In the last 30 years, The Am Law 200 has increasingly come to resemble corporate America—with the profits and global footprint to match. Guiding this transition behind the scenes is a phalanx of "C-suite" professionals, such as chief marketing officers, chief revenue officers, and chief operating officers. These men and women walked through a door that was opened by Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom's Earle Yaffa. He became Skadden's first and only managing director in 1980. And because of Yaffa's success in such a sensitive role, other firms opted to follow Skadden's model and appoint people with business expertise to prominent management jobs.
In 1979 Skadden brought in Yaffa, then at Arthur Young & Co., to overhaul the firm's IT systems. A year later, he came on full-time as the firm's managing director. Yaffa worked on strategy and assumed oversight of all nonlegal aspects of the firm, including operations, finance, and technology. As Skadden grew from 200 lawyers in 1980 to more than 800 lawyers in 1987, he jumped into analyzing the competitive landscape and designing a customized billing and financial reporting system to track collections, realization, and profitability. "Yaffa thought about law firm finances in a way others hadn't—running a firm by financial metrics—and measuring a firm's success by finances," says law firm consultant Peter Zeughauser.
