cover image Skadden: Power, Money, and the Rise of a Legal Empire

Skadden: Power, Money, and the Rise of a Legal Empire

Lincoln Caplan. Farrar Straus Giroux, $25 (341pp) ISBN 978-0-374-26566-3

For years Joseph Flom, the hard-hitting senior partner of the Manhattan firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, dominated the world's richest law firm with a roster of prestigious international clients. In this revealing in-depth study, written with Skadden's ``sometimes'' cooperation, Caplan ( An Open Adoption ) traces the history of change among postwar legal firms into big businesses often as money-and power-centered as their clients, specializing in corporate mergers, acquisitions and ruthless takeovers. Abetted by the relaxed enforcement of antitrust laws and by deregulation from the 1970s to 1990, Skadden's more than 1000 lawyers, organized on a corporate model, made merger or acquisition deals involving Dupont-Conoco, U.S. Steel-Marathon Oil, and GE-RCA, among others, which the American Bar Association criticized as serving the client's interest rather than the public's. Skadden, the author notes, has weathered the recession with fewer partners and new leadership. 30,000 first printing; author tour. (Nov.)