Lawyers: The Factories

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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.