When we went looking for our first group of lifetime achievers, we had our eye on the future. We wanted to recognize great achievement for its own sake. But more importantly, we sought those who could be models for young lawyers. We wanted distinguished lawyers who had built great private practices and firms, but also made important contributions to public life. And we wanted a few from the public sector who not only felt an irresistible calling but performed public service at the highest level. To narrow the field, we looked for lawyers who were still living but were near the end of their careers or had retired from their firms or principal jobs. We present this extraordinary group, most of whom, health permitting, continue to contribute to the private bar and the public good. These are lawyers who gave meaning to the profession’s values, lawyers whose careers are a challenge to those who follow. -Profiles by Amy Vincent
William
Coleman, Jr.
O'Melveny & Myers
In an age of ever-narrower specialization, William Coleman's career harkens
back to the broader role of counselor: to presidents and the poor, to civic
and public interest groups, and to corporations of all types. After serving
as President Gerald Ford's secretary of Transportation and joining O'Melveny
& Myers, Coleman tackled corporate challenges as diverse as foreign trade,
labor relations, regulatory matters, and auto safety. At the same time, his
list of corporate and civic board memberships is practically unrivaled. From
the beginning of his career, Coleman has knocked down closed doors. With a
list of firsts as a black-Harvard Law Review Board of Editors, clerk to U.S.
Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, and partner at a major "white"
Philadelphia firm, Dilworth Paxson-Coleman devoted years of pro bono work to
the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, where he helped his friend
Thurgood Marshall on Brown v. Board of Education and rose to the fund's
chairmanship.
John
Pickering
Wilmer Cutler Pickering
The first time John Pickering ever appeared in court to argue a case was at the U.S. Supreme Court. Only a few years out of school, the former clerk to
Justice Frank Murphy was appointed to represent an indigent defendant. Murphy's beliefs in protecting the rights of the individual inspired Pickering to develop one of the most influential and diverse records in Supreme Court advocacy. He played a major role in cases that defined the limits on presidential authority (Youngstown v. Sawyer), checks and balances between the branches of government (Powell v. McCormack), civil rights (NAACP v. Claiborne County, Mississippi), and physician-assisted suicide
(Vacco v. Quill). More recently, Pickering has been a leading legal mind in
the right-to-die debate, an issue he has repeatedly taken back to where he
started: the Supreme Court. (Pickering and his partners never shied away
from change. As this issue went to press, his firm announced that it would
merge with Hale and Dorr, the august Boston firm, forming Wilmer Cutler
Pickering Hale and Dorr.)
Lloyd
Cutler
Wilmer Cutler Pickering
To say
that Lloyd Cutler is the only lawyer who has ever served as counsel
to two presidents, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, would be enough to
describe a distinguished political and legal career. But it wouldn't
be enough to describe the breadth and depth of Cutler's work, which
has moved from firm practice to government and back again. As one of
the founders of Wilmer Cutler Pickering, he helped create the ideal
legal business: an elite and highly profitable practice that at the
same time maintains an extraordinary dedication to pro bono. A generalist
of the old school, Cutler has made his mark across the practice spectrum,
from international arbitration to appellate advocacy, public policy,
and constitutional law. Cutler was also a founder and cochairman of
the Lawyers Committee on Civil Rights Under Law. In the political arena,
his influence has been felt within the Democratic party for decades,
and he served as a member of the President's Commission on Federal
Ethics Law Reform in 1989 and as Carter's special counsel on ratification
of the Salt II arms control treaty.
Joseph
Flom
Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom
In 1948
Joseph Flom was the first associate hired by the firm then known as
Skadden, Arps & Slate. He helped transform a scrappy little New York
firm into a mainstream global institution that has topped The Am Law
100 nearly every year. His example made it a place where merit and
performance mattered more than pedigree: a novel concept among the
elite firms at the time. A leading M&A lawyer and pioneer of takeover
strategies, Flom's early mastery of proxy fights positioned him and
the firm to take advantage of the corporate takeover boom in the seventies
and eighties. Flom extended his visionary entrepreneurship beyond simply
developing and growing his firm and its business with a maniacal devotion
to giving the client the best service. Flom has demonstrated a commitment
to pro bono and created a model program-The Skadden Fellowships-in
1988 through which the firm annually supports at least 25 law school
graduates to work in public interest jobs for up to two years.
Alexander
Forger
Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy
In private
practice, Alexander Forger's clients are the kind of people for whom
money is no object and influence is inherited; in public service, he
has always dedicated his strongest efforts to those who have neither
money nor influence. As chair of New York's Legal Aid Society, Forger
helped bring top-level legal advice and assistance to the indigent.
When he went to Washington to serve as president of the Legal Services
Corporation under President Bill Clinton, he fought fiercely in Congress
to rescue a federally funded program that gave poor people meaningful
access to the courts, restructuring the organization to adapt to severe
budget cuts and restrictions on the types of cases that it can take.
If charity begins at home, then Forger's assistance to his partners
came in the form of tough love: helping revitalize an old-fashioned
firm and ensuring its competitiveness in the modern era of global business,
while also urging a greater commitment to pro bono and public service.
Newton
Minow
Sidley Austin Brown & Wood
Newt Minow
was the youngest chairman of the Federal Communications Commission
and perhaps its most often quoted. Three months after President John
Kennedy named him to the post, he told a national group of broadcasters
that on their watch, television had become "a vast wasteland." He believed
in private enterprise, but he came to Washington to protect the public
interest. Those dual themes have guided Minow's career. When he returned
to Sidley & Austin in 1965, he built a strong practice and served as
one of Chicago's-and the nation's-first citizens, chairing the Carnegie
Corporation, the RAND Corporation, and the Public Broadcasting Service.
Currently, he chairs an advisory committee to the secretary of Defense
on protecting civil liberties, a group that includes two other Lifetime
Achievers, William Coleman, Jr., and Lloyd Cutler.
Howard
Trienens
Sidley Austin Brown & Wood
He may
be the most influential "loaner" a law firm ever made to a client.
After serving as AT&T's outside lawyer at Sidley & Austin for many
years, Howard Trienens went in-house at an auspicious moment in corporate
history: overseeing the breakup of Ma Bell in the landmark antitrust
litigation. In his six years as general counsel (1980-86), Trienens
took an unusually active role in the work of outside counsel, a harbinger
of the in-house revolution that shook corporate and law firm relations
industrywide shortly afterward. He returned to lead the firm as chairman,
reuniting him with one of his Northwestern University students, Newt
Minow, with whom he clerked at the U.S. Supreme Court before they joined
Sidley together. In 2000, they coauthored Landscape with Smokestacks:
The Case of the Allegedly Plundered Degas. It's only fitting, then,
that they both be named among the first American Lawyer Lifetime Achievers.
John
Rosenberg
Appalachian Research and Defense Fund of Kentucky, Inc.
John Rosenberg
was the director of APPALRED from its founding in 1970 until his retirement
in 2002. Through nine field offices, the organization handles cases
from housing evictions to coal mining safety and serves 37 counties
in eastern and south central Kentucky, a high-poverty area. Rosenberg
and his family fled Nazi Germany when he was 6 years old and eventually
settled in North Carolina. After law school, Rosenberg worked in the
civil rights division of the U.S. Department of Justice for eight years,
litigating discrimination cases in the South. When he was ready to
leave main Justice, he went to Kentucky instead of to K Street. There
he created a powerful legal services agency that changed the balance
of power in his adopted state. His office helped stop coal operators
from strip-mining private property without permission and helped stop
the construction of a dam that would have turned a major tourist area,
the Red River Gorge, into the bottom of a lake.
Frederick
A.O. Schwarz, Jr.
Cravath, Swaine & Moore
"Fritz" Schwarz
was born with one of New York City's illustrious names, but has spent
his life making a mark of his own. A litigation partner at one of the
nation's most elite firms, he punctuated his career with stints of
distinguished public service. In the mid-seventies, Schwarz served
as counsel to the U.S. Senate select committee led by Frank Church
of Idaho that uncovered decades of abuse by the CIA and other intelligence
agencies. In the 1980s, he was corporation counsel for New York City
when Ed Koch presided over a never dull City Hall. Back at Cravath,
he maintained an active public life, chairing the boards of both the
Natural Resources Defense Council and the Vera Institute of Justice.
Schwarz retired from private practice last year-not to the driving
range or the fishing boat but to the Brennan Center for Justice at
New York University, which among other things is trying to reform campaign
finance and other issues at the heart of American democracy.
Robert
Strauss
Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld
Akin Gump
is rooted in Texas but with a power base in Washington second to none.
That's in large part because it embodies the career of founder Robert
Strauss, who rose from local prominence to a position as one of D.C.'s
most influential power brokers. And, like his firm, Strauss's connections
transcend parties. He rose through the Democratic ranks in the wake
of mentor Lyndon Johnson and eventually served as chairman of the Democratic
National Committee and of Jimmy Carter's first presidential campaign.
Strauss went on to serve as ambassador to the Soviet Union during the
administration of the first President George Bush-a Republican and,
perhaps more importantly, a fellow Texan. His career and drive helped
propel his firm from a regional name into a global force, with nearly
1,000 lawyers in 16 offices in the United States, western Europe, Russia,
and Saudi Arabia. In 1981 Strauss was awarded the Presidential Medal
of Freedom, the highest award the U.S. can give a civilian.
Patricia
Wald
Former chief judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit
In every
decade of her public-spirited career, Patricia Wald has been a witness
to-and a crucial influence on-legal history: as a trailblazing woman
law clerk at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, working
for the judge assigned to the appeals of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg;
as the lone woman at the firm now known as Arnold & Porter, working
alongside giants Thurman Arnold and Abe Fortas as they represented
Joseph McCarthy's red-scare victims; in the first wave of legal services
litigators, with Washington, D.C.'s Neighborhood Legal Services Program;
and making legislative policy in the Carter administration before becoming
a circuit judge herself, on the D.C. Circuit. Since retiring in 1999,
Wald has brought her experience to bear in international relations,
first as the U.S. representative to the International Criminal Tribunal
for the Former Yugoslavia and, since February, as a member of the Iraq
Intelligence Commission.
Robert
Raven
Morrison & Foerster
"I'm a
maverick within the system," Robert Raven once said, and he's proven
it repeatedly through every aspect of his long career at Morrison & Foerster.
What other firms take for granted now, Raven did first. He built a
partnership that didn't require pro bono work, it expected it. Before
associate alienation became a virus, he created a strong mentoring
system. He hired women and promoted them before that was conventional
thinking, and in the process turned MoFo into one of the most female-friendly
firms in the country. Some of this was good business-and some of it
was simply good. He never lost sight of the profession's highest aspirations.
What made him different was, whether as president of the American Bar
Association or chair of MoFo, he tried to push past platitudes.
Editor's
Note: Due to illness, Raven was unavailable to be photographed.
Copyright 2004 ALM Properties, Inc. All rights reserved.
