OS ANGELES, Oct. 5 - Before the outcry and the lawsuits, Barry L. Hirsch could have taken the easy path into retirement.

Earlier this year Mr. Hirsch, the 70-year-old show-business lawyer whose clients include Julia Roberts, Jennifer Lopez, Michelle Pfeiffer and Francis and Sofia Coppola, was offered what some would consider a generous retirement package by the younger shareholders in Armstrong Hirsch Jackoway Tyerman & Wertheimer, a premier entertainment law firm that Mr. Hirsch helped found here 24 years ago.

Mr. Hirsch, the firm's chairman, was not being forced into retirement, said his fellow board members, many of whom he had recruited into the firm. But if he chose to stay on, they said, his multimillion-dollar annual salary would be reduced, he would have to share much more power in the realigned organization, and his personal expenses would be reined in.

If he chose to continue working, Mr. Hirsch would have to acknowledge that he was "no longer the rainmaker at this firm, but, instead, a rainmaker," said James R. Jackoway, the president of the firm, now called Jackoway Tyerman Wertheimer Austen Mandelbaum & Morris.

But since the rainmaker in question is the unconventional Mr. Hirsch - a licensed marriage and family counselor who officiated at Ms. Lopez's second wedding - there is no slow ride to Palm Springs on the horizon.

Instead, Mr. Hirsch has decided to go to war with Mr. Jackoway and what has become Mr. Hirsch's former firm. With some younger partners there - Robert S. Wallerstein, Howard A. Fishman and David J. Matlof - Mr. Hirsch founded a new firm in August. (Another former partner in the old firm, George T. Hayum, jumped aboard last month.)

The split has created a battle over money and clients (with some of Hollywood's most successful actors and directors caught in the middle), touched off dueling lawsuits among deal-making lawyers who usually stay out of the courtroom, and provided a spectacle for those who thrive on gossip about show business's bloody internal politics.

As of last week, Mr. Jackoway confirmed, Ms. Lopez, Ms. Roberts, Ms. Pfeiffer, the Coppolas, the actors Bernie Mac and Owen Wilson and the director Wes Anderson were among clients who had jumped ship to the new firm, called Hirsch Wallerstein Hayum Matlof & Fishman.

Speculation was rampant among fellow deal makers as to where the loyalties of other famous Hirsch clients, like the actor Jude Law and the directors Sydney Pollack and Barry Levinson, would ultimately lie.

What makes this conflict unusual is that high-profile lawyers seldom make their wrangling as public as Mr. Hirsch and Mr. Jackoway have. Entertainment industry lawyers are usually considered to be the voice of reason, counselors who make wise decisions in their clients' interest while staying above the fray of internecine Hollywood business disputes.

"Since I've been an agent, I've never heard of this kind of thing between big Hollywood lawyers," said Ari Emanuel, one of the founders of the Endeavor Agency. Mr. Emanuel was represented by Mr. Jackoway when Mr. Emanuel's former boss, Jeffrey Berg, chairman and chief executive of International Creative Management, caught him taking I.C.M. files just before he started Endeavor in 1995. That dispute was settled amicably, without litigation, according to an executive at I.C.M.

Mr. Hirsch said the fight grew from his long-standing protests over what he called a change in culture at his old firm. "It turned into a business with a bottom-line approach rather than a business about serving clients," he said. "I tried to rehabilitate a dysfunctional firm and keep the clients out of any dispute. I want to solve my dispute amicably."

So far, the proceedings have been anything but amicable. Papers filed in Los Angeles Superior Court by the Jackoway firm say that Mr. Hirsch and his colleagues collected their bi-weekly paychecks on Friday, Aug. 13, and, after the close of business, bolted.

Over the next 36 hours, Mr. Hirsch and the partners who first joined him backed a truck up to their old offices, downloaded files from their office computers and removed miscellaneous office furniture and boxes filled with hard-copy client files, the papers say.

By the following Monday, Aug. 16, Mr. Hirsch and his new team had hired a publicist and christened their new legal boutique down the street in the Century City neighborhood, and were urging clients from their old firm to jump ship.

Also on that day, Mr. Jackoway and his fellow board members Alan S. Wertheimer, Barry W. Tyerman and Geoffry W. Oblath were served with a lawsuit that Mr. Hirsch and his new law partners had filed on the previous Friday. The suit states that Mr. Hirsch and the other plaintiffs had effectively been pushed out the door by a scheme that would have improperly diverted revenue and concentrated power in the hands of the defendants by converting the firm from a corporation into a limited liability partnership on Sept. 1.

Legal issues in the dispute turn partly on whether Mr. Hirsch and his colleagues misappropriated trade secrets by what the Jackoway side calls "wild looting" of the firm's records.

According to Gregory Keating, who teaches professional business practices at the University of Southern California Law School, disputes between lawyers over who owns what in a legal file are commonplace but often resolved without trial.

"It's the client's right to control the actual work product in respect to attorney-client confidentiality," Mr. Keating said. Thus, if the clients whose information was in the files have switched to Mr. Hirsch's new firm, "it may not really matter that the old firm owns the actual paper that's in the file," he explained.

A more colorful assertion by Mr. Jackoway and his partners is that Mr. Hirsch, with his training and skills in psychology, persuaded clients to switch representation for his sake rather than their own by making them feel sorry for him. "Hirsch used the psychological pressure points known to him as a therapist to manipulate their emotions," the Jackoway firm's court filing says.

Mr. Hirsch, who has a master's degree in behavioral science from Azusa Pacific University, scoffed at that contention. "The idea that I'm some sort of Svengali who hypnotized clients to come with me is laughable," he said last week. "My clients are sophisticated business people perfectly capable of acting on their own free will."

Challenging Mr. Hirsch's claim to have been squeezed out, Mr. Jackoway said in an interview that Mr. Hirsch "left secretly and without discussion because of his hubris and greed."

A Yale Law School graduate, Mr. Jackoway, 52, represents David Letterman and Mr. Letterman's Worldwide Pants production company. He and his partners have a client list that also includes the actors Nicole Kidman, Cameron Diaz and David Caruso, the talk show host Jimmy Kimmel and the screenwriters Ron Bass, Brian Helgeland and Gary Ross. "My loyalty is not to any law firm, but to my individual lawyer, Alan Wertheimer, whom I've been with for 20 years," said Mr. Ross, whose screenplay for "Seabiscuit" was nominated for an Oscar last year. "I have to worry about making movies, so I'm not really that interested in the fight between Alan and the firm and Barry Hirsch."

In the current troubles Mr. Hirsch, at least, sees a silver lining. "Instead of retiring, I still get to do what I love to do and do so well, which is represent clients," he said. "What does my age have to do with anything?"

Mr. Hirsch said he had recently heard from many people over 45 who felt trapped in miserable jobs until they heard of his own exit from his old firm.

"To borrow the words of Joseph Campbell from the 70's, I tell older people afraid of starting over to just follow your bliss," Mr. Hirsch said.