166. The price of prestige
"Prestige" has a specialized meaning in the legal profession. "Prestigious" is a precise synonym for "powerful" and a somewhat looser synonym for lucrative. The equivalence with big bucks isn't perfect: a billboard practice might be lucrative but it's not prestigious. Nonetheless, as a rule of thumb, the word "prestige" is used in the legal world to refer to power and money.
A second, related rule of thumb: Lucrative = boring. Prestigious firms can be identified by the sky-high salaries they offer law school graduates, but the salaries are high for the same reason the witch's house is made of gingerbread. No one would submit to stressful tedium for less.
The tedium of prestigious legal work is no paradox: smart and ambitious people won't do uninteresting work unless they're paid exceptionally well, and they draw the line at degrading work unless the pay is outrageous. One of the bon mots customarily attributed to Churchill, the one about haggling over the price, is generally understood to refer to the recruitment practices of prestigious law firms.
The lawyer as family retainer has long since faded into the hazy distance of nineteenth-century English fiction, but lawyers at prestigious firms remain a variety of servant. They're corporate butlers, involved in the dynamism of capitalism the way a highly skilled caddy is involved in the Masters golf tournament. High pay is compensation in the psychological as well as financial sense.
I would have thought that Cravath, Swaine & Moore was the the most prestigious of all firms - in fact, its website says it is - but this survey says it's fallen to number two. Kind of a Harvard / Yale thing, I suppose.
Balzac said that behind every great fortune there is a great crime. I'm not prepared to say that behind every prestigious law firm there is the monthly practice of mail fraud, but in the case of Cravath, Swaine & Moore, there's an earthier sort of crime.
At least, that's according to John T. Noonan, Jr., who himself followed the power path to prestige. In his book Bribes - the only fat footnoted book about the law ever to be published without a subtitle, though the hardback edition does have a wordy blurb on the front cover - Noonan describes the receivership proceedings involving Williamsport Wire Rope Company, which he describes as "a small corporation coveted by its chief creditor, Bethlehem Steel."
Bethlehem Steel, in turn, was represented by Hoyt A. Moore. Yes, that Moore. (Still ... Hoyt?? Shouldn't it have been his mother's aristocratic maiden name, or, failing that, a name shared by at least one post-Ethelred English king?) According to Noonan, Moore oversaw the shoveling of $250,000 to a federal judge, Albert W. Johnson, who ordered the smaller company into receivership and then "manipulated its receivership so that eventually in 1937 Bethlehem was able to acquire the company at a bargain price."
Moore was put on trial but got off by pleading the statute of limitations - a litigation coup oddly unmentioned on the firm's website. However, his partner Swaine once wrote that Bethlehem was Moore's principal client, adding, "No lawyer ever unreservedly gave more of himself to a client." It's hard to be less reserved than a criminal, but what he gave wasn't so much of himself.
Wednesday, September 13, 2006 at 08:04PM in Big firms, Crimes of Judging
Reader Comments (1)