office next to them, or their young associate, or mid-level associate who’s right there next door. And we’re trying to make sure that we realize that some of the best talent and expertise may very well be in our other offices and take advantage of that by having a practice group leader. That helps because they get to know the expertise and experience of people in other parts of the firm that I might not run into every day if I’m just practicing in Houston for example.
I’d like to talk about goal 5, promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion, which is a very hot topic in law firms at the moment. Why are you doing this? Is it down to a drive from clients saying look we want your teams to have the makeup and ideals that we have or is this you thinking we’re going to get better results or is it just plain and simply the right thing to do? Where does your drive for DE&I come from?
I think it’s mostly because it’s the right thing to do. First of all, Houston, as we talked about briefly earlier, is a very diverse city and if we don’t have a diversity of lawyers we are less likely to attract business from all segments of our community. There are clients who demand a diverse team when they’re working with us. But that doesn’t really drive the desire to reflect our community and be good part of it. I think that’s really more the driving force.
You know, we’re a pretty inclusive firm. And a pretty diverse firm. We have women involved in management; we have minorities involved in management. We have lots of minority and female representation throughout the firm. It’s a great mix.
Are there real penalties for law firms which don’t embrace diversity, equity and inclusion? I mean, do the buyers of legal services actually say look, unless you shape up, we’re moving on? Is that something you’ve come across or is it really still just a threat?
It’s more than just a threat with some clients. They take these issues very seriously. But I think it’s still quite rare for things to be that blatant. I will say the larger the client, the more likely the pressure to have a diverse team working on their matter. In my personal work, I don’t experience that very often because you know, tax controversies are largely a company or an individual coming to me to save their butts, and that’s all they really care about.
It’s not really a priority for most of my personal clients, but I do see in certain areas of the firm where being diverse is an absolute must. For example, labor and employment lawyers who are working for bigger companies, and sometimes in litigation matters too.
David, I don’t think we’ve ever had ultimatums like you talked about but we’ve been pretty diverse to start with. I don’t know what goes on in places where they’re not diverse. But I do know that we have clients who ask about our ratios, ask about the number of people from historically underrepresented groups, and ask whether they exist in our management structure.
Like I say, we are diverse. For example, the Internal Revenue Service is having a crackdown which it started doing back in 2009 on the failure to report foreign bank accounts. Well, obviously a lot of our immigrant communities had issues and needed help. I was very lucky that I had associates who were of Indian and Latin descent, first generation US citizens. They were already working with me, so I didn’t have to change anything. And you know, it was certainly easier to go to a meeting with a prospective client who’s Spanish speaking and bring along a lawyer whose first language is Spanish. Even though I can speak Spanish, the clients like the comfort of having a native speaker there to help them. It just happens that in my practice I’ve had the diversity at hand, and so the topic doesn’t really come up very much.
So I guess you’re running your firm as a meritocracy, hiring the best people and by doing so, that automatically leads you to have a more diverse workforce in place anyway?
I wouldn’t say it’s automatic, but certainly that’s what we’re trying to strive for – a diverse workplace that’s a meritocracy as well.
What practice areas or industry sectors are you seeing a lot of growth at the moment?
We continue to add tax controversy lawyers to respond to the IRS’ increased enforcement efforts. I don’t know whether you’ve heard about this from others but Congress gave the Internal Revenue Service $60 billion. They gave them $80 billion and then took away 20, so they now have $60 billion to revamp the agency, much of which will go into enforcement. So we’re building our tax controversy group all the time. Our corporate area is still growing. The bankruptcy practice is growing, as is our litigation section. So if you look outside of the tax disciplines, our biggest groups are litigation and corporate.
What makes Houston a good place to live and work?
There’re so many things to love about Houston. I could talk forever about it! It’s one of the most diverse cities in the world, and our food scene reflects that. I think the most important thing is that Houston is a place where it doesn’t matter very much where you went to school, or where you grew up, or who your family is. We’re a city of transplants and immigrants, and our culture is much more welcoming to outsiders than most other cities are. What matters here is whether you have the smarts to accomplish what you say you’re going to do. For example, you can move to Houston and in a few years belong to just about any country club in town, whereas in most cities, if you’re not a legacy or you don’t really work hard to build your network, you can’t get in the door. This this city is wide open and welcoming of people who are go getters.
Another feature of Houston that’s kind of different is that because we’re sort of in the middle of the country, we can be on either coast in a few hours. So that makes it very convenient for business trips and vacations. Great location. It’s a city that’s a great place to live and work despite the climate!
What do you get up to in your spare time?
Well, I like to swim. I try to make time for exercise. I also serve on the board, the Advisory Board of the Tony award-winning theatre, the Alley Theatre here in Houston. I don’t know if you saw a play while you were here, but both Patty and I love theatre. She was a professional ballerina in her first career. We both love theatre and when we travel, we like to hit the local theatres and museums.
If you didn’t get into law, what would you have done?
You know, I knew you were going to ask me that, David, and I really don’t know how to answer because almost everything interests me. When I was in college, my major was a special major. At the University of Texas at Austin, they have what’s called Plan II.I In Plan II, you don’t even have to have any other major, you just you can put together a concentration of courses in different disciplines. It’s an interdisciplinary honours program, so just as long as you get the credits it doesn’t matter what they’re in. Well, you have to have a certain number of credits in something that is a sort of a major, but under Plan II, it’s diverse. And so I’ve always been a person who’s interested in everything.
If I had to answer the question, I’d say if I hadn’t been focused on the law, I probably would have built a career centred on public policy. There are some nonprofit areas of need, but I’ll go back to something else I already told you – I always loved the theatre. Maybe I would have done something in the arts, I don’t know. I wasn’t one of those kids in school who was only good at writing and not so good in math, or not so good in science. I was pretty damn good at everything, and so I just stayed interested in everything. I can only speculate, because as you know from our prior discussion, from a pretty early age I was attracted to the nobility of the legal profession, and that attraction just got stronger the more I learned about the law.