In a couple of different races during the 1970s, three partners at the law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison ran as Democrats for U.S. senator from New York. Neither Ted Sorensen, the J.F.K. aide, Ramsey Clark, the former attorney general, nor Morris Abram, the civil-rights leader, won a seat, but their efforts offered a clue about the kind of people who worked at the firm.
So, in the 1980s, did the service of Arthur Liman as the chief Senate investigator in the Iran-Contra affair, the great crisis of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Paul, Weiss was the definition, the epitome, of the civic-minded law firm. At various times, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan were summer associates. (So was I.)
As Brad Karp, the longtime chairman of Paul, Weiss, tells me of the firm he joined four decades ago, “It was a collection of extraordinarily smart, very iconoclastic, very intellectual lawyers who represented lots of clients and causes that traditionally were outside of the mainstream of the American corporate world.”
Not anymore. The world of Big Law has been transformed into one where attorneys switch firms like free agents switch baseball teams, clients dump their lawyers after a single bad result, and well-known firms, such as Shearman & Sterling, disappear in a flash.
There’s no longer any such thing as a WASP law firm or a Jewish firm—not even a Black or white firm—because the only color that matters now is green. Paul, Weiss, where a top partner can now make $25 million a year, is still a storied place; it’s just that the story is a different one than it used to be.
At a youthful 64, Karp practically vibrates with enthusiasm for the firm where he has spent his whole career. His twitchy energy is appropriate to a moment when he knows—as the leader of every firm now knows—that success in the contemporary law business is precarious. “I talk about that every Thursday at our partners’ lunch,” he tells me. “It is, What have you done for me today? What will you do for me tomorrow? The successes you had yesterday are irrelevant.”
“Law firms have two things that matter,” he says. “They have talent, and they have clients. It’s not like a corporation that has a 10-year contract with a government purchaser to buy widgets. Your talent, as you’ve seen over and over again, can walk out the door every single day and not come back. Your clients, as we’ve seen over and over again with major law firms, can disappear and switch firms overnight.”
Just look at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, long the paradigm of white-shoe pre-eminence in the profession. In just the last few years, Sandra Goldstein, the former head of the firm’s litigation department, fled Cravath for Kirkland & Ellis and a deal valued, according to The New York Times, at $11 million a year for five years, plus a signing bonus. (Yes, the head of litigation at Cravath was a) a woman, and b) a Goldstein.)
Then Katherine Forrest, a former federal judge at Cravath, jumped to Paul, Weiss, as did a leading mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer named Scott Barshay, who makes $25 million a year. (Because, I’m told, Barshay brings Paul, Weiss more than a $100 million a year in billings, his compensation may be a steal for the firm. Barshay and Karp declined to discuss the numbers.)
How did this all happen in a profession where, within living memory, mention of money was considered, well, vulgar? Karp voices a widely shared view: “Steven Brill changed everything.” In 1985, Brill, the founder and editor of The American Lawyer magazine, came up with the circulation-boosting idea of listing the highest-grossing law firms in the nation, including, crucially, an accounting of profits per partner. The feature did more than attract eyeballs to Brill’s magazine; it transformed the legal profession.
Up to that point, law-firm partnerships had kept their financial results a secret, including from many of their own colleagues. Brill’s innovation opened lawyers’ eyes to the differences among firms and unleashed a wave of competition for the best results.
The public accounting hastened the end of “lockstep” compensation—the rule, at many firms, that all partners be compensated equally, based on their year of graduation from law school. All partners of the same vintage were paid the same amount, regardless of how much revenue from clients they produced for the firm.
Attorneys switch firms like free agents switch baseball teams, clients dump their lawyers after a single bad result, and well-known firms disappear in a flash.
“In order to prevent star lawyers at less profitable firms from leaving, firms decided we have to deviate from lockstep and pay more based on performance,” Karp says. In time, partnership at a law firm evolved from a kind of lifetime appointment, like tenure at a university, to the kind of cash-based meritocracy that prevails today. (Cravath stuck with lockstep longer than most firms, which seems to have contributed to the recent exits of some of its stars.)
The clients and lawyers started moving around the same time. For decades, big clients had sent most of their business to a single firm: IBM to Cravath; Chase to Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy (now known as just Milbank); Citibank to Shearman & Sterling; and so on. But the general counsels at these companies started to spread their business around to their preferred individual lawyers regardless of which firms they worked at, further increasing the leverage of these individuals within the profession.
The firms’ scramble for talent, and for clients, also had a less obvious effect. When the big firms didn’t have to work too hard to bring in business, the lawyers could afford to treat their firms like country clubs, with the same kind of social exclusivity. As a result, during the long period of pre–American Lawyer stability within the profession, law firms had distinct ethnic profiles. Cravath and Davis Polk & Wardwell were WASP strongholds. Outsiders were forced to found their own firms: Catholics, for example, at Cahill Gordon & Reindel, and Jews at Rosenman & Colin and Proskauer Rose, among many others.
When Paul, Weiss Met Apollo
From its founding in the late 19th century, Paul, Weiss, though significantly Jewish, prided itself on a measure of religious diversity. As law firms go, Paul, Weiss is still more diverse than many, and its partnership includes three of the most prominent Black lawyers in the country: Loretta Lynch, the former attorney general under President Obama; Ted Wells Jr., a sought-after trial lawyer and member of Harvard’s governing board; and Jeh Johnson, Obama’s former secretary of homeland security. (Johnson is currently leading the defense of Davis Polk, in a trial where a Black former associate has charged the firm with race discrimination.)
For most of its history, Paul, Weiss was known as a litigation shop, with strong side practices in tax and entertainment law. (John Wharton, the name partner, represented the Cole Porter Trust, among many other Broadway clients, and he founded the TKTS booth in Times Square, to make theater available at lower prices.)
For decades, the firm’s most prominent figure was Simon Rifkind, who joined the firm after he stepped down from a federal judgeship in 1950. He represented Jacqueline Kennedy in her dispute with author William Manchester over his book The Death of a President and U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Douglas when he was threatened with impeachment. “After the war, you had all these Jewish-owned businesses that began to thrive, like Revlon and Warner Communications, and they all became Paul, Weiss clients because of Judge Rifkind,” a firm partner tells me.
For a long time, the prize of a single dominant client, such as a major bank, eluded Paul, Weiss, but that turned out to be a blessing. Until around 2000, the firm lacked much of a corporate practice, but then it began to win more work on deals, thanks largely to Bob Schumer (Chuck’s younger brother), who became a leading mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer.
At the same time, the big banks started spreading their business around. Citibank sent a good chunk to Paul, Weiss, hastening the decline of Shearman & Sterling, which recently agreed to merge into a British firm. So, rather than have to worry about the shrinking business of a big banking client, Paul, Weiss was ready to pounce when the great legal jackpot of recent years appeared: private equity.
A private-equity firm is a perfect client for a modern law firm. Unlike a commercial bank, which may do a handful of major transactions in a given year, private-equity firms do nothing but deals. Their business is to finance, buy, and sell smaller companies, which themselves also buy and sell other companies. All these transactions require lawyering, often involving complex and innovative financial structures.
Kirkland & Ellis became the No. 1 firm on The American Lawyer’s current list, with $6.5 billion in revenue in 2022 and more than 3,000 lawyers, thanks in significant part to its success with private-equity clients. Paul, Weiss (No. 22, with $1.8 billion in revenue and nearly 1,000 lawyers in 10 offices around the world) signed Apollo Global Management in 2008, which was co-founded by Leon Black and is now the third-largest private-equity firm in the world; it’s currently the biggest client at the firm. (Black stepped down at Apollo in 2021 after his financial entanglements with Jeffrey Epstein came to light; Paul, Weiss does not represent Black.)
For decades, the finance boom in New York led many lawyers to trade firm life for Wall Street. But now the traffic is starting to go the other way, because, as one Paul, Weiss lawyer tells me, “We make more money than our clients.” Proving the point, Rob Kindler last year left his position as global chair of mergers and acquisitions at Morgan Stanley to become a partner at Paul, Weiss. (Billing at firms such as Paul, Weiss is complicated; top lawyers charge well over $1,000 an hour, but there can also be flat fees and bonuses for successful outcomes.)
Still, one current lawyer at Paul, Weiss didn’t mean it as a compliment when he said to me, “We’ve turned into Kirkland.” A couple of decades ago, Kirkland had a reputation as a stodgy Chicago-based firm that was as friendly to conservatives as Paul, Weiss was to Democrats. (Kenneth Starr and Brett Kavanaugh were partners at Kirkland.) In recent years, though, Kirkland has largely shed its political identity and become an almost soul-less, multi-national profit machine.
With the end of lockstep, the structure of Paul, Weiss and many other firms has come to reflect the broader, increasingly unequal American economy. According to The American Lawyer, the firm had overall profits per partner of $5.7 million in 2022, the most recent reported year. But if some partners are making as much as $25 million and others close to that amount, that means that some partners are making a great deal less. Having to get by on a million or two dollars a year is unlikely to engender sympathy anywhere on planet Earth, but it doesn’t mean these relative worker bees are happy about it.
For decades, the finance boom in New York led many lawyers to trade firm life for Wall Street. But now the traffic is starting to go the other way, because, as one Paul, Weiss lawyer tells me, “We make more money than our clients.”
After Karp last year poached three partners from Kirkland & Ellis at a reported $20 million per year each, The American Lawyer reported on “tensions among partners as the firm widens the spread of compensation.” Karp’s response appears to be: Welcome to the big leagues.
It’s tough to imagine what law-firm “culture” even means if partners cycle through a firm as fast as players did through the George Steinbrenner–era Yankees. Taurie Zeitzer, the co-head of Paul, Weiss’s M&A group, just left the firm for White & Case, which marks Zeitzer’s fourth firm partnership since 2012. True, some aspects of the old Paul, Weiss ethic seem to have endured. The firm retains a serious commitment to pro bono work, including on expensive, long-term litigation. But Karp is happy to ditch other aspects of firm traditions, such as its overwhelmingly Democratic character. He hired as the chair of the firm’s appellate practice Kannon Shanmugam, a veteran Supreme Court advocate who is a former law clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia and a frequent speaker at Federalist Society conferences.
In 2019, Paul, Weiss successfully defended ExxonMobil against charges by the New York attorney general that the company lied to investors about the risks of climate change. This was followed by protests at Harvard Law School that targeted Paul, Weiss recruiting events, because the firm “cultivated a reputation as a liberal corporate law firm” while defending a major oil company. Aaron Regunberg, a student and an organizer of the protests, said at the time, “I went to law school because I believe in the power of our legal system to be a force for good, and using aggressive tactics to enable corporate polluters to literally continue lighting our future on fire to me is the antithesis of what lawyers should do.”
Karp tells me that Paul, Weiss won’t represent opioid manufacturers (though it does represent members of the Sackler family, which controlled Purdue Pharma, an opioid manufacturer), but that oil companies are fair game. “It is a big business, and we’re proud of the work we’ve done,” he says. “We represent our clients to the full extent of our abilities. We do it so ethically and zealously, and there were protests. It’s very hard in today’s world to represent a wide spectrum of clients and not run into the occasional protest.”
Paul, Weiss is currently seeking other clients in the oil patch, with plans to open a new office, in Houston.
Jeffrey Toobin, a legal analyst and journalist, is the author of many books, including Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism