One morning in the early 1970s, a Jones Day partner named Allen Holmes was driving to work when he had an epiphany. For as long as Jones Day had existed, Cleveland had been a bustling center of American capitalism. The tradition went back to the 1870s, when the city was leading the way in the creation of things like electric lighting, chemicals, cars, and steel—“a hotbed of high-tech startups, much like Silicon Valley today,” as a group of academics later described it.1 Well into the 1960s, northeast Ohio was among the country’s leading locations for Fortune 500 companies.
This had been great for Jones Day. The firm was the best in town. It was on retainer at the vast majority of these companies.
But as Holmes drove through the city and approached the law firm’s headquarters, something clicked. Cleveland was a financial and social mess. One by one, its greatest companies were being swallowed up in mergers, or relocating to faster-growing regions, or just not doing nearly as well as they once had. The economy of the city—in fact, of the entire region—was grinding down.
A brilliant but mercurial antitrust lawyer, Holmes was next in line for the throne at Jones Day.2 He was a determined and stubborn man, qualities born out of a lifetime of health battles. When he was seventeen, he had his first bout of muscular paralysis. It turned out to be Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare disorder in which the immune system mistakenly attacks the body’s nerves. Holmes would suffer recurring episodes, sometimes leaving him hooked up to a breathing machine for months. His wife said that Holmes spent so much time in bed during these forced convalescences that he needed only five hours of sleep a night when he was healthy. “He simply got tired of bed,” she explained.3
Now Holmes had a revelation. To thrive, maybe even to survive, Jones Day needed to move beyond Cleveland. It needed to expand. It needed to go national.
This was unheard-of. At the time, even the largest law firms were confined to a city or two; some, like Jones Day, had their headquarters plus an outpost in Washington or New York. Jack Reavis was still managing partner, but Holmes had his ear. “You know, there aren’t any national law firms,” Holmes ventured at a meeting with Reavis and other partners. “We should be a national law firm.” Some in the room rolled their eyes. Holmes didn’t care. The only reaction that mattered belonged to Reavis.4
At first, Reavis wasn’t terribly receptive, either. But he listened, and Holmes kept pushing, and an opportunity soon presented itself. One of Jones Day’s largest clients was TRW, which was becoming a major player in the aerospace industry. It was moving to Los Angeles. So here was Holmes’s pitch: Let’s follow it west.5 Reavis didn’t see the need; lawyers could serve TRW while still being based in Cleveland. Holmes persisted. Having an L.A. office would allow the firm to pursue new clients and could serve as a model for other outposts in the future.6 Finally, Reavis relented. In 1973, Jones Day opened an office in L.A. “No outside firm had ever tried to come into California before,” Pogue said many years later. “It was a dramatic symbol of what was to come.”7
Dramatic, yes, but also a disaster. The California bar association insisted that top partners (those with their names on the door) at law firms operating in the state had to be licensed to practice in California. That was a problem for Jones Day, since Jones and Day were dead. The firm fought the rule, arguing that it unfairly stymied competition. Eventually, the bar association caved; it was a precedent-setting victory not only for Jones Day but also for other firms looking to expand beyond their home states.8
The California experiment proved humbling—for fifteen years, Jones Day would struggle to attract clients or turn a profit9—but when Holmes took over from Reavis in 1975 he remained steadfast that the firm’s future lay outside Cleveland. He proselytized to colleagues and clients about establishing a “truly national firm”—a phrase that he repeated so frequently that it became a joke, with insiders shortening it to “TNF.”10 Holmes, a man determined to overcome very long odds to get what he wanted, viewed the practice of law as a business, not just a profession. Everything was about to change.
In 1978, Holmes persuaded Jonathan Rose—the former Nixon aide and Chappie’s son—to join Jones Day and, not long after, sent him to D.C. to help start an antitrust practice. The lawyers in the Washington office perceived the appointment as nepotism and a usurpation of their prized autonomy.
The way Holmes and his allies in Cleveland saw it, the folks in Washington were angling to build their office into a self-sufficient fiefdom that wasn’t part of a firm with national aspirations.11 On a snowy Valentine’s Day in 1979, Holmes arrived in Washington and expelled the leaders of the D.C. office’s independence movement, as well as a bunch of their colleagues.12
Partners spent the following weeks bickering over which lawyers, which secretaries, which furniture would stay and which would go to a new firm being launched by the outcasts. One day, Dick Pogue stopped by to check on the progress. He was surprised to see that a young man was handling the negotiations for Jones Day. He was only two years out of law school and had a thick head of dark brown hair, his bangs threatening to descend over his eyes. His name was Steve Brogan. Pogue was impressed.13
Ultimately, about two-thirds of the Washington lawyers left the firm.14 Brogan was one of those who remained, and he could not have missed the lesson. The power at Jones Day would reside entirely with one man. For now, that person was Allen Holmes. Maybe one day Brogan would have his shot. In the meantime, he would be fast-tracked into leadership as a result of his loyalty.
After leaving Jones Day, Antonin Scalia had spent a few years teaching at the University of Virginia. Then he began pondering his next career move. Nixon was president. The White House’s newly created Office of Telecommunications Policy was looking for a general counsel. The head of the office asked Jim Lynn, the Jones Day partner who had recruited Scalia and now was at the Commerce Department, if he knew anyone. Lynn endorsed Scalia, who got the job in 1970.15 It was Scalia’s entree into Washington.
Four years later, following a recommendation from Jonathan Rose, Nixon nominated Scalia to run the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. (By the time Scalia started the job in August 1974, Gerald Ford was president.)16 During the Carter administration, Scalia took a job at the University of Chicago, where he helped establish the Federalist Society in an effort to place more conservatives on the federal judiciary.17
Then Ronald Reagan was elected. Among the people who joined his Justice Department were Steve Brogan and Jonathan Rose, who worked together in the Office of Legal Policy. Its responsibilities included drawing up lists of potential judicial nominees. Rose had an eye out for young, conservative academic stars. Here was Scalia, who had worked at Jones Day and in the Ford administration. Rose recommended him as a federal judge.18 In 1982, Reagan nominated Scalia to the powerful D.C. Circuit Court and then, four years later, to the Supreme Court.
It was a small preview of the power Jones Day would one day wield in shaping the federal judiciary.