Dick Pogue was in his office when the call came from London.1 Allen Holmes was on the line. The iron-willed Holmes hadn’t let his precarious health get in the way of his pursuit of the good life. It was February 1984, and he was in England for a meeting of the International Wine & Food Society, a gastronomic club of which he had recently been named president. Then his Guillain-Barré syndrome struck. Holmes, calling from a hospital and paralyzed from the neck down, informed Pogue that he was hereby appointed as Jones Day’s managing partner.
Like Holmes, Pogue was a tireless worker. He hardly slept; even as a baby, he would stay up until 11:00 p.m. and wake six hours later, pounding on his crib to get out (and causing his parents a fair amount of worry about their sleep-deprived infant).2 This didn’t change in adulthood, though Pogue found time for poker and the saxophone.3 He “puts in more hours than I do, and I was doing what amounted to about 3,000 hours a year,” Holmes would say.4
Now, as the managing partner of the firm he had joined twenty-seven years earlier, Pogue had two main priorities. One was to gain the respect of the firm’s partners. The other was growth.5 The combination of the Supreme Court’s rulings in Goldfarb and Bates and the emergence of the legal media had convinced Pogue that a new era was dawning for his revered profession. Expansion wasn’t just a goal; it was a prerequisite. “Everyone else was going to do it,” Pogue recalled decades later. Jones Day had to move fast or be left behind.6
The firm had a jump on most of its rivals. After moving into L.A., Jones Day had opened an office in Columbus, Ohio, and then, in 1981, in Dallas.7 That made Jones Day the first out-of-state law firm in Texas. The New York Times had seized on the deal as proof of an emerging trend of law firms becoming national, ending “the traditional identification of law firms with single cities.”8
With 335 lawyers in five offices,9 it was not crazy to argue that Jones Day had achieved Holmes’s ambition of becoming a truly national firm. When Jack Reavis addressed a group of Jones Day associates in 1983, he remarked wistfully how much the firm had changed. Only one of its five largest clients was based in northeast Ohio, and the rest had “practically nothing to do with Cleveland.”
Now in the driver’s seat, Pogue stomped on the gas. The U.S. economy was booming, with the Reagan administration’s deregulation acting as a shot of adrenaline. This go-go period would come to be regarded as a time of recklessness and greed, but in the moment it seemed like a golden opportunity for Jones Day to get bigger. Three months after he took over, Pogue decided to open an office in Austin, which was among the fastest-growing cities in the U.S.10 The move would set the tone for the rest of his tenure.
Pogue asked Rick Kneipper, a lawyer who’d helped open the Dallas office, to start thinking strategically about how Jones Day could keep growing. The two men discussed shedding the traditional lawyer mentality and thinking more like investment bankers. Kneipper and a small team began analyzing the business landscape and looking for areas—industries and regions—that were poised for growth and where other law firms hadn’t already established positions of dominance.11
The firm’s next leap would be much bigger. Globalization was in full swing. “If we wanted to be at the forefront of the profession, we needed to be international,” Pogue explained.12
The first step, he concluded, was to establish an outpost in New York, which was the port of entry for many European and Asian companies seeking to do business in America. “People didn’t take you seriously without a New York office,” Pogue told me. His team drew up a list of potential acquisition targets and then started putting out feelers. After a few aborted attempts, Pogue’s crew came across Surrey & Morse, a venerable New York firm with offices in Washington, London, Paris, and Riyadh. The firm’s leaders were nearing retirement age, and their frugality appealed to Pogue, who, for all his ambition, favored austerity.13
The deal was completed on January 1, 1986. At the time it was the biggest law-firm merger ever. With the addition of Surrey & Morse’s 79 lawyers, Jones Day now had a total of 572 worldwide.14 Pogue got on the phone with the New York Times to tout the acquisition. “The international offices were the primary attraction,” he explained. The firm had become the country’s second-largest, behind only Baker McKenzie.15
Jones Day got more than just an international law firm when it bought Surrey & Morse. It also got a lobbying shop. For years, Surrey & Morse had represented foreign governments as they sought to influence Washington. Now the lobbying business—which Welch Pogue had shunned when he was running Jones Day’s Washington office because he considered it demeaning—belonged to Jones Day.
Jones Day had already established a pedigree as a politically wired firm with a clear rightward tilt. It went beyond Chappie Rose’s counseling of Nixon. In 1980, Jones Day had filed a lawsuit against President Carter on behalf of Marathon Oil, protesting the imposition of an import fee on crude oil. Jones Day won. Months later, the firm represented Reagan’s presidential campaign when the Carter campaign sued to prevent him from collecting $29 million in federal election funds. Once again, Jones Day beat Carter. The back-to-back victories became a point of pride. “Jones Day has the unique distinction of having defended one president and sued another in the same year,” wrote Albert Borowitz, a Jones Day lawyer, in his 1993 history of the firm.16
Even so, Jones Day had avoided trying to sway federal officials on behalf of clients. That made the firm an outlier. Other large firms in the capital—like Patton Boggs and Akin Gump, among many others—had made this sort of work a foundation of their Washington practices. Now Jones Day plunged into this rough-and-tumble world. Surrey & Morse’s lobbying clients included the South African Sugar Association, which wanted to defang international sanctions against the country’s apartheid government,17 and the Chinese government on issues including Tibet and China’s one-child policy.18 Such work might have left the old guard at Jones Day feeling queasy, but it was lucrative. And with the firm growing rapidly, it was incumbent upon all offices to generate as much revenue as possible, as quickly as possible.
That was how, a couple of years later, Jones Day found itself capitalizing on a crisis in the Libyan desert. In November 1988, the U.S. government issued a warning to European countries that Muammar Gaddafi’s regime had built a poison-gas factory with the help of Western companies. Before long, the names of those companies were made public. One of them was West Germany’s Preussag, which had built a water-purification plant that ended up serving the weapons factory southwest of Tripoli.19 Preussag officials denied wrongdoing,20 but the company was already in hot water for allegedly having helped build a chemical weapons factory in Iraq.21
American lawmakers were angry. In January 1989, Senators Bob Dole and Jesse Helms introduced bills to punish companies that aided outlaw countries in developing chemical and biological weapons. Helms entered into the Congressional Record a list of companies, including Preussag, that were accused of assisting in proliferation. Senator John McCain blasted the members of this “Roll of Dishonor.” “Such companies must be judged guilty until proven innocent,” he thundered. “One strike and you’re out!”22
Lawyers at Jones Day smelled an opportunity. Six days after the bills were introduced, a partner in the newly acquired Paris office wrote a letter to Preussag. The letter warned that Preussag faced possible sanctions that would prevent it from importing products into the U.S. “Jones Day is uniquely qualified to be of assistance to Preussag to represent its interests on the Hill and the executive branch,” the partner wrote.
Attached was a twelve-page “Proposal for Representation of Preussag.”23 It was a blunt articulation of how Jones Day hoped to use its growing roster of well-connected insiders to influence events in Washington—and specifically to help a company avoid punishment for helping Libya develop dangerous weapons.
The proposal recommended that Preussag “embark upon a series of meetings” with key officials throughout the George H. W. Bush administration and on Capitol Hill. “Jones Day would be prepared to set up and attend these meetings,” the proposal explained.
The letter outlined why Jones Day was right for the task. It wasn’t the firm’s international reach or its expertise on sanctions or its skillful lawyers. It was that Jones Day had people with access to the country’s leaders. There was former GOP senator Charles Mathias, who had joined Jones Day in 1987 after eighteen years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. There was Herbert Hansell, who had spent years at the State Department and “is currently actively involved with the State Department on behalf of many of the firm’s international clients.” There was Jonathan Rose, who “has close relations with many individuals currently serving in the White House.” There was Randall Davis, who had served in the Reagan and Bush White Houses “and has maintained a close working relationship with many individuals now on the White House staff.” Finally, there were Victor Raiser and Jane Harman, who were in touch with Democratic congressional leaders “as a result of their fundraising activities” and would be involved “should this project involve contact with the Democratic leadership.”
It was a compelling pitch, in part because of its unusual candor in outlining exactly how the firm intended to exploit its connections. Preussag signed on as a client.24 Davis reached out to folks on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and assured them that Preussag wouldn’t service the water-purification equipment it had provided to the Libyans. Senate aides said they’d take that into consideration if the legislation began to move.25
The legislation never moved; the bills died without a hearing. But the successful pitch showed Jones Day the power of capitalizing on its lawyers’ political comrades and their prior work for the government. The lesson would resonate for decades to come.
After the Surrey & Morse acquisition, Dick Pogue went on a spree. Later in 1986, Jones Day opened a Hong Kong office. Then it acquired a Chicago firm26 and opened an office in Geneva. A Pittsburgh outpost came in early 1989. Four months later Jones Day bought a firm in Atlanta. That was Jones Day’s tenth U.S. office, and it left the firm with more than one thousand lawyers.27 It went on to open offices in Tokyo and Brussels that year, followed by Taipei and Frankfurt.
In the space of about a decade, Jones Day had gone from being an unremarkable regional firm to being one of the largest and most important in the world. It became the envy of the industry. “The clients flow from one city to the other and back again,” marveled a partner with Akin Gump. “It’s awesome to behold.”28 In Brussels, the firm hired so many people that local lawyers coined the phrase “keeping up with the Jones Days” to reflect the race for talent that the firm had kicked off.29
Jones Day prospered. By 1988, it was the country’s second-largest firm in terms of revenue, behind only Skadden. Under Pogue’s watch, Jones Day expanded from 335 lawyers in 5 U.S. cities to more than 1,200 lawyers in 20 offices around the world.30
Pogue ruled his domain with an autocratic air. He was a micromanager. If a memo was being sent out about the vacation policy for secretaries, Pogue would insist on reviewing and editing it beforehand, to the frustration of even his admirers.31 He was often gruff. The journalist Mark Stevens noted in 1987 that Pogue’s “assets do not include a sparkling personality.”32 In interviews, Pogue was prone to repeating, over and over, that he was in charge, that he was the monarch: “In the end, I make all decisions.” “I have the authority to run the firm.” “There are no appeals.”33
It would be easy to lump Pogue in with that era’s imperial CEO: strong-willed, supremely ambitious, arguably narcissistic men like General Electric’s Jack Welch who lavished themselves with nine-figure paydays. But Pogue differed from that breed in a key respect. He wasn’t in it for himself. All he cared about was Jones Day. Yes, his power was absolute. But he viewed that as crucial to the firm’s ability to make quick decisions, unburdened by the never-ending committees and consensus-building that bogged everything down at other firms. Pogue didn’t see a problem with this approach, so long as the managing partner exercised his power on the firm’s behalf, not his own. And that was what Pogue did. He eschewed the trappings of wealth and power, showing up to business meetings in ill-fitting suits and ties that didn’t match his cheap printed shirts.34 He drove a Chevy. He flew coach.
On one occasion, a junior lawyer boarded a plane for a business trip and settled into his first-class seat at the front of the cabin. Then, to his surprise, he spotted Pogue getting on board. The lanky managing partner shuffled past the associate to his seat at the rear of the aircraft. The associate nearly had a panic attack; had Pogue spotted him sitting in his expensive seat? What would he think? The plane took off and reached cruising altitude, and the young lawyer calmed himself by considering the unlikelihood that Pogue would even recognize a lowly associate. That is when he felt a tap on his shoulder. It was a flight attendant. “There’s a fellow in the back who says you wouldn’t mind changing seats with him,” she said. On that rare occasion, Pogue enjoyed a first-class flight.