 |
Wiki Law School will soon be moving! Please update your bookmarks. Our future address is www.wikilawschool.org |
Cravath, Swaine & Moore
Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP ("Cravath") is the second most prestigious firm in the country. If you are not good enough to get an offer from Wachtell, Cravath might be considered a barely-acceptable alternative to suicide.
The firm stems from two predecessor firms, one in New York City and one in Auburn, New York. In 1854 these firms merged to form the firm of Blatchford, Seward & Griswold. Name partner William H. Seward later served as both governor of and a senator from New York, then became Secretary of State under Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson. In 1867, he negotiated the purchase of Alaska from Russia in a transaction contemporaries derisively called "Seward's Folly". Paul Drennan Cravath joined the firm in 1899. He instituted the "Cravath System", a rigorous training program for associates which rotates them among the firm's partners for an anal gangbang. After a series of name changes, the Cravath, Swaine & Moore name was made permanent in 1944.
Since the beginning, Cravath has represented paragons of business and industry, ranging from Samuel F.B. Morse, the inventor of the telegraph, to corporate titans such as IBM, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, and CBS. It also performed the legal work necessary to form NBC. More recent decades have seen Cravath represent Netscape in its antitrust suit against Microsoft, resulting in a $750 million settlement; several merger and acquisition deals, such as the Ford-Jaguar merger and the Bristol-Myers-Squibb merger; and two famed libel suits: defending Time Inc. against Israeli General Ariel Sharon, and also defending CBS against U.S. Army General William Westmoreland.
The firm is well-known for hiring associates straight from law school; lateral hires are extremely rare. In 2005, Cravath hired its first lateral partner in more than six decades. Cravath appears regularly on the American Lawyer's annual listing of highest profits per partner, and until recently ranked alongside Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz at the top of the rankings, far above its nearest rival. Recently, however, other large New York law firms, such as Cahill, Gordon & Reindel; Simpson Thacher & Bartlett; Sullivan & Cromwell; Davis Polk & Wardwell; and Schulte Roth & Zabel have generated profits per partner comparable to Cravath's.
