The Factories

If Barry Goldwater, Nelson Rockefeller, George Romney or William Scranton runs for President in November and loses, a pattern is sure to be broken. None of the four is likely to become a practicing lawyer, and it is something of a tradition for defeated G.O.P. presidential nominees to join big Wall Street law firms. After losing to F.D.R. in 1940, Wendell Willkie entered the partnership now named Willkie Farr Gallagher Walton & Fitzgibbon. In 1955 Tom Dewey joined Ballantine, Bushby, Palmer & Wood, which promptly renamed itself Dewey, B., B., P. & W. Richard Nixon has joined Mudge, Stern, Baldwin & Todd, and the firm has changed its handle to Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie & Alexander.

For the big law firm, a Willkie, Dewey or Nixon is a valuable catch; apart from the newcomer's legal talents, his very name can be counted on to pay off in new and profitable business. For the ex-candidate, the arrangement is just as rewarding. Six-figure incomes are common among senior partners of big law firms. At N., M., R., G. & A., Richard Nixon could take in $200,000 a year.

Solid & Durable. The traffic moves in both directions; big-time lawyers shift readily into high posts in business and government. The late John W. Davis of Davis Polk Wardwell Sunderland & Kiendl left Wall Street in 1924 to be come the Democratic candidate for President; he lost and went back to lawyering. Several Cabinet officers, Henry L. Stimson and John Foster Dulles among them, have been Wall Street lawyers. Defense Secretary McNamara's newest deputy, Cyrus Vance, came from Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. The big outfits, sometimes referred to as "factories" (the term makes the lawyers wince), also supply a sizable share of the presidents, board chairmen and directors of large corporations.

"Factory" lawyers fall into two broad categories: partners, who divide up the profits, and associates, who are paid salaries. With 24 partners and 47 associates, the Nixon firm barely ranks among New York City's 20 biggest. At the top in size is Shearman & Sterling, with 158 lawyers. Outside New York, firms with as many as 50 lawyers are uncommon: there are five in Philadelphia, five in Houston, four in Chicago, four in Cleveland, two in Los Angeles, one each in Washington, Boston and San Francisco.

Although their names sometimes suffer drastic changes, the big law offices are usually solid and durable institutions. Most of today's giants are direct descendants of firms established generations ago. Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie & Alexander, for example, traces back to 1869. Relationships with clients tend to be just as durable. Shearman & Sterling has represented one New York bank for the past 67 years.

Unlike The Defenders. In both style and substance, most of the law practiced in the big shops differs radically from the work of attorneys who operate alone or in small firms. A rare star performer, such as Edward Bennett Williams or Melvin Belli, may get rich with an essentially one-man show, but the average income of U.S. lawyers working on their own comes to about $8,000 a year. In big firms, the starting salary for an associate fresh from law school is about $8,000, and the average income of partners and associates is about four times that amount.

Factory lawyers have little to do with the kind of TV law seen on Perry Mason and The Defenders. They rarely touch criminal cases, personal-injury suits or domestic relations. Most of their work is done outside the courtroom, and some senior partners have never argued a case before a judge and jury--a testament to Elihu Root's dictum that "a lawyer's business is to keep his clients out of litigation."

It was not many years ago that some of the lordlier firms had outside lawyers do their litigating for them, just as a dentist may send a patient to a dental surgeon to have a tooth pulled. But times have changed. Now many of the big firms can brag that along with all their other services they offer clients the skills of specialists in the belligerent arts of litigation. Since the troops first turned out to defend the electrical-equipment companies against price-fixing charges in 1960, the roster of counsel in this continuing flood of litigation has read like a roll call of the legal elite.

Green Goods. For the most part, though, the big firms still earn their big money drawing up contracts. Factory-fashioned transactions often involve many millions of dollars--large transfers of property, huge bank loans, corporate mergers. Shepherding new stock issues is an especially profitable type of business, affectionately referred to among Wall Street lawyers as handling "green goods."

Almost all such work reflects the complexity of modern society--the problems of big business, of big unions, of big government, with its high taxes and its maze of regulations. Lawyers must make sure not only that a contract is foolproof and foulproof, but also that the deal in question clears with the federal regulatory agencies, the Justice Department and the Treasury.

White Shoes. A spot in a big, busy law firm is a prize starting place for an ambitious law-school graduate, and only the highly promising get tapped. Back in 1911, having graduated from Princeton, studied at the Sorbonne for a year and acquired a law degree from George Washington University, John Foster Dulles applied at several Wall Street law firms and failed to get a job. "Law degrees from Harvard or Columbia," Dulles later recalled, "were the requirement for admission to the eminent law firms of New York." It took family influence to win Dulles a starting berth at Sullivan & Cromwell. Once in, he rose to be the top partner, but he never did get his name in the title. Sullivan & Cromwell it remained, and remains today, although Sullivan died in 1887 and Cromwell in 1948, leaving an $18 million estate.

The doors are open wider now. With the expansion of the U.S. economy and the U.S. Government, the demand for bright young lawyers has grown faster than the supply. The big firms' lists of acceptable law schools are swelled from two or three to ten or more; students near the top of the class rarely have to hunt down jobs--they are recruited even before graduation.

Next to good grades, the factories list "energy" and "personality" as the main criteria for judging prospects. Some "white-shoe outfits" (so called because white bucks were once standard footgear on Ivy League campuses) still cherish a preference for an upper-class family background. It also helps to be free of conspicuous eccentricities: a facial tic, a squeaky voice or a gaudy necktie can bar a bright applicant, and even too much library pallor may arouse suspicion. In response to a Harvard Law School questionnaire on what it was looking for in graduates, a New York firm curtly replied, "Byron White." The name alone conjured up the improbable combination of football hero, Rhodes scholar and Supreme Court Justice.

Darkness at 2. Once he gets in, the graduate is often assigned to several different departments over a period of two years or so before settling into a specialty. Statistically, a new associate has about one chance in seven of eventually reaching a partnership. The climb takes about ten years in New York, but in California an able newcomer can hope to become a partner in five years, or even less.

It is seldom easy. Getting ahead in a big law firm means a hefty amount of evening and weekend work. "There is somebody here every night of the year except Christmas," says a Shearman & Sterling partner. Once he gets to be a partner, a factory lawyer finds that he works just as hard at the top as he did on the climb. Wall Street lawyers still like to recall an anecdote about the late Hoyt A. Moore, a partner in Cravath, Swaine & Moore. A colleague once told Moore that the firm ought to hire more associates because the staff was overworked. "That's silly," Partner Moore replied. "No one is under pressure. There wasn't a light on when I left at 2 o'clock this morning."

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