On an April morning in Manhattan last year, Steven Davis, the former chairman of the law firm of Dewey & LeBoeuf, reached for his ringing cell phone. He was sitting in the back seat of a taxi, on the way downtown to renew his passport. Dewey & LeBoeuf, which was often referred to in the press as a global “super firm,†was largely his creation. In 2007, he had engineered the merger of a profitable but staid midsized specialty firmâ€"LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene & MacRaeâ€"with a less profitable but much better-known firm, Dewey Ballantine. (Thomas E. Dewey, the former Republican Presidential nominee, was for many years the guiding partner.) “Dewey married money, LeBoeuf married up†was how some characterized the union. It was the largest merger of New York law firms in history, and the new firm had more than thirteen hundred lawyers. Dewey & LeBoeuf handled high-profile transactions for an enviable roster of corporate clients: Lloyd’s and A.I.G. in insurance; Duke and BP in energy; JPMrgan Chase and Barclays in banking; Disney in media and entertainment; Dell and eBay in technology; and Alcoa in manufacturing. Under Davis’s leadership, a number of the firm’s partners had joined the ranks of the highest-paid corporate lawyers in the country.
Now, five years later, Davis’s vision was in ruins. He had been stripped of his title of chairman, and was being exiled to the London branch. The partnership was riven by intrigue, animosities, and defections. It was uncertain that the firm would survive.Â
Davis saw that the call was from a colleague in Dewey & LeBoeuf’s Riyadh office. “What about this lawsuit?†the colleague asked. . . .
