Feldman's Faves: January 5, 2026

GOOD MORNING EVERYONE AND HAPPY NEW YEAR!

I hope you all had a chance to get some time off and enjoy yourselves over the holidays. 2025 was an epic year and 2026 (at least for now) looks like more of the same.

It’s pretty early days so I have you are all successful so far in keeping your New Year’s resolutions going.

It’s been a pretty crazy week in sports – Canada out of the Juniors, BAMA and Georgia out of the CFP, Baltimore out of the NFL playoffs, etc. As always, I am sure that this year is the Bills year (sorry Duncan).

I want to take this opportunity to thank Chloe and Laxsega for all of their great work during their rotation with us and also to welcome Josephine and Serayah. Yup - we are already on to Rotation #3 - wow….As always, our students are eager to get a great experience so please get them involved in your files.

Please join me in wishing our fearless leader - ALEX - a very happy birthday this week.

This week’s theme looks both backwards and ahead in an effort to make sense of the business world in which we operate.

WHITE SHOE - HOW A NEED BREED OF WALL STREET LAWYERS CHANGED BIG BUSINESS AND THE AMERICAN CENTURY By; John Oller - Cravath, Sullivan and Cromwell, White, Case, Wardwell, Cadwalader, Wickersham and Taft are all known as some of the classic White Shoe Wall Street firms that formed the foundation for what we know as BIG LAW today. But last century they were just regular people trying to make names for themselves in an emerging legal market during the Gilded Age. We all stand on the shoulder of giants and are where we are today because of them. Thanks to our giant, Steve -for recommending this book, which is an incredible history lesson and a reminder that not that much has changed over the years at the core (just change the name JP Morgan for Elon Musk and you will see). I loved this book because it really does give perspective on how the legal profession has become what it is today. As one reviewer notes, “For better or worse, lawyers have been with us ever since John Winthrop arrived at Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630. But it was not until the final years of the 19th century that lawyers assumed a prominent place in American business and public life. They did so most notably in New York among graduates of Ivy League colleges, whose students were known for palling around in white buckskin shoes with red soles and heels. This transformation of the practice of law is the focus of John Oller’s entertaining history, “White Shoe.”

The creation of elite law firms was intimately related to the rise of large corporations. As the robber barons sought to dominate markets by creating monopolies, manipulating stock and bond prices, and disrupting one another’s businesses for competitive advantage, they required legal advice. But the law firms of the day were poorly equipped to meet their needs. A typical New York firm in the late 19th century comprised two or three partners who shared office space and clerks but kept their clients and fees to themselves. To say the business was conservative was an understatement. Many lawyers considered it unprofessional to make a phone call, and they preferred to have documents prepared by scriveners rather than mechanical typewriters. Stenographers didn’t arrive to take dictation until after 1900.

Mr. Oller credits Paul Cravath, who made his name by helping George Westinghouse battle Thomas Edison for domination of the electric-power industry, with creating the first modern law firm. In 1899, having joined one of the city’s most established firms, he hired a professional librarian to put the firm’s records in order. Four years later, he directed that all new legal hires come straight from law school—that is, from the Harvard, Columbia or Yale law schools. He organized a training system, in which a senior lawyer broke a complex case down into simpler parts and assigned a young lawyer to handle one part from start to finish. After five or six years, the firm would either appoint the young associate to partner or help him find a position elsewhere. Profits were shared among the partners, and a client of one partner was to be treated as a client of all.

This model, adopted at a time when Cravath’s firm had only three partners, would become the norm among New York’s white-shoe firms. It created a structure within which individual lawyers could specialize, allowing the firm to offer a broad range of services. It created a meritocracy of sorts, but one that rejected many potential colleagues out of hand. White-shoe lawyers moved in the same social circles, joined the same clubs and sent their children to the same prep schools. “This mutually reinforcing system constituted a Protestant old-boy network that dominated the top Wall Street firms for years,” Mr. Oller writes. “It would remain intact from Cravath’s early days until roughly the mid-1960s, when a number of large Jewish law firms attained elite status on their own and emerged as rivals for top corporate business.”

Many white-shoe lawyers were intimately involved in public affairs, on behalf of their clients or as government officials in their own right. William Nelson Cromwell, not at all to the manor born, began as an accountant working for a former prosecutor named Algernon Sydney Sullivan. Sullivan paid Cromwell’s way through law school and eventually, in 1879, took him on as a partner, creating a firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, that remains among New York’s most prestigious.

Cromwell proved adept at cleaning up corporate messes, often by threatening creditors with, as Mr. Oller puts it, “a forced liquidation of a bankrupt company’s assets at fire-sale prices” unless the creditors accepted his offer. Among his clients was the New Panama Canal Co., based in Paris, which claimed the right to take over the abandoned work of an earlier French company and complete a canal across Panama. The U.S. government strongly preferred a Nicaraguan canal. Cromwell skillfully mounted a seven-year lobbying effort to convince Congress and the American public that Panama was where the canal should be, making himself extremely wealthy in the process.

Mr. Oller, a biographer and former Wall Street lawyer, highlights the role of the white-shoe firms in making their corporate clients understand that the times were changing in an age of reform. In 1902, Elihu Root, then taking a break from the law to serve as secretary of war, bargained with J.P. Morgan to settle an anthracite coal strike; for the first time, the federal government acted as the impartial mediator of a labor dispute rather than as an enforcer for employers. Charles Evans Hughes, one of Cravath’s former partners, was counsel to a New York legislative investigation of malfeasance in the life-insurance industry, an investigation that led to the first meaningful insurance regulation. George Wickersham, who worked in the same firm where Cravath and Hughes began their careers, instituted some 89 antitrust actions as William Howard Taft’s attorney general, including one against the Sugar Trust, which his firm had previously defended. “In the thirty years between 1890 and 1920,” Mr. Oller writes, “the steering of a middle course between unchecked capitalism and state socialism owed much to the elite Wall Street lawyers and their firms.”

Today’s white-shoe firms are surely more diverse than they were a century ago. But as Mr. Oller notes, they have developed into very different institutions, with thousands of staff members and offices around the world. Their leaders still deal with political figures, but the relationship is far more complicated today. In 2019, could one imagine a leading banker—say, Jamie Dimon—talking to Donald Trump as J.P. Morgan talked to Theodore Roosevelt: “Send your man to my man and they can fix it up”?;” So in a sense, we can all say we work at CRAVATH, which I will be putting on my CV (but not LinkedIn as my ongoing self imposed moratorium continues). Here’s a good review from Goodreads - https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/40915202-white-shoe

MASTERS OF SCALE - Lessons of Rapid Response for 2026 – One thing you can’t say about 2025 was that it was boring. There were some crazy developments in the world of politics, business, trade and technology. As a result, we were all operating in a world of extreme uncertainty. It is in moments like these where the best leaders look beyond the chaos and seek out opportunity to thrive. In this PODCAST we hear from of today’s greats and how they plan to navigate this ongoing craziness and strive for success where others will fail. Here’s an excerpt from the PODCAST itself, “This year delivered whiplash: geopolitics, tariffs, and technology all shifting at once. And heading into 2026, the disruption isn’t easing up. In this special episode, host Bob Safian distills five hard-won lessons from Rapid Response this year on how to lead when the ground won’t stop moving. You’ll hear standout moments from Brian Chesky, Clara Shih, Marc Lore, José Andrés, and more, with practical takeaways for turning uncertainty into advantage.” https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/masters-of-scale/id1227971746?i=1000741507191

Thank you for your ongoing engagement and participation.

And remember to stay safe, stay healthy and to docket daily.

Jon