IPO attorneys forced to shift focus to mergers, acquisitions

Crystal balls are pretty cool. Just one problem: They never take change in to account.

Take for example the crystal ball lawyers eyed during the 1990s. In the securities section of the ball, all looked rosy. In fact so rosy, some law firms bulked up their firms with lawyers just to take companies public.

“If you had a pulse, you could go public in the 1990s,” says Rob Planchard, a corporate finance attorney in the Boulder office of Faegre & Benson. “In the mid-’90s, the Nasdaq was in the five thousands. Today is in 12 hundreds.”

And those folks with a pulse were…