Dewey Ballantine

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Dewey Ballantine's principal office at the Calyon Building, New York City.

Dewey Ballantine LLP was a white shoe corporate law firm headquartered in New York City. In 2007, Dewey Ballantine merged with LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene & MacRae to form Dewey & LeBoeuf. The firm underwent numerous name changes throughout its history as partners left to serve in government positions or form new firms.

[edit] History

In 1909, three recent graduates of Harvard Law School - Grenville Clark, Francis W. Bird, and Elihu Root, Jr., son of New York Senator Elihu Root (who had previously served as United States Secretary of War (1899-1904) and as United States Secretary of State (1904-1909)), agreed to establish a law partnership on Wall Street, named Root, Clark & Bird. The young lawyers were able to capitalize on the senior Root's connections to gain an entry into high financial circles and soon had a thriving law practice. In 1913, the firm merged with the firm of Buckner & Howland (a firm which had recently been founded by Emory Buckner) to form Root, Clark, Buckner & Howland.

In the 1920s, Arthur A. Ballantine, who had become the Internal Revenue Service's first solicitor in 1918, joined the firm and ran the firm along with Emory Buckner throughout the 1920s and 1930s. During the Great Depression, the firm flourished by moving away from its traditional focus on litigation and to begin focusing on bankruptcy and reorganizations, and then by taking the advantage of the New Deal to build a thriving regulatory practice.

The firm also built up a corporate practice, serving clients such as AT&T and Standard Oil. Overall, the firm expanded from 8 to 74 associates and opened a second office in Washington, D.C. Both Henry Friendly and John Marshall Harlan II worked at the firm during this period.

The firm weathered many name changes from its founding through 1955, as named partners left the firm for periods of time to serve in a number of important government positions. Among them was Emory Buckner, who left to become United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York and is often credited with remaking that office into a professional prosecutorial office by declining to appoint Assistants based on party affiliation. Partner Grenville Clark served as United States Postmaster General. Later generations of partners included John Marshall Harlan II, who left the firm when appointed to serve as a Judge of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and who later became an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court; Henry J. Friendly, who left with several partners to form the firm of Cleary, Friendly, Gottlieb & Steen (now Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP) and later was appointed to serve on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

In 1955, Governor Thomas E. Dewey joined the firm as a partner after leaving office and the firm, then called Ballantine, Bushby, Palmer & Wood, became Dewey, Ballantine, Bushby, Palmer & Wood. It shortened the name to Dewey Ballantine in 1990 and later adopted the limited liability partnership form, becoming Dewey Ballantine LLP. Arthur Ballantine, the other partner whose name survived in the pre-merger name of the firm, joined the firm in 1919 after serving as the first solicitor of the Internal Revenue Service.

In early 2007, Dewey Ballantine had approximately 500 attorneys in 12 offices around the world.

On October 25, 2006, the firm announced that it would merge with the San Francisco-based, Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe. With over 1,500 attorneys, the combined firm would have been among the 10 largest firms in the United States. ^[1] Ultimately, however, the two firms were not able to successfully negotiate the merger and it was called off in January 2007. ^[2]

On October 1, 2007, Dewey Ballantine merged with LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene & MacRae to form the combined firm of Dewey & LeBoeuf LLP. The combined firm has over 1,400 attorneys in 27 offices around the world.

The headquarters for Dewey & LeBoeuf are located in the Calyon Building in Midtown Manhattan. These offices, which belonged to the legacy Dewey Ballantine firm, were featured in the 2007 film Michael Clayton starring George Clooney.^[3]

In the NBC TV show The West Wing, the character Sam Seaborn worked for Dewey Ballantine before working at the White House.