Henry Kravis, the cofounder of KKR & Co., likes to tell the story about how he offered his friend Richard Beattie a job with his private equity firm in the late 1970s. Beattie was planning to return to Simpson Thacher & Bartlett after two years in the Carter administration, but Kravis thought Beattie should work for him instead. “He turned it down,” Kravis says, chuckling. “He was advised by someone that they weren’t sure that KKR was going to make it at the time.” Beattie remembers it differently. “Oh, that’s not true,” he says. “I always knew KKR would be very successful. Henry and [cofounder] George [Roberts] always competed very well, even better than their competitors.”
But the chairman of Simpson Thacher did just fine by staying put. At 72, he runs an 810-lawyer firm and has negotiated some of the most high-profile corporate deals of the last few decades. His personal crusade to improve public education led the firm to spend 11 years and $21 million worth of lawyer time on a pro bono case against the state of New York. In 2006 the state’s highest appeals court found that New York State was failing to meet its constitutional obligation to provide a sound basic education to inner-city students.
