Shortly after Sheila Birnbaum joined Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom in 1980 as the firm's 185th lawyer, Joseph Flom told her and a room full of partners they would one day grow to 1,000 lawyers. At the time, it seemed impossible.

"We all looked at him like he lost his mind," Birnbaum says.

But Flom, as she and others often say, was a visionary. He had worked for years to entice Birnbaum to leave teaching to launch a products liability practice at the firm. Most other large firms viewed products liability as low-end insurance defense work, but Flom saw something more. Major corporations were starting to become self-insured and they wanted their trusted advisers by their side when major litigation hit.

Through moves like that, Flom eventually made good on his promise to grow Skadden. It evolved from a New York shop to an international powerhouse. Dozens of firms have since surpassed the once-unthinkable 1,000-lawyer milestone.

The industry's national and then global expansion coincided with—and, in some ways, was fueled by—the birth of The American Lawyer. Flom had a hand in that, too. A few years before launching the magazine, Steven Brill was captivated by the personal stories of Flom and another trendsetting lawyer, Martin Lipton, planting the seed that grew into this publication.

Brill, who was writing an occasional column for New York Magazine while at Yale Law School, was getting a snack from the vending machines on campus when he noticed that the career placement center's recruiting board was covered in letters from large law firms all saying the same thing: They were unique, their clients were unique and they wanted unique associates to come work with them. (Sound familiar?) Brill figured he'd give writing about the law a shot and went looking for a story.

Credit: Jonathan Reinfurt

Published in New York Magazine in 1976, the resulting piece profiled two Jewish lawyers who couldn't get jobs at Wall Street firms and eventually started their own shops—Flom at Skadden and Lipton at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. Flom and Lipton also happened to be revolutionizing the deal world, handling lucrative takeover and tender-offer fights. And by the early '80s, Lipton would create the poison-pill defense. Lawyers and investment bankers were now operating in the same boardrooms, and young associates grew envious of their newly well-heeled colleagues' pay. Brill had more stories to tell.

After the piece on Lipton and Flom came out, Brill followed an editor to Esquire and started writing regularly on the business of law. He launched the magazine in 1979, two years after the U.S. Supreme Court issued its groundbreaking ruling in Bates v. State Bar of Arizona, which upheld lawyers' right to advertise. Attorneys could no longer hide behind ethics rules to avoid a reporter's calls. Well, at least theoretically.

"I ended up cold-calling a lot of managing partners at hoity-toity firms and some of them would tell me the questions I was asking were illegal," Jill Abramson, the former New York Times executive editor who helped launch the magazine and spent 10 years reporting for it, says of the early days. "A lot of people just hung up on me. It was stressful."

Lawyers didn't want to talk about compensation, disclose who was on their management committee or dare name their clients. Abramson and other reporters often relied on printed editions of Martindale-Hubbell for pieces of information.

But Brill put the magazine in the hands of the right people to gain influence. David Boies remembers attending a bridge tournament where the magazine sat in stacks for the taking. The publication both reflected the industry and accelerated its progression, Boies says.

Brill had reporters stay in posh hotels when they were on assignment, Abramson recalls. He wanted lawyers to take the reporters and the magazine seriously. But it took a few years to get there.

"In the beginning, the first year or two, I would say half the people you got on the phone would hang up on you immediately," Brill recounts. "It was just time, a war of attrition"—and reporting valuable information—that gave the magazine staying power.

It didn't come without a personal cost for Brill and his family. His wife, Cynthia, was an attorney with what was then Winthrop, Stimson, Putnam & Roberts in New York. A few of the partners called her and Brill in for a meeting in the library of the Yale Club. They couldn't have someone at the firm who was associated with Brill, they said. She offered to use her maiden name, but that wasn't good enough.

Steve Brill, co-founder of The American Lawyer. Credit: David Handschuh/ALM.

The industry has certainly softened to the existence of the magazine, but not everyone has gotten over the fact that partner compensation is more than water cooler talk. Lipton, who encouraged Brill to start the magazine, says he may have reconsidered had he known that revenue and profit rankings would soon follow.

"If I had known that it was going to focus on the economics of law firms and make public estimates as to how firms were doing, I never would have been in favor of it," Lipton says. "That has been, I won't say a disservice, but certainly it has not been helpful to the legal profession, and I think it has focused the legal profession on the wrong things. It is, in part, what stimulated the creation of the mega firms."

Brill, who laughs when he hears Lipton's comments, is familiar with being blamed for helping take collegiality out of the profession. And he recognizes there is always some risk when it comes to what is done with information once it becomes available. But, as a journalist to his core, he cares more about transparency.

"It's one thing to say, 'Gee, we always used to be collegial,'" Brill says. "Yeah, but you also didn't have women or Jews, and didn't have to worry about competition because you all overbilled your clients because the GC was a friend."

What's Old Is New Again

Despite monumental changes in the legal industry, much has stayed the same. Headlines from the early days of the magazine could easily be confused with those written this year. Hot topics at the start included partner compensation, diversity and gender struggles, strategic planning, the hiring of business professionals, marketing and business development, mergers, lateral hiring and, of course, the billable hour.

Skadden; Wachtell; Cravath, Swaine & Moore and their ilk were frequent subjects from the jump. The first edition, in February 1979, detailed a PricewaterhouseCoopers report on law firm financials, in which Skadden was the highest-grossing firm. That was six years before the Am Law 50 first published in 1985 and many years before it became acceptable to discuss law firm compensation in civilized circles.