| Sullivan & Cromwell LLP | |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | New York City |
| No. of offices | 12 total, 8 international |
| No. of attorneys | 758 (2011) |
| Major practice areas | General practice |
| Key people | Joseph Shenker, Chairman and Senior Partner H. Rodgin Cohen , Senior Chairman |
| Revenue | USD 995 million |
| Date founded | 1879 |
| Founder | Algernon Sydney Sullivan and William Nelson Cromwell |
| Company type | Limited liability partnership |
| Website | |
| www.sullcrom.com | |
Sullivan & Cromwell LLP is an international law firm headquartered in New York. The firm has approximately 800 lawyers in 12 offices, located in financial centers in the United States, Asia, Australia and Europe. Sullivan & Cromwell was founded by Algernon Sydney Sullivan and William Nelson Cromwell in 1879. The firm consistently ranks as one of the most prestigious law firms in the world. As of 2010, it was the 18th largest law firm in the world, by revenue.
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From its earliest involvement in the formation of Edison General Electric Company in 1882 and United States Steel Corporation in 1901, to its present work with leaders of the global economy in the 21st century, the firm has been closely involved in the affairs of some of America's, and now the world's, greatest industrial, commercial and financial enterprises. Sullivan & Cromwell's efforts to bring about the building of the Panama Canal are chronicled in David McCullough's book, The Path Between the Seas. The firm represents the Panama Canal Authority to this day.
The Great Depression and its aftermath reoriented much of Wall Street, and Sullivan & Cromwell was called on to assist clients in confronting a burst of government involvement in business affairs and a new wave of business-related litigation. During this period the firm developed its expertise in defending shareholder derivative litigation and antitrust actions, and was among the first law firms to develop expertise in the field of federal income tax law. A series of new federal statutes, beginning with the Securities Act of 1933, was enacted to regulate the investment industry, and Sullivan & Cromwell prepared the first major registration statement under the Securities Act. The firm's substantial involvement in, and important contributions to, securities offerings and securities regulation have continued since that time.
Sullivan & Cromwell partner Rogers Lamont was the first American to die in World War II. Lamont had worked in the firm's Berlin office in the early 1930s and had seen the horrors of Nazi Germany firsthand. Lamont resigned from the firm in 1939 and joined the British Army. Lamont was killed at Dunkirk on May 27, 1940. On the other hand, Sullivan & Cromwell did business with I.G. Farben (the chemical manufacturer of ‘Zyklon-B’ poison gas used in the Nazi death camps) and its associated Nazi-era corporations. Their chief contact at the firm was an attorney named John Foster Dulles, who later became Secretary of State in the Eisenhower Administration. “Sullivan and Cromwell thrived on its cartels and collusion with the new Nazi regime,” say the firm’s chroniclers. In 1933 and 1934, when the Nazis' brutal course was obvious, Dulles led off cables to his German clients with the salutation, “Heil Hitler”. In 1935, he scribbled a screed for the Atlantic Monthly magazine dismissing Nazi state terrorism as “changes we recognize to be inevitable.”
During and after World War II, individual members of the firm, including partners such as John Foster Dulles and Arthur Dean, also played important roles in domestic politics and international affairs. In 1935, Dulles closed Sullivan & Cromwell's Berlin office; later he would cite the closing date as 1934. Sullivan & Cromwell's litigation department was led for many years by Harlan Fiske Stone, before he left the firm to become Chief Justice of the United States. Partner Robert MacCrate served as Counsel to New York Governor Nelson D. Rockefeller and as Special Counsel to the Department of the Army for its investigation of the My Lai Massacre.
During the past three and a half decades Sullivan & Cromwell has grown gradually in measured response to the increasing volume and complexity of their clients' affairs, developing leading practices in areas such as mergers and acquisitions, banking regulation, real estate finance, derivatives and private equity. The firm's work in cross-border capital flows has continued, including substantial involvement in foreign direct investment and project finance, the development of the Euro — and other global capital markets, and the financial flows to Asia and Latin America.
As the expansion of the scope and nature of the firm's practice required Sullivan & Cromwell to have lawyers in locations more convenient to clients. Building on the legacy of John Foster Dulles and Arthur Dean, the S&C chairmen during this period, John Stevenson, John Merow and Ricardo Mestres, all aggressively expanded the firm's practice in the United States and around the world. Domestic branches were opened in Washington, D.C. in 1977, Los Angeles in 1984 and Palo Alto in 2000. Overseas, the Paris office, closed during World War II, was reopened in 1962, and offices were opened in London in 1972, Melbourne in 1983, Tokyo in 1987, Hong Kong in 1992, Frankfurt in 1995, Beijing in 1999 and Sydney in 2001. Now a fixture in U.K. legal circles after 35 years in London, Sullivan is widely regarded as a peer of the Magic Circle (law) firms.
In the late 1980s Sullivan partner Robert MacCrate served as president of both the New York State Bar Association the American Bar Association. MacCrate later chaired the ABA Task Force on Law Schools and the Profession. The Task Force's Report, widely known as the MacCrate Report,[1] was issued in July 1992 and is widely viewed as template for modern legal education in the United States. MacCrate, a former S&C vice chairman, continues to be active as a Senior Counsel of the firm.
As Mergers & Acquisitions became an increasingly important part of the corporate landscape in the 1970s, most of the leading White shoe firms of the day would not work on hostile takeovers, leaving it to other now leading law firms, like Wachtell Lipton and Skadden Arps. George Kern led the firm's M&A effort in the 1970s and 1980s. Kern was a colorful figure and was widely viewed, at S&C, as one of the early leading M&A lawyers. As the commercial banking industry began to consolidate in the 1980s, S&C partner and current chairman H. Rodge Cohen became involved in many of the key deals. Joe Frumkin is the managing partner of an M&A department that includes Jim Morphy and Frank Aquila, along with elders Ben Stapleton and Neil Anderson. Rodge Cohen continues to be the firms leading financial institutions M&A lawyer. With high-profile assignments from multinationals such as BP, Diageo, Philips, France Telecom, InBev, British Airways, Scottish Power, Endesa, and Vodafone, Sullivan & Cromwell has carved-out a niche in cross-border M&A. Partners Rich Morrissey in London and Chun Wei in Hong Kong lead the firm's non-US mergers practice. The firm has consistently ranked at the top among law firms involved in worldwide M&A transactions. Globally, Sullivan & Cromwell leads the M&A league tables, ranking first by value among law firms representing principals in announced transactions in 2007 (as was also the case in 2006, 2005 and 2004), according to data from Bloomberg and Euromoney Institutional Investor PLC's Dealogic.
Individuals who have worked at Sullivan & Cromwell include: