Brogan officially became managing partner on January 1, 2003. Change came quickly. First was the firm’s name. It was in its seventh iteration since the firm’s founding in 1893, as named partners came and went.1 Its most recent incarnation was Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue. Brogan regarded that as unwieldy, and as his first official act he shortened it to simply Jones Day. “The move to ‘Jones Day’ is a symbol of change and an extension of our determination to capitalize on our brand-name recognition around the globe,” Brogan announced.2
A more important shift followed. Under McCartan, the firm’s lawyers had been organized in a handful of groups: corporate, litigation, tax, and so on. Those departments were run by powerful partners, whose clout derived from the large number of lawyers they managed and the awesome amount of revenue those attorneys generated. Brogan smashed the groups into smaller pieces. The stated explanation was that it would create a nimbler organization. But it was hard not to notice that the restructuring diluted the power of the partners who had led the large groups—the closest thing Brogan had to internal rivals. Adding to that impression, he didn’t consult with some of the partners whose powers were being stripped. “That was not the firm I grew up in,” Weber would lament in an email to a colleague, noting how he and others had been blindsided.
While Brogan projected confidence, there were subtle signs of insecurity. One of his closest colleagues at the firm was Tim Cullen; multiple Jones Day partners described him to me as Brogan’s professional conscience. So it was telling that, not long before Brogan became managing partner, Cullen emoted to a reporter about how, when Jones Day attorneys competed with Wall Street firms for assignments, they heard their New York competitors make disparaging remarks like, “We’re the investment banking people—they’re the Cleveland people.”3
That chip on the shoulder was shared among the firm’s senior lawyers. Brogan often acted like he had something to prove. And one thing he quickly set out to establish was that he—and his firm—intended to be dominant all over the world.
On February 8, 2003, a Jones Day jet touched down in London. It was a cloudy and cool morning, though the air felt mild compared to the near-freezing temperatures in Washington the evening before. A car drove Brogan into the City of London, Britain’s ancient financial and legal hub, and pulled up next to the Old Bailey courthouse. This was the home of the century-old Gouldens law firm. It now belonged to Jones Day.
Barely a month into his tenure as managing partner, Brogan was in London to sign the paperwork on the deal, which had been unveiled the day before.4 Jones Day already had about fifty lawyers in London, but Brogan wanted to be bigger. Gouldens had roughly 150 attorneys of its own. Just like that, Jones Day’s presence quadrupled. The addition of this venerable British firm nudged Jones Day into sixth place in the rankings of the world’s largest law firms, with more than two thousand lawyers.
Gouldens had a strong team of corporate lawyers who advised European companies on mergers, acquisitions, and other transactions. (It also had a legendary wine cellar filled with many of the world’s finest vintages.) After sealing the deal, Brogan and four other men posed for photos on a carpeted stone staircase in Gouldens’s offices. Brogan, standing in the center, struck an imperious stance: his hands clasped in front of his crotch, his left foot a step up from his right, no trace of a smile.5
He was just getting started. Later that year, Jones Day agreed to buy a 120-year-old New York firm, Pennie & Edmonds,6 and opened offices in San Francisco and Beijing. In 2004 came San Diego. Jones Day was expanding so quickly that it was opening outposts before it even secured office space. Since 1999, the firm had doubled in size.7
The firm’s thirtieth office, in September 2004, was in Moscow. Brogan noted that Russia’s rapid economic growth “makes it an important market for our clients and, therefore, for us.”8 Before long, Jones Day was one of the firms to which Kremlin insiders were turning for professional services. The head of the Moscow office became an adviser to oligarch-owned conglomerates like Alfa Group and Rosneft.9 One of the firm’s senior associates left in 2012 to run the legal department at a company controlled by Alisher Usmanov,10 a billionaire in Russian president Vladimir Putin’s inner circle.11
Discretion was important to Brogan. No business leader—no person, for that matter—wants their dirty laundry aired in public. But Brogan insisted on a level of secrecy inside the firm that caught many longtime partners by surprise.
When he emailed memos to the staff, the text wasn’t in the message; you had to click a link, which brought you to the firm’s intranet, which was programmed to block people from printing or copying and pasting the text. The firm’s official spokesman was regularly instructed by Brogan’s office not to return reporters’ phone calls, much less divulge anything about the firm. (“A firm spokesman declined comment on Brogan’s age” was an actual sentence in a news story about Jones Day.)12
Jones Day had long ordered its lawyers not to discuss their pay with anyone. The confidential compensation system—known in the industry as the “black box”—was unusual. Most major law firms used transparent, or at least translucent, pay models in which partners and associates alike generally knew how much their peers earned. They also usually knew how their compensation was determined.13 Not at Jones Day.
Brogan and his allies argued that keeping people’s pay under wraps encouraged collegiality and reduced jealousy. But it also bred fears that Brogan was playing favorites. This wasn’t the thinking of one or two disgruntled lawyers. It was a widely held belief among longtime partners whom I spoke to that Brogan rewarded his friends and penalized his real and perceived rivals. A member of the firm’s exclusive partnership committee told me that Brogan’s colleagues in the D.C. office tended to make vastly more than partners elsewhere at the firm and that the ratio of what the highest to lowest paid partners were making had grown so lopsided—more than six to one—that the firm risked no longer being considered a partnership in any real sense. Another partner, a former federal prosecutor, said that when he joined Jones Day in the McCartan era, the firm felt like a meritocracy. Under Brogan, “meritocracy turned into high school, a cool kids’ club,” he said. “We all want to be surrounded by people who like us. If you aren’t careful, you simply end up promoting your friends.”
For years, partners had considered the idea of using a private jet as anathema. It ran counter to the image the firm was trying to project of a no-frills culture that cared about representing clients and nothing else. At one point, as the firm’s international empire grew under Pogue, there was a brief debate about whether the firm should buy its own plane. One partner pointed out that it might pay for itself within a few years. “He was laughed at,” Rick Kneipper told me. “We’re not the kind of people who want to fly private.”
That resistance had begun to fade under McCartan, who sparingly used a corporate jet, including to fly himself and clients to Augusta National for golf outings. As managing partner, Brogan adopted private planes as his primary mode of air travel.
Quite a few lawyers compared Brogan to a mob boss, not because he was a crook but because he demanded deference. Associates once made a parody video depicting the harrowing moment when they had to go and kiss Brogan’s ring as if he were a godfather. His worldview hewed toward the authoritarian: Do what you’re told, whether you like it or not. Now that was becoming Jones Day’s philosophy. (Some of Brogan’s supporters disputed that, saying he built consensus and delegated responsibility.)
Every two years, all of the firm’s partners convened at a sunny, golf-friendly venue like the Orlando Ritz-Carlton or the Breakers resort in Palm Beach, Florida. In addition to group meetings and a golf tournament, everyone was required to gather for a long afternoon in a cavernous ballroom. Onstage, Brogan would deliver interminable PowerPoint presentations. Before the speech, a group of partners would place bets on how many slides would be in Brogan’s show this year. Eight hundred was not out of the question. Lawyers mainlined coffee; nobody wanted to be spotted losing focus, checking his phone, or, worst of all, nodding off.
Brogan covered everything: the firm’s finances, his outlook for the year to come, a hearty helping of cultural indoctrination. He illustrated his points with stills from popular movies like The Godfather. Some slides listed books Brogan had been reading or quotes he found inspiring. And there were slogans: Because we’re the best or Nobody does it the way we do.
One slide almost always appeared: a picture of a guy on a skyscraper washing windows, alongside the phrase “We do windows.” The idea was that Jones Day had a culture of service to clients. The firm would do whatever it took to get the job done. It didn’t matter how big or small, glamorous or dull, the task might be. You had to do it.
Top lawyers soon began stomping for the exits, frustrated with what they saw as Brogan’s autocratic style. Rick Cieri, who ran the firm’s bankruptcy practice: gone. Rick Werder, a leading litigator: gone. Jamie Wareham, another litigation star and a Brogan acolyte: gone.
Wareham’s departure, in 2003, was especially acrimonious. He had spent seventeen years at Jones Day, quite a bit of it complaining about what he perceived as his insufficient pay. (“Jamie was obsessed with money,” one of his longtime colleagues, Mike Gurdak, told me. “I knew him well back then, and he is the proverbial character who, if he saw a dime on the floor, would dive on it.”) At one point, Brogan had walked into Wareham’s office in the D.C. building and informed him that he was getting a raise: from $500,000 to $550,000. This was a nice chunk of change, but it struck Wareham as inadequate given how much money he was pulling in for the firm.
Brogan soon returned with a $100,000 check, written from a Jones Day bank account, payable to the exclusive Congressional Country Club in Bethesda, Maryland. Brogan told Wareham to use the check to pay his dues there. Wareham was dumbfounded. You couldn’t just go around handing out six-figure checks to golf clubs as a form of compensation. He handed the check back to Brogan.
Not long after, Wareham decided to leave for another firm. “I knew you were gonna leave when you wouldn’t take that check,” Brogan growled.
“I knew I was going to leave when you offered me that check,” Wareham shot back.
It took Bob Weber a few years, but he would be gone, too. He told acquaintances that he’d been unhappy with Brogan’s imperious ways—and his apparent disinterest in Weber’s clients. Shortly after Brogan became managing partner, Weber had asked him to come meet top executives at long-standing Jones Day clients like Cardinal Health and IBM. The idea was for Brogan to make these crucial customers feel special. Brogan came to the meetings—he flew in via private jet—but uttered maybe four sentences. Weber later vented his frustration to colleagues.
In 2004, Weber successfully defended IBM against workers who claimed they had developed cancer because of exposure to chemicals at a company factory.14 (In an argument that surely would have caused RJR to blanch, Weber noted that one of the plaintiffs was a pack-a-day smoker; maybe that’s what caused her cancer.15) Afterward, IBM’s CEO, Sam Palmisano, invited Weber to dinner at the luxurious Homestead Inn in Greenwich, Connecticut. Sitting in the quiet back patio, Palmisano asked Weber if he’d be interested in joining the company in the newly created role of senior vice president for legal and regulatory affairs. (IBM’s general counsel would report to him.) Palmisano told him it would be a new adventure—and he could make a killing if, as Palmisano hoped, IBM’s undervalued stock price took off.16
It was hard for Weber to come to terms with leaving Jones Day, but he eventually realized the job offer was a gift from God. For decades, he’d been grinding it out, constantly on the road, feeling like he was never able to really catch his breath. It was getting old.
In the fall of 2005, Weber said yes. Before anyone else could find out, he sent Brogan a confidential letter. “The reason for this memo is that, after almost thirty uninterrupted years at the firm (my only ‘real’ job), I have decided to accept an offer to join IBM,” Weber wrote. “I am very happy for you,” Brogan replied the next day. “This development is a great credit to your standing as a lawyer in the whole of the profession.”
No doubt, it was a plum gig—IBM was one of America’s most iconic companies—but it was a body blow to Jones Day. Weber was soon deluged with emotional messages from his shocked colleagues. One admirer after another lamented the departure of someone with such high standards and professional and personal ethics. And they mourned—in some cases, using their work email accounts—what felt like the end of the golden days at Jones Day. It was as if, two years into the Brogan regime, lawyers were waking up to the fact that things had changed irrevocably.
“I fear now for the future of the Firm,” one partner—who would eventually run a key region for Jones Day—wrote on the firm’s letterhead. “I’ve watched you lead as a leader should,” the lawyer added, in what sounded like a veiled dig at Brogan. “Your efforts in maintaining interaction and dialogue with each layer of this Firm, lawyer to staff, have made more of an imprint than you likely know.”
“No kidding, I’m sitting here with tears in my eyes,” a lawyer wrote from Pittsburgh. Another: “This is the saddest day in all my years with the firm.” And another: “I am truly devastated.”
“I am sad for us and for me,” wrote a prominent litigator in the Chicago office. Weber responded: “Somehow something felt different about things here—not as close, not as collegial, whatever, I don’t know.” Then he dispensed some unsolicited advice: “Try to save the culture.”
Some of the writers hinted at their shared frustration with Jones Day’s direction under Brogan. “Sad day for the Firm, but I guess I am not surprised,” came an email from a Texas partner. “I have sensed your heart not in it since SJB [Stephen J. Brogan] took over.”
Weber wrote back and praised the partner for his no-nonsense approach to practicing the law. “Just honest competence and decency. There’s just too little of it left here.”
It is worth noting that many Jones Day partners, including some who despaired over Weber’s departure, disagreed with the sentiment he expressed as he left. These partners told me that Brogan built a culture of shared responsibility, that he looked out for his colleagues and their families, that he was tough but fair.
Brogan “made us personal—committed to one another, no matter our size and reach,” one partner, Lizanne Thomas, wrote to me in an email. “No doubt you know from others that he is tough—know too that he is kind. I have direct experience with both, as have many others at this firm.”
Others said they thought I was being misled by sources who were nursing long-running grievances against the firm. “Some of your information clearly has been provided by departed partners who fundamentally did not—and do not—agree with our core principles,” Chris Kelly wrote. “When they were with the firm, they either sought leadership for themselves because they convinced themselves they were smarter and more deserving than everyone else, or they valued money over everything else. . . . That’s okay, there are a lot of different things that drive people, but those former partners’ ‘frustration with leadership’ was really, at bottom, a disagreement with the culture and mission of our firm.”
Kelly continued: “The real story is the story of a successful institution with a long history that has only grown stronger in the last twenty years because of a relentless focus, which starts with our managing partner, on our core principles and culture of commitment to each other, our clients, and the firm. This story is even more remarkable because the notion of putting clients and other lawyers before yourself, of making others better, of selflessness, is almost anachronistic in our present-day society.”
Two months after purchasing Gouldens, Jones Day sent word to its new employees in London:17 They would generally be expected to bill about two thousand hours a year. The Brits reacted with disbelief—not only was that substantially more than what local attorneys typically racked up, but the notion of setting guidelines, even informal ones, for how many hours they billed was out of step with the British legal culture, which was a decade or two behind America’s and, with some exceptions, still prized professionalism over profits.
Brogan was exerting similar pressure on other Jones Day offices and practice areas, which were urged to hit more ambitious revenue targets. The combination of Brogan’s brook-no-dissent style and the firm’s intensifying focus on financial metrics eroded some lawyers’ interest in ethics. “It has created opportunities for people to push their professional boundaries a lot,” one partner in Texas told me. The urgency to achieve ever-loftier goals began to affect some people’s judgment about whether to take on a client with a bad reputation. “You’re being consistently pushed in one direction,” the partner said.*
That translated into an embrace of clients and assignments that at times conflicted with the firm’s values. One small but representative example—set in motion in McCartan’s final years as managing partner—involved the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence (later known as the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence), which Jones Day had represented on a pro bono basis since at least 1990. Erwin Griswold, who for many years was the firm’s most famous partner, had brought the center on as a client, and he had taken great pride in the work. Griswold was a staunch supporter of gun control, and his position carried extra weight given his credentials as a former Harvard Law dean, solicitor general, and prominent Supreme Court advocate.
The gun-control work wasn’t especially sexy. It mostly consisted of filing briefs on important court cases involving the Second Amendment and helping to fight legal challenges to federal, state, and local gun-control laws. But especially on the cases when the firm filed briefs in Ohio—for example, in support of assault-weapon bans enacted in Columbus and Cleveland and challenged by gun companies—the prestige of the Jones Day name made a difference.
Then, in 1999, the gunmaker Colt was sued by state and local governments and victims of violence, in large part because of the havoc wreaked by its AR-15 assault rifle. The company wanted a high-profile, no-holds-barred law firm that specialized in bet-the-company litigation. Jones Day was the perfect fit. By early in Brogan’s tenure, the gun-control work that Griswold had pioneered was no longer happening—a shift for which some of the firm’s lawyers blamed the new managing partner.
When the city of Cincinnati, with the help of the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence, sued gun manufacturers, seeking to hold them accountable for the harm caused by their firearms, Jones Day showed up in Colt’s corner.18 Among the allegations was that Colt and other gun companies hadn’t properly vetted gun dealers. There was no question that the industry had been reckless, but were gunmakers legally liable? Jones Day persuaded jurors that the answer was no. In 2004, the American Lawyer, nodding to that work, bestowed upon the firm the title of “Product Liability Department of the Year.”
“From handguns to tobacco,” the magazine declared, “Jones Day defends the powerfully damned and the damned powerful.”19