Cravath, Swaine & Moore will likely be moving out if its longtime Manhattan offices at 825 Eighth Ave. after the current lease expires in 2024. (Photo: Rick Kopstein/ALM)

Two of Wall Street's oldest law firms are celebrating major milestones this year: Cravath, Swaine & Moore turns 200 years old, while Sullivan & Cromwell—founded when Thomas Edison was still tinkering with his first electric light bulbs—turns 140. Another elite New York firm, Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, is relatively young—about 54 years old—but in its relatively short life has grown to be one of the premier M&A firms competing for Wall Street business.

SEE ALSO: Can Cravath and Wachtell's Lean Lockstep Approach Keep Them on Top? and High-End M&A Meets a New Challenge: Too Many White Men

While each of the firms' practice mix has evolved over generations, other attributes have held constant, including their financial prosperity and high profits, and their partners expect to maintain longtime traditions unique to each firm.

Cravath's past is so important to the firm that this year it created a brand new website to outline its bicentennial history. The New-York Historical Society is also showcasing the firm's history with an exhibit that features documents, photographs and prints from the last two centuries.

Early highlights of the firm's work include securing a patent for client Samuel Morse in 1848 to protect an invention of the electromagnetic telegraph, defending abolitionist John Van Zandt, and advising IBM on its common stock offering in 1939—a client relationship that would span decades.

“There aren't many institutions that can say they've been around for 200 years,” said presiding partner Faiza Saeed.

Cravath still holds on to many of the same characteristics that defined it decades ago. While other law firms have grown to dozens of offices around the world, employing thousands of attorneys with multitiered partnership pay arrangements, Cravath is one of the few Am Law 100 firms that still operates out of mostly one office, hosting a traditional equity partnership. The firm, which has a small London office, rarely adds lateral partners. “We do want a pretty cohesive partnership,” Saeed said.

“It's not imaginable to be in lots and lots of offices in lots of places where we only see each other once a year at a jamboree,” she said, noting all Cravath partners, each Monday, are expected to see each other for a business lunch.

Still, the Cravath of today looks totally different than the Cravath of 1819 or 1919, she added.

While Saeed said she would be surprised if there are any profound differences in Cravath's structure or footprint in the next decade, it wouldn't shock her to see a handful of lateral hires or a different practice mix in that time frame. “We will go wherever the sort of high-impact work is,” she added.

“Everything about Cravath is playing for the long term—that's how we think about talent, that's how we think about training. We're not transactional with clients,” she said. “There's a saying that culture eats strategy for breakfast and we really believe that.”

Cravath will see one significant change in the near future: a new office. Saeed said the odds are the firm will be in a different New York office after its lease at 825 Eighth Ave. expires in 2024, but declined to comment where. Cravath has been at Worldwide Plaza since 1989 and, according to a 2013 Morningstar ratings report about the building, it has paid an estimated $54 million in annual base rent.

Succession planning on Wall Street

As for Sullivan & Cromwell, M&A partner Francis Aquila said he also doesn't predict any significant changes in the firm in the near future, such as new offices or dramatic changes in hiring practices. But he suspects the practice mix will shift. When he started at Sullivan & Cromwell decades ago, Aquila said, the firm was much more securities law oriented.

In the last five years, Sullivan & Cromwell has already seen more emphasis in restructuring and leveraged finance, as well as internal investigations, executive compensation, corporate governance and matters related to the #MeToo movement's impact on C-suites, said Aquila and Joseph Frumkin, leader of the firm's M&A group.

Unlike Cravath, Sullivan & Cromwell has chosen to expand much more outside New York, opening locations in Europe, Asia and Australia. The firm opened its 13th office in 2017 in Brussels.

“One of the reasons we have the offices we do today that we didn't have 30 years ago is that our clients' businesses changed. We're not the 'Field of Dreams' type—'If you build it, they shall come.' We were led to Germany by our clients, we were led to Asia by our clients, we were led to Australia by our clients,” Aquila said. “We built a Latin American practice because that's where our clients were focused.”

One question looming for the firm is who will take over after chairman Joseph Shenker's tenure ends—whenever that may be. Shenker, 62, became chairman in 2010, when H. Rodgin Cohen, then 65, became senior chairman.

Aquila and Frumkin couldn't comment on any potential future leaders, but they didn't appear concerned. “We've been through it before,” said Frumkin about leadership changes.

While Aquila said there was no planned transition in the works and “no one is looking for Joe to leave anytime soon,” the firm's approach to providing legal services to clients, its culture and commitment to law as a profession “permeates the partnership, and I certainly believe that when the time comes and whoever succeeds Joe as chairman will be someone who has spent their professional life here and shares those values.”

At Wachtell, the firm has periodically faced questions about what will happen after two of its founding partners, Martin Lipton and Herbert Wachtell, who are 87 and 86, respectively, leave the firm, and whether it can continue to command the same prestige and premium rates.

Still, the firm's founders have been passing on management duties and client relationships for decades, said John Coates, a former Wachtell partner who is now a Harvard Law School professor teaching corporate law, finance and the legal profession.

The next two generations of partners have been making decisions about what kind of work to take and whom to hire, he said, adding that Lipton could have only worked on a fraction of the major deals over the past decade. “The firm is a brand, just like Cravath,” Coates said.

While Wachtell and Lipton still work full time at the firm, a look at Wachtell partners who worked on some of the largest publicly announced deals in the last year, including the $98 billion combination announced in January between Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. and Celgene Corp,, shows that the firm has staffed deal teams with relatively younger partners. The Wachtell Lipton team advising Celgene was led by partners Steven A. Cohen, David K. Lam and Edward J. Lee.

“We're all extremely bullish about the firm's future,” Lee said. “Being extremely entrepreneurial is in our firm's collective DNA.”

Another Wachtell partner, Adam Emmerich, added that “there's no shortage of people at the firm who are unbelievably good and successful.”

And while Wachtell is less diversified and more narrowly focused on M&A compared with its Wall Street peers, its partners are not alarmed by the deal market's ebbs and flows. “M&A has been cyclical since it was invented,” Emmerich said. “We're not dependent on every year being the best year ever and we're not panicked when cycles come and go.”

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