Episode 12 - The New York Jewish Law Firm
The story of the rise and obsolescence of the New York Jewish law firm
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Introduction
One of my favorite Curb Your Enthusiasm episodes is the first episode of season eight. Larry and Cheryl are getting divorced. Larry’s divorce lawyer is Randy Berg, who he assumes is Jewish because of his last name. But when Larry hears through the grapevine that Berg went to Catholic school, he confronts him:
The Jewish lawyer is a trope in American Jewish culture. In today’s installment of Recognizably Jewish, we’ll scratch the surface of that trope to understand some of the historical social and cultural forces that created it. In particular, we’ll examine the rise and obsolescence of the New York Jewish law firm.
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The Old Country
Jewish immigration to the United States largely happened in two waves. From 1840 to 1880, before Ellis Island opened, approximately 250,000 Jews from German-speaking Europe arrived. Some settled in New York, but many put down roots in other metro areas. Then, from 1880 until the start of World War I in 1914, more than two million Jews immigrated to the US from the Russian empire, including the Pale of Settlement. Both of these waves of immigrant Jews became important parts of the story of Jewish law practice in New York in the 20th century, so it’s reasonable to ask whether there was a tradition of Jewish law practice in Europe in the 19th century.
In short, the answer is no. Widespread antisemitism, explicit legal restrictions, and social discrimination, among other obstacles, made it difficult or sometimes impossible for European Jews to become successful lawyers. In many parts of Europe, Jews were excluded altogether from certain professions, including law, or faced absurd and arbitrary barriers to practicing. Although emancipation movements eased some of these formal restrictions over time, normalized antisemitism remained a major barrier to establishing a viable law practice. There were a small number of historically notable nineteenth-century Jewish lawyers from France, the Netherlands, and some German states, but Jews were not a significant part of the profession in those places. And in the Russian Empire, there simply weren’t prominent Jewish lawyers at all.
Before we move on to the American story, I do want to make one more point. Even though European Jews were largely barred from the legal profession, there is arguably some cultural predisposition for Jews to become lawyers. The rabbinic variant of Judaism that has been dominant since at least the codification of the Talmud in the sixth century is, in a way, very legalistic. Jews who study Torah and Mishnah and Talmud are trained in critical thinking and analytical modes that can resemble the text-based systemized legal reasoning used by practitioners of the common law. Whether that has anything to do with the rise of the Jewish law firm and the modern tropes about Jewish lawyers is a bit beyond the scope of this episode, but it’s interesting to think about.
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Yiddish Phrase
Let’s move on to today’s Yiddish phrase. See if you can figure out what it means. Read to the end to find out.
Vos ken vern fun di shof az der volf iz der rikhter?
Our Crowd
In 1967, Stephen Birmingham published his best selling social history Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York. The book documents the lives of prominent New York Jewish families of the 19th century, including familiar names like Seligmans, Lehmans, Schiffs, Guggenheims, and Kahns. I think the book deserves an episode of its own someday, but I mention it because it’s the best-known articulation of the incredible professional and financial successes achieved by the German Jews who came to America in the mid-nineteenth century. The wealthiest and most successful of them tended to be bankers, but there were lawyers among them as well.
One notable example is Alfred Jaretzki Sr., who became a partner at the Wall Street law firm Sullivan & Cromwell in 1894 and took over as managing partner of the firm around 1900. His cousins Edward Green and Eustace Seligman were also partners at the firm in later years. Another example is Joseph Hartfield, who joined the law firm White & Case in 1904. Finally, though he was neither a New Yorker nor a member of the Our Crowd society, perhaps the best-known example of Jewish legal success from the German wave of immigrants is Louis Brandeis, the first Jewish Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, whose Jewish parents emigrated to Louisville, Kentucky from Prague in 1856.
By 1885, there were about 5,000 lawyers in New York City, about 400 of whom were Jewish. And most of those were of German extraction.
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The Creation of the (WASP) Law Firm
It’s crucial to understand that, at the turn of the twentieth century, the modern incarnation of the law firm simply didn’t exist. There were law firms, but they were basically small collections of partners performing solo work on their own client matters. One of my key sources for this episode is the work of Eli Wald, a professor at the University of Denver Sturm School of Law. Links to some of his papers are in the show notes. Professor Wald describes the period from 1899 to 1945 as the “formative era of the large law firm,” when firms grew and evolved to satisfy the demands of increasingly large and complex corporate clients.
The growth and management model used by elite law firms during this time period became known as the “Cravath system” because it was largely conceived and implemented by Paul Drennan Cravath in the early decades of the twentieth century at the firm that today is known as Cravath Swaine and Moore. The attributes of the system included hiring from elite law schools; apprenticing junior lawyers to senior partners; lockstep compensation systems that paid each lawyer a salary regardless of the client business he generated; and promoting partners solely from within the firm. The system purported to represent an idealized form of professional meritocracy in which considerations like socioeconomic background and religion were deemed irrelevant to a lawyer’s credentials. But as a practical matter, that wasn’t the case. From 1900 to 1945, every large law firm in New York had a distinctively White Anglo Saxon Protestant identity.
Part of the reason for that persistent WASP identity was explicit or at least implicit nativism. That is, successful New York Protestant families, communities, and business leaders (including law firm partners) used their comparative advantages to oppose the ambitions of Jewish and Catholic immigrants. For example, by using subjective factors like “warmth of personality” and “stamina” in the recruiting process, elite law firms excluded non-WASPs without having to own up to their underlying nativism or the imperfections of their supposedly meritocratic recruiting methods.
Moreover, the character of the elite firms was such that it privileged the social and cultural identities of established WASP lawyers over those of the striving immigrant classes. The atmosphere was gentlemanly and in many ways uncompetitive. For instance, compensation was set rather than negotiated. Lawyers were trained rather than hired laterally. Perhaps most notably, competition for clients was frowned upon, creating an old boys club in which relationships based on class privilege and social and cultural standing determined professional success. Such an atmosphere almost necessarily excluded Jews — especially the later-arriving Eastern European cohorts.
After World War II, elite law schools largely did away with artificial caps on the number of Jewish students they admitted. And many Jewish students excelled at those schools. By the mid 1950s, more than half of the lawyers in New York City were Jewish, and Jewish law students consistently graduated in the top ranks of the best law schools on the east coast. There was a large pool of qualified Jewish lawyers overlooked by WASP firms — either not hired in the first place or hired as token Jews and virtually certain never to become a partner. But every truly elite firm in New York City had a distinctively WASP identity and Jewish partners were few and far between.
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The Incredible Growth of the New York Jewish Law Firm
So it’s 1950 and you’ve graduated near the top of your class at Columbia Law School. You have the brains, the education, and the motivation to become an elite corporate lawyer. But you’re an Ashkenazi Jew whose parents emigrated to the US from Poland. You’re smart enough to realize you’re probably not going to get hired – let alone promoted — at Cravath, Sullivan & Cromwell, Willkie Farr, Milbank, Shearman & Sterling, Simpson Thacher, White & Case, or Davis Polk. What do you do? For an increasing number of Jewish lawyers at the time, the answer was to join a Jewish law firm.
In 1945, there wasn’t a single Jewish firm with more than 10 lawyers. But by 1950, Weil Gotshal was a relatively large firm by New York standards, with 19 attorneys. Other sizable Jewish firms included Kaye Scholer, Proskauer Rose, Fried Frank, and Stroock, Stroock & Lavan (whose named partner changed his name from Levine to Lavan). Wachtell Lipton, Kramer Levin, and a number of other Jewish firms had not yet been founded. These so-called Jewish firms were not monolithic. Some had more German Jewish partners, while others had partners who were largely Eastern European in descent. And a few, like Paul Weiss, actually had a mix of Jewish and gentile partners. But in the middle of the twentieth century, these emerging Jewish firms did have certain things in common.
First, they adopted their own iteration of the Cravath system. But rather than merely paying lip service to the ethos of meritocracy, the Jewish first genuinely sought out the best credentialed and most promising recruits. WASP firms systematically overlooking non-Protestant law graduates meant it was relatively easy and inexpensive to recruit the best and the brightest of those graduates to Jewish firms. And to the extent Jewish lawyers did somehow make it to white shoe firms, they were inevitably back on the market as lateral associates when they realized promotion was impossible. Those realities led to the concentration of an enormous amount of legal talent in mid-century Jewish firms.
Second, Jewish law firms collectively differed from their WASP counterparts in that they did not adopt any sort of ethnic or religious character. In other words, the Jewish firms were Jewish by virtue of their partner and associate demographics, but not by virtue of their atmospheres or other qualities. At a time when antisemitism and discrimination were prevalent, expressly invoking Jewish identity would have been an impediment to achieving elite professional status. So instead Jewish firms adopted a neutral, business-oriented ethos that distinguished them from their WASP counterparts. Whereas the WASP firms glorified genteelness and your family’s placement on the Social Register, the Jewish firms glorified attributes that were more directly connected to succeeding in a modern, sophisticated law practice. In other words, Jewish firms transformed the prejudiced stereotypes that had been used to exclude Jews into desirable qualities.
Third, Jewish law firms took advantage of practice niches that the WASP firms deemed undesirable. As professor Wald writes:
When litigation became a more accepted avenue of corporate strategic behavior, rather than a symbol of a transaction gone awry, when takeovers . . . became mainstream methods of reorganization, and when commercial real estate became a lucrative practice area — the Jewish law firms, which emerged 50 years after the WASP law firms, benefited from acting as the first movers in these practice areas.
Litigation is a paradigmatic example of this phenomenon. Many WASP firms perceived litigation as an ungentlemanly and low-status practice area because it depended more on being combative or argumentative than on one’s networking and connections. The other well-known example is exemplified by the extraordinary success of Joe Flom at Skadden Arps and Marty Lipton at Wachtell Lipton – both masters of a type of M&A practice that WASP firms deemed undignified. Other examples of practice areas that were largely ceded to Jewish firms included labor relations and bankruptcy.
A fourth commonality among the Jewish firms was that, after Paul Weiss left Wall Street in 1949, they tended to be located in midtown, whereas the traditional WASP firms were still located on Wall Street. In this way, they gained another first-mover advantage when large corporate clients began populating midtown. It took the Wall Street firms a while to catch up.
Finally, the emerging elite Jewish firms were united in their incredibly rapid growth. In 1950, there was not a single truly large Jewish law firm in New York. By the mid-1960s, six of the largest twenty law firms were Jewish, and by 1980 four of the ten largest law firms were Jewish firms. Jewish firms were growing about twice as fast as their WASP counterparts.
With rapid growth and such a phenomenal concentration of talent, some true superstars emerged. Milton Handler at Kaye Scholer became a prominent authority on takeover law. Ira Millstein at Weil Gotshal excelled at antitrust. I’ve already mentioned Joe Flom and Marty Lipton. Their public profiles further fueled the growth of, and highlighted the elite status of, the Jewish firms.
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Integration and Obsolescence
Today there aren’t really Jewish firms in the top tiers of law practice. There are still firms that are associated with their Jewish origins, but they’re now demographically similar to firms that were once bastions of the white shoe WASP bar. So how did the system transition from one of largely distinct WASP and Jewish firms to today’s fully integrated AmLaw 100?
First, although it was the exception rather than the rule, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that there were examples of Jewish attorneys who managed to succeed at traditionally WASP firms. In 1945, Leo Gottlieb became the first Jewish named partner in a major WASP Wall Street firm when the Root Clark firm split into Cleary Gottlieb and Dewey Ballantine. Edwin Weisl, who had close ties to Lyndon Johnson, was a prominent success at Simpson Thacher. Louis Loeb at Lord Day & Lord was the first Jewish president of the New York City Bar Association. And Floyd Abrams at Cahill Gordon represented The New York Times in connection with the highly public Pentagon Papers matter. The profiles of these lawyers helped normalize the presence of Jewish attorneys at traditionally WASP firms.
As is so often the case in corporate law practice, client attributes and attitudes had a lot to do with the way firms developed. In particular, in the sixties and seventies, big companies began building sophisticated in-house counsel operations. Company general counsels were sensitive to price and quality more than to the religious and social backgrounds of their outside counsel’s partners and associates. That made it all the more acceptable for WASP firms to hire and promote bright Jewish attorneys. (Incidentally, Professor Wald finds “no evidence to suggest that wealthy individual Jewish clients and ‘Jewish’ corporations displayed religious loyalty and sought legal services preferentially from Jewish law firms.”)
In 1964, the Yale Law Journal, at the behest of the Anti Defamation League, prepared a study of discrimination in the New York Bar. It found that, while Jewish law graduates still faced employment discrimination, it was far less than it would have been even a decade prior. WASP firms increasingly began to hire larger numbers of Jewish associates. And in time, some of those associates were elected to the partnerships of the elite WASP firms. Cravath itself promoted Edward Benjamin in the mid-1950s — over the strenuous and expressly antisemitic objection of octogenarian named partner Hoyt Moore. Irwin Schneiderman became a Cahill Gordon partner in 1959. Mort Moskin became a partner at White & Case in 1962. Davis Polk elected Joel Cohen in 1969. The trend intensified between the 1960s and the 1980s, as the demand for legal services grew in parallel with the growth of corporate clients. At some point, the previously Protestant identities of the firms simply fell by the wayside. Historically Jewish firms, which had lost their privileged status in hiring and promoting Jewish lawyers, also became increasingly diverse. Well before I began practicing law in 2007, the distinction had been erased.
Conclusion
I’m proud to be a Jewish member of the bar. None of my direct ancestors were lawyers, but I nevertheless view myself as standing on the shoulders of the Jewish attorneys who blazed the trail over the past century.
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Before I finish, let’s not forget this episode’s Yiddish phrase:
Vos ken vern fun di shof az der volf iz der rikhter?
It means: “What will become of the sheep if the wolf is the judge?”
Select Sources and Citations
The Rise and Fall of the WASP and Jewish Law Firms, 60 Stan. L. Rev. 1803 (2008). (https://www.stanfordlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2010/04/Wald.pdf)
The Rise of the Jewish Law Firm or Is the Jewish Law Firm Generic?, 76 UMKC L. Rev. 885 (2008) (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1138437)
Paul Hoffman, Lions in the Street: The Inside Story of the Great Wall Street Law Firms (https://a.co/d/h40irB5)
Gillian: Thanks for such a generous comment. I'm so grateful for the feedback.
Thanks, that was really interesting. I’m a English lawyer, and work at Mayer Brown. We still have recognisably Jewish firms over here, but again everyone is becoming increasingly diverse really good article.