One day in October 2002, McCartan summoned Weber to his office. The two men worked on opposite sides of the same floor of Jones Day’s Cleveland headquarters. Weber walked down the long hallway to McCartan’s corner suite. It boasted panoramic views of Cleveland, stretching from the airport to the downtown skyline. Directly outside was the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, designed by I. M. Pei.
It wasn’t hard to guess why McCartan wanted to see Weber. All year, the firm’s partners had been speculating about who McCartan would pick to succeed him as managing partner. McCartan had reached Jones Day’s mandatory retirement age a couple of years earlier, but the firm had amended its partnership agreement to let him stay. It was the first time that such an exception had been made. “That tells you the incredible amount of admiration and affection the partners have for him and the confidence they have in his leadership,” Steve Brogan said at the time.1 McCartan used those extra years to restart the firm’s growth, which he had paused at the beginning of his tenure. Jones Day opened offices in Shanghai, Madrid, Singapore, Silicon Valley, Milan, and Houston. (It also bought a Tokyo law firm.)2
Now, though, his tenure was nearing its end. Per tradition, McCartan had stashed a memo naming his replacement in a safe deposit box. “It’s been in there for quite a while,” he told the Plain Dealer in January 2002.3
While a handful of lawyers had been jockeying for the job, only two were serious contenders: Brogan and Weber. For its entire history, Jones Day had been led by men with plausible claims to being the best lawyers in the firm. Frank Ginn was. Tom Jones and Jack Reavis may well have been. Allen Holmes was. Dick Pogue was an antitrust star. McCartan was perhaps the finest trial lawyer in America. Weber was right up there. Brogan, however, was not. He was perfectly competent, and very hardworking, and some of his colleagues regarded him as a great strategist. But would anyone mistake him for the best at Jones Day? Probably not. His experience was more bureaucratic. Pogue had promoted him to run the D.C. office in 1989, when Brogan was only thirty-seven,4 and he’d been doing the job ever since.
By all accounts, Brogan had done a good job in this leadership position. The Washington office had been struggling when he took it over. Brogan ushered out underperformers and lured new lawyers. Soon the office was booming.5 That was one of the reasons that Brogan had moved the firm out of its musty, rabbit warren–like space near the White House into the Acacia, the landmark neoclassical building on Capitol Hill.
Some of Brogan’s colleagues were turned off by his arrogance. On cross-country trips, he would book multiple first-class and coach seats, and a crew of associates would rotate between the two cabins to brief Brogan on various cases he was juggling. (The extra space in first class, one of his associates told me, made it easier to have confidential discussions.6) When the plane landed, the associates would get right back on another flight to return from wherever they’d just come.
Once, in a meeting of the firm’s advisory committee, the discussion turned to Jones Day’s associates. “Within two years, I can tell who’s going to make partner,” Brogan boasted.
“How the fuck do you know that?” scoffed Rick Werder, a longtime partner. Associates develop at different speeds, Werder pointed out. Brogan told Werder, basically, to shut up. He seemed to believe in his own omniscience.
Several partners used the word “cronyism” to describe Brogan’s way of operating. He surrounded himself with a tight-knit circle of loyal advisers. As McCartan neared his decision on who would succeed him, a rumor circulated among senior lawyers that Brogan’s band was ironing out contingency plans in case their man didn’t get the job. They supposedly were contemplating creating their own law firm—a traitorous move inspired, perhaps, by the splintering of the D.C. office decades earlier, which had first put Brogan on the path to power.
Yet McCartan was inexorably, almost magnetically drawn to Brogan. He asked Brogan to help craft a strategic plan for Jones Day. The men’s families vacationed together on Florida’s Gulf Coast. When an ambitious partner sent a memo to McCartan raising his hand for the top job, McCartan faxed the document right to Brogan.*
What explained the exceptionally close ties, which many colleagues described as akin to a father-son bond? It may have been that McCartan saw shades of himself—as a person, if not a lawyer—in his protégé.
Brogan was an only child. When he was a boy, his mother suffered from health problems and was unable to raise him.7 That task fell largely to his father, a lieutenant in the New York City Police Department.8 Brogan and McCartan were both brought up by cops.
As a lawyer, Brogan never tired of telling colleagues about his dad being a policeman; that detail found its way into an extraordinary number and range of conversations. Brogan emphasized the loyalty, the honor of policing—qualities he wanted to transpose into his law practice. “He grew up with a dad who was the kind of rough, tough guy that you had to be to be a New York City cop in those days,” said Rick Kneipper, whom Brogan used to regale with tales from his childhood during late-night drinking sessions. One nugget that Brogan liked to share involved his father’s retirement party. A sergeant had leaned over and whispered to Brogan: “Your dad just reeks of manhood.”9
Like McCartan, Brogan was a devout Catholic. At Bergen Catholic High School in New Jersey, “Brog” was a middling student who bickered with teachers. He played baseball—his senior year, he was the Crusaders’ starting catcher10—and had a reputation as a bruiser. “He didn’t back down from anybody,” a high school friend said. “I thought he’d possibly end up in the Marines.”11 In his senior yearbook photo in 1970, Brogan stared straight ahead, unsmiling, his lips tight, wearing a bow tie and a white blazer.
Brogan toyed with following his father into the police force. Instead, after graduating from Boston College with a degree in English,12 he went to law school at Notre Dame—just like McCartan. He spent the summer after his second year at Jones Day and then, newly married, joined the firm full-time the following year. At first, he wasn’t sure the Big Law life was for him. Maybe he should work in public service; he still fantasized about being a cop.13 But he quickly grew close to McCartan. “I needed to see somebody who could be as fine a lawyer as Patrick is, who I’d still want to introduce to my dad,” Brogan would say. McCartan “was an accomplished guy, but he had his head on straight.”14 Aside from a two-year stint alongside Jonathan Rose in Reagan’s Justice Department, Brogan would spend his entire career at Jones Day.
As an up-and-coming lawyer, he represented15 RJR, defense contractors, Persian Gulf royals, members of the bin Laden family,16 targets of independent counsel investigations, and many others. Brogan exuded the same unpolished brawler vibe that he’d been known for in high school. He sometimes made boorish remarks. He cursed a lot. After a few rounds of drinks, he’d slide into a clipped New York accent. (At other times, he was happy to discuss his favorite authors, who included Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald.)17
Legend had it that, when Brogan was running the D.C. office, a partner had walked into his suite to complain about his compensation. This was never a good idea at Jones Day; lawyers’ pay was unilaterally set by the managing partner, and you were not to discuss your compensation—much less gripe about it—under any circumstances. But something possessed this partner to go to Brogan. Brogan’s reaction was simple: “You’re done.” The stunned partner trudged back to his office. By the time he arrived, staff were already there boxing up his belongings.
While McCartan was refined and discreet, Brogan maintained a snarly side, even as he matured. He encouraged his underlings to act on their killer instincts, whether that meant firing poor performers or acting mercilessly in court. “Brogan loves blood on the floor,” one of his confidants told me. If a good lawyer resigned to go to a rival firm, Brogan would sometimes fire off furious letters and memos trashing the departing colleague. It became such a familiar occurrence that some Jones Day partners gave it a name: “the full Fredo.” It was a reference to the scene in Godfather II when Michael Corleone watches from the shore as his younger brother, Fredo, is murdered on his orders.
Weber couldn’t have really expected to be named managing partner. But that hadn’t stopped him from talking to his allies about what he might do on the off chance he did get the job. (John Strauch told me that he was among those who favored Weber for the role.) Weber had long believed that Jones Day concentrated too much power in the hands of a single man. It worked all right with a benevolent dictator like Pogue, who put the firm’s interests above everything else. But as Jones Day grew, a system that empowered one person to make every important decision felt less viable. For starters, it meant the entire firm was hostage to one man’s whims; if his judgment was off, thousands of jobs and billions of dollars could be on the line.
What’s more, the unitary power structure was making Jones Day a less attractive home for some top lawyers. Other big firms had strong leaders, of course, but their cultures encouraged consensus-building. Long-serving partners could expect to have a voice in major strategic or financial decisions; after all, it was their firm as much as it was the top guy’s. Not at Jones Day. While plenty of the firm’s veterans appreciated the speedy decision-making that was possible under its unusual structure, others found it emasculating to spend decades at a place where, no matter how much revenue they generated or hours they put in or courtroom victories they pulled off, they would always be on the outside.
The place, in short, could use a little more democracy, Weber thought.
But when he reached McCartan’s corner office that day in October 2002, McCartan got right to the point. He had chosen Brogan.
Weber wasn’t one to throw a tantrum. But for the sake of the firm to which he’d devoted his entire career, he wanted to voice his concerns about the choice of Brogan.
“There are two things you’ve got to talk to him about,” Weber urged McCartan. First, there was Brogan’s reputation for cronyism; he needed to learn to resist the temptation of withdrawing even more into his small circle of advisers, of surrounding himself with yes-men. “You’ve got to get him to change his way of operating,” Weber pushed. Second was the issue of Jones Day abandoning its midwestern heritage. Brogan had always been based in D.C., and anyone who had glimpsed his office on Capitol Hill could surmise that he would be remaining there. What would that mean for Jones Day’s identity as a Cleveland-centric law firm? “It’s always been our secret sauce,” Weber reminded his fellow Ohioan.
Dick Pogue similarly cautioned McCartan about this. He pressed McCartan to press Brogan to relocate to Cleveland. McCartan broached the subject, but Brogan wouldn’t budge.18 Even before he was formally elevated, Brogan knew he had the power.
About a month later, Jones Day’s partners traveled to the luxurious Esmeralda Resort near Palm Springs for one of the firm’s periodic retreats. Convening hundreds of lawyers from all over the world in the middle of the Southern California desert was not particularly convenient, but McCartan loved the venue because of its thirty-six-hole, championship-caliber golf course. The hotel, whose pool had waterfalls and a sandy beach, was designed for large corporate events. Attendees could roam from air-conditioned meeting rooms directly onto landscaped lawns and gardens with sparkling views of the Santa Rosa Mountains.
At the start of the retreat, a group of about two dozen of the senior-most partners sat down in a conference room. McCartan informed them that he had chosen Brogan. Weber was there, doing his best to maintain a poker face, though some attendees thought he looked crushed.*
Later that day, on stage in a ballroom, McCartan formally handed the gavel to the fifty-year-old Brogan. To honor his mentor,19 Brogan read a congratulatory letter from President George W. Bush, who hailed McCartan’s leadership of Jones Day as “an important asset to the American legal community.” Then, via a satellite hookup, Justice Scalia appeared on a big screen, his deep voice booming through the room. With the partners watching, he and McCartan reminisced about their time together at Jones Day.
Partners weren’t surprised that McCartan had tapped Brogan. He had been strutting around for years like he knew he’d inherit the throne. Some—in particular those who worked for Brogan in the D.C. office—welcomed his ascent. But many others were displeased. The partners worshipped Weber, and now some were angry at McCartan for having strung him along. They figured that Weber would soon resign and that others who had clashed with Brogan probably would be gone, too.
The news was announced to the world a few days later. Sensitive to the appearance that the firm was giving up on the Midwest, McCartan hosted a cocktail reception in its Cleveland offices to celebrate Brogan’s coronation. Some four hundred20 judges, executives, lawyers, and local politicians showed up to pay their respects.21 So did Weber, signaling that he remained committed to the firm. McCartan told attendees that he liked how Brogan viewed being a lawyer as a profession, not a business.22
Brogan put on a show of folksiness. Attendees noticed he was wearing scuffed leather loafers. “Cop shoes,” Brogan remarked.23 After chatting with him, the founder of a local duct-tape company was all smiles: “He’s an Irish Catholic with six kids, and his old man was a cop. What could be bad about that?”24
In private, though, Brogan dropped the façade. On a plane ride to Washington around this time, he boasted to a longtime ally that he hoped to remake Jones Day in the image of one of Wall Street’s most powerful investment banks.
“We’re going to be the fucking Goldman Sachs of the law firm world,” he declared.