Skadden: Power, Money, and the Rise of a Legal Empire

by Lincoln Caplan

Overview

In this unprecedented look at the culture of American lawyering, Lincoln Caplan shows us Skadden's origins in the white-shoe postwar legal world and its rise to preeminence in the era of Drexel Burnham Lambert - the firm's largest client in the eighties. Skadden is revealed as a place that prizes opportunists but which also created a $10 million program to support public-interest lawyers. In Caplan's probing and even-handed account, the story of Joe Flom's firm illuminates an era in America business and society.

"Caplan's inside insights are fascinating. It is as if we get not only one of L.A. Law's best episodes, but also a lot of what is usually left on the cutting-room floor." - Booklist

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374524241
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	10/30/1994
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	735,978
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.82(d)

Table of Contents

I	History
1	The Snake Pit	3
2	April Fools'	14
3	Accident	26
4	Showing the Bastards	35
5	Takeoff	45
II	Business
6	Opportunism	63
7	The Market	72
8	Building the Church	87
9	Olympus	105
III	Culture
10	The Bar's Race to the Bottom	121
11	Hardball	139
12	The Skadden Culture	153
13	Green	176
14	Pro Bono	191
15	The Merger Movement	207
IV	The Crucible
16	Skaddenfreude	231
17	The Morning Line	239
18	Recession	246
19	Making Partner	263
V	The Future
20	Global	277
21	Spooked	297
22	Succession	318
	A Background Note	333
	Acknowledgments	337

Editorial Reviews

For years Joseph Flom, the hard-hitting senior partner of the Manhattan firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, dominated the world's richest law firm with a roster of prestigious international clients. In this revealing in-depth study, written with Skadden's ``sometimes'' cooperation, Caplan ( An Open Adoption ) traces the history of change among postwar legal firms into big businesses often as money-and power-centered as their clients, specializing in corporate mergers, acquisitions and ruthless takeovers. Abetted by the relaxed enforcement of antitrust laws and by deregulation from the 1970s to 1990, Skadden's more than 1000 lawyers, organized on a corporate model, made merger or acquisition deals involving Dupont-Conoco, U.S. Steel-Marathon Oil, and GE-RCA, among others, which the American Bar Association criticized as serving the client's interest rather than the public's. Skadden, the author notes, has weathered the recession with fewer partners and new leadership. 30,000 first printing; author tour. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly