How Edward Bennett Williams Built the World's Most Powerful Law Firm
Even in the rarefied air of Washington, D.C., lawyers are lawyers: There are some you trust with your everyday business, and some you trust with your life. In Washington, there is no surer way to know that someone powerful or well-connected is in trouble than to note that they are now represented by Williams & Connolly. Whether it be Iran-Contra or Watergate, the Clinton impeachment or the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan, the DUI arrest of a politician’s wife or the defection of Elian Gonzalez, the censure of Sen. Joseph McCarthy or the prosecution of Sen. Ted Stevens, someone at Williams & Connolly is involved in the case. In Masters of the Game: Inside the World’s Most Powerful Law Firm, Washington-based author Kim Eisler analyzes the unorthodox origins and breathtaking resumé of one of the nation’s truly elite firms.
Many American cities are defined by the names on their tallest buildings: the banks of Charlotte, the insurance companies of Hartford or Jacksonville, the retail world of Chicago with its Willis (formerly Sears) Tower and Wrigley Building. In Washington, no building can be more than 13 stories, the height of the U.S. Capitol.
Since architects can’t go up, they feel like they have to use every inch, so it’s a striking building that takes up 80 percent of its block near 12th and F streets—there are trees and an open area with tables and chairs.
Inside the giant lobby are Italian marble floors, mahogany walls and moldings of bird’s eye maple. The name over the door reads Edward Bennett Williams Building. And next to the entrance is a small plaque with the name of the major tenant, who occupies the 250,000 square feet of usable nonretail office space, the Washington law firm of Williams & Connolly.
On April 7, 2009, a loaded white van pulled up outside the building. There was no uniformed concierge at the curb; Washington is anything but a doorman town.
From the shotgun, the front right seat by the driver, a slight, angular man with dark glasses and puffy white hair, his jaw locked tightly in a serious but satisfied grip, jumped out and slid open the vehicle’s middle door.
Out spilled newly exonerated Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, his wife, Catherine, two daughters and several attorneys, mostly toting thick briefcases and giant smiles. They were fresh from the federal courthouse where high-profile corruption charges against Stevens had, after months of litigation, been dropped.
Stevens’ principal attorney, however, still stood stoically by the door he had just released, a scowl on his face. He was, in his own words, in a “silent rage.”
Brendan V. Sullivan Jr., who had turned 67 just three weeks earlier, had never been a young-looking man. His high school classmates back at Providence Country Day School most often used the word fearsome to describe the boy whom the yearbook editors called “our esteemed leader.”
For the last 35 years with only one exception, the mention of which could send Sullivan into high-pitched paroxysms of anger, there had not been a single guilty verdict for one of his clients that he had not been able to undo or finesse. Only one of Sullivan’s clients had ever seen the inside of a prison, despite the fact that, Sullivan says, “by the time someone comes to me, they are pretty far up the creek.”
Though Stevens had been convicted of multiple felonies by a federal jury in Washington some weeks earlier, Sullivan had never doubted for a moment that the conviction would be overturned and Stevens would never spend a day in jail.
There had been a myth about Sullivan. It went like this: In any case Brendan Sullivan tries, there is a greater chance the federal or state prosecutor will go to jail than his client. On the surface such a notion seemed totally counterintuitive, a lawyerly exaggeration. Yet in this case, the prosecutors were themselves headed for investigation for prosecutorial misconduct.
But for the firm with which Sullivan had been associated for more than 40 years, it was simply another day at the office.
Continue reading “Masters of the Game” online in the June ABA Journal.
