One evening in 1959, Jim Lynn, a Jones Day partner, was prowling the offices of the Harvard Law Review.1 He was looking for legal talent, and there were few places in the country—in the world, for that matter—packed with more raw, young brainpower than inside the old, white Gannett House. Decades of leather-bound legal texts lined the walls, and dozens of sleep-deprived students sat at desks, slumped in armchairs, and huddled with classmates.
The fact that Jones Day had sent a lawyer to Cambridge to scout for recruits was one sign of the firm’s ascent. Notwithstanding its small Washington office, it was still very much a Cleveland firm that represented midwestern clients. It was among the scores of local legal powerhouses popping up in cities around America: Gibson Dunn in Los Angeles, Bryan Cave in St. Louis, Kirkland & Ellis in Chicago, Ropes & Gray in Boston, and King & Spalding in Atlanta, not to mention the bevy of firms that predominantly served Wall Street. (In addition to Jones Day, Cleveland was home to the firms that would become BakerHostetler and Squire Patton Boggs.) These firms would all become global behemoths, but at the time, their businesses revolved around their hometowns.
To be more precise, these law firms were barely “businesses,” and the legal industry was hardly an industry. It was more like a collaborative club (one that was largely off-limits to anyone besides white men).
Ever since the 1920s there had been an unwritten agreement among the leaders of major firms to pay young lawyers the same starting salaries, known as the “going rate.” Partners at these firms were disturbed by the notion that the career decisions of shortsighted law students might be influenced by small differences in salaries. So they decided to eliminate any such differences. Each summer, the firms’ managing partners would gather for a luncheon to determine that year’s going rate.2 (In the 1950s, it was about $4,000.)3
For many decades, the act of recruiting employees was a restrained affair. Harvard Law’s New York alumni chapter, for example, held a “smoker” each Christmas at which law firms could present their case for employment. Firms also sent notices to law schools’ placement offices describing themselves to prospective job seekers.4 By the late 1950s, though, competition for the best students was beginning to warm. Some large firms—those with more than fifty lawyers—began inviting second-year students to clerk with them over the summer; they were called “summer boarders.”5 The boldest were experimenting with what at the time was a cutting-edge recruitment tactic known as “wining and dining” of job candidates, which induced heartburn in the legal establishment. The practice “irritates many lawyers who must resort to this procedure, even though in only a limited way, for they feel it is not ‘professional,’” a prominent sociologist wrote in 1960.6
Poaching lawyers was simply not done. Once, a partner at another firm came to Jones Day looking for a job. The managing partner at the time, Jack Reavis, and others met with him. Toward the end of the meeting, Reavis checked to make sure the lawyer had withdrawn from the other firm’s partnership. The lawyer replied that he had not, but planned to soon. “Well, then we’re not going to talk to you,” Reavis stated, and he ushered the man out.7
Yet Jones Day’s ambitions were growing, in a way that seemed suspiciously businesslike. The firm wanted to join America’s elite. And to do that, it needed to hire from the Ivy League.
Inside Gannett House, Jim Lynn noticed a heavyset student bent over a manuscript. He had thick black hair and bushy eyebrows. Lynn approached him and introduced himself. They got to talking. By 2:00 a.m., Lynn had convinced the student to get eggs and bacon with him in Harvard Square. The kid was from the New York City borough of Queens. He told Lynn that another law firm, Philadelphia’s Morgan Lewis, had offered him a job, which he planned to accept.8 But by the end of the predawn breakfast, Lynn had persuaded the student to visit Cleveland to interview for a job at Jones Day.9
Two months later, true to his word, Antonin Scalia arrived in Cleveland. He attended a recruiting party at Lynn’s house. The conversation turned to a recent Harvard Law Review article in which Scalia had defended “blue laws” that required stores to be closed on Sundays. Eight Jones Day lawyers encircled Scalia, pelting him with arguments against the blue laws. The debate got intense. Boy, this is a terrible way to recruit a guy, one lawyer, Dick Pogue, thought to himself after an hour of this.10 Pogue was a fast-rising attorney at the firm, destined one day to become managing partner, and he was impressed with this unflappable recruit. Scalia stood his ground, his eyebrows furrowed, relishing the intellectual combat. The debate wore on until 3:00 a.m.11
Scalia summered at Jones Day, made a little money, got married, honeymooned on Cape Cod, went off to Europe by ocean liner, spent time in Germany, and returned to Jones Day as an associate in 1961. At the time the firm had about sixty lawyers in Cleveland plus a few in Washington.12
Scalia fit right in. At office functions, he and Lynn were in a Jones Day quartet. Other times, Scalia played the piano and sang numbers from Guys and Dolls.13 (“I wouldn’t say he’s terribly good at [the piano], but he likes to hammer,” recalled Lynn,14 who later would have top roles in the Nixon and Ford administrations and would run Aetna, the insurance giant.) Scalia got into a monthly poker game with colleagues; he tended to show up wearing a fishing hat.15 At lunch, he’d debate constitutional law with liberals.16 The guy was clearly going places.
Scalia had planned for Cleveland to be a brief way station on his road to academia, but he got sidetracked. He enjoyed the practice of law. He enjoyed Cleveland, at the time “pretty much an ethnic town.” And he enjoyed Jones Day, which allowed him to rotate among different practice areas. He did litigation. He did wills. He did real estate. He did financings, contracts, labor law, taxes. “I got a really good look at the whole waterfront,” he remembered years later.17
After about two years, Scalia landed his first client, “my own little corporation,” he said. “Any problem they had, they would call me up, and it was a really wonderful feeling.” He spent nearly seven years at Jones Day. Until he became a federal judge, it was the job he held longest—and his only stint in private practice. “I enjoyed practicing so much that I just sort of forgot that I was going to go into teaching eventually and hung around probably longer than I should have.”18
Eventually, forced to pick a specialty, Scalia grew bored.19 It was time to leave. He got a job at the University of Virginia School of Law. On his way out, he addressed the firm’s lawyers. “I’ll be glad to get away from such a liberal place,” he joked.20
The day after Tom Jones died, Jack Reavis summoned the partners to the firm’s library. He announced that Jones had anointed him as successor. Partners were not thrilled. “We knew him [Reavis] as a brilliant tax lawyer, with a mind like a steel trap, a short fuse on his temper, and a sharp tongue,” one remembered.21 Unlike his personable predecessor, the bald and bespectacled Reavis had trouble keeping track of the names of partners’ wives.22 (Reavis himself was a widower; the firm became his spouse.)
Under his leadership, Jones Day cemented its role as the firm of choice to the Midwest’s biggest companies, many of which were heavy polluters and notorious for mistreating workers. Reavis and his inner circle were mostly Republicans, and the firm was seen as a hegemonic force in Cleveland politics. It became a bête noir of the local left. Roldo Bartimole, a legendary Cleveland muckraker, routinely had Reavis and his firm in his crosshairs. Citing the firm’s extensive work for the giant iron and coal company Hanna Mining, Bartimole bestowed upon it the “Sierra Club ‘Soot Award.’”23 He blasted Jones Day for wielding political power on behalf of clients. “Reavis is another fat cat living off the poor,” Bartimole seethed.24
But Reavis was also a pragmatist—and the culture in law firms at the time was that the profession’s leaders should be embedded in the civic life of their cities. In 1963, Cleveland was being ripped apart by riots. Reavis wasn’t a civil rights activist. But he recognized that for Cleveland to prosper, there couldn’t be strife in the streets. He used his clout in the community to establish the Interracial Businessmen’s Committee.25 It consisted of prominent white executives and less prominent Black business owners. Its goal was to foster dialogue, defuse tensions, and find ways to alleviate some of the economic pressures on the city’s Black underclass. Polarization was not good for Jones Day’s business prospects.
Against all odds, Reavis’s initiative eased racial tensions, even if it didn’t address the underlying problems. The NAACP honored Reavis with a human rights award.*
In 1912, an axe-wielding maniac had terrorized the citizens of Villisca, Iowa. A suspect was apprehended and put on trial for murder. It was a sensational case, and the small courtroom was packed with spectators. One of them was a sixteen-year-old farm boy named Lloyd Welch Pogue.26 He was wowed by the lawyers. That’s for me, Pogue said to himself. He went to college, then law school, then Ropes & Gray in Boston. Among his clients were Bell Aircraft Corporation and Lockheed.27
It was a thrilling time to be involved in aviation, the dawn of an age that would make the world a much smaller place. Pogue was hooked. In 1938, he got a job at the new Civil Aeronautics Authority. He soon was promoted to be general counsel, then chairman. In 1944, he helped negotiate a landmark pact that allowed civilian aircraft to fly through the airspace of other countries without having to stop in each jurisdiction.28
Two years later, Pogue started his own D.C. law firm. Pogue & Neal specialized in aviation law and airline regulation. Over two decades, the little firm grew into a medium-sized firm with fourteen lawyers.29 Pogue by then was a giant in the field, to such an extent that Aviation Week established the L. Welch Pogue Award for Aviation Achievement—and named Pogue its first winner.30
But Pogue’s firm was completely reliant on the aviation industry.31 He wanted to team up with a more diversified operation. Pogue got to talking with Jones Day’s brass in Cleveland. He immediately hit it off with Jack Reavis.32 Pogue could tell that these gentlemen were honest, had integrity, and had respect for the law as a profession, not simply as a business.33 (It didn’t hurt that Pogue’s son, Dick, was a partner there.) The 1967 merger of the two firms more than doubled the size of Jones Day’s team in the capital.34 For the time being, the D.C. office would operate as a semiautonomous unit of Jones Day.
The timing was ideal. President Lyndon Johnson and Ralph Nader were ushering in an era of government regulation. Corporations needed a law firm that could help them navigate these tricky waters. The D.C. office, its walls lined with modern art, took flight, propelled by Pan Am, its biggest customer.35 Specialists in government contracts were brought in, toting enormous corporate clients. Then came Erwin Griswold, a Cleveland native who had recently stepped down as U.S. solicitor general; plenty of other top firms had tried to hire him, but Welch Pogue and Chappie Rose landed him by emphasizing the firm’s Cleveland character.36
Pogue insisted that his own values be reflected in the D.C. operation that he oversaw. He wasn’t a big drinker, and when partners gathered for after-hours beverages in the office, they kept it a low-key affair so as not to attract the boss’s unwanted attention. More important, Pogue refused to engage in lobbying or other common forms of Washington influence peddling, which he viewed as beneath the honorable calling of his profession. As the journalist Nicholas Lemann wrote in 1980, “It was his belief that that kind of work—political work—inevitably led to a lessening of a lawyer’s respect in the community.”
That is not to say that the firm lacked political connections. With scandals devouring his presidency, Richard Nixon regularly sought advice from Chappie Rose. They had first met when Nixon was vice president and Chappie worked in the Eisenhower administration;37 the two men became friends.38 Rose was a big donor to Nixon’s presidential campaigns.39 Nixon and his deputies regularly called Rose for counsel on matters of politics, public relations, and of course, the law.40 (Rose’s son, Jonathan, worked in the White House as a special assistant to the president.)
As Watergate intensified, a reporter in 1973 asked Chappie Rose whether he planned to keep advising Nixon. “Well, I don’t know,” he answered. “If the president wants help, I would be glad to offer it.”41 The president wanted help. The White House pleaded with Chappie to represent Nixon when Congress demanded that he hand over his soon-to-be-infamous Oval Office recordings. Rose said sure—on one condition. Nixon needed to let him listen to the audiotapes first. Rose was a loyal Republican, and he liked the president, but neither he nor his law firm was interested in stumbling blindfolded into a situation where their ethics or judgment could be called into question.
Nixon refused to let Rose review the tapes. Rose wouldn’t budge. And so that was that—Rose and Jones Day would not represent the president. “He felt that it was just not a matter that he could undertake consistent with his responsibilities to Jones Day,” Jonathan Rose would say.42
Rose’s stand would become a point of enduring pride, a seminal moment in the firm’s history. Steve Brogan, a partner who worked closely with Rose, regarded it as “a supreme demonstration of the lawyer’s prerogative to exercise independent judgment concerning a proffered engagement, even if the client is the president of the United States.”43
To this day, Jones Day’s website boasts about the firm having walked away from the high-profile assignment. The vignette is recounted alongside the tale of Frank Ginn rejecting the lucrative merger assignment. Both are listed under the heading “The Independence Principle.”44