It’s no longer just the lawyers making money during good times and bad. A fixed-income boutique in New York is jockeying for position as the go-to adviser for financial firms — and for the U.S. government — as they attempt to value the toxic securities blamed for crippling the financial sector. Standish, the $200 billion fund manager owned by Bank of New York Mellon Corp., took calls from clients earlier this year about whether they should hold or dump structured-investment vehicles, the early casualties of the credit crisis. Thomas Graf, head of structured products for Standish, says now the phones are ringing off the hook. He set up a formal business at Standish advising clients on how to value all structured products, including the troublesome collateralized debt obligations and mortgage-backed securities. Some of the business is coming from BNY Mellon’s existing clients, but Standish also wants a piece of Washington’s bailout business, as the government tries to decide what to pay for securities it will buy from flailing financial firms.

“We’ve always done fundamental credit analysis,” says Graf, who declines to put a number on Standish’s advisory business today. BlackRock and Pacific Investment Management Co. have been big players in this space, but the director of a large U.S. public plan who wants to remain anonymous says other fixed-income managers will likely be called in for a second opinion on the assets. “This isn’t a science, it’s an art,” he says. “We need to reach deeper into the market for expertise.”