Reading List for Deal Lawyers

John Quinn got the Wall Street Journal to publish his Reading List for Trial Lawyers last weekend.

Inspired, we’ve put together a reading list for deal lawyers.

See our five recommendations, after the jump (including two written by former Cravath lawyers).

1. Big Deal: Mergers and Acquisitions in the Digital Age.  Author Bruce Wasserstein started his career at Cravath, then went on to First Boston, formed his own shop (Wasserstein Perella), sold that, and took over the top job at Lazard. He knows his way around a deal, so we’ll forgive the precociousness of a 1998 book about M&A in the Digital Era (and there’s an “updated” version from 2000: Big Deal : 2000 and Beyond). But what’s really important is that he knows his history as well. The book traces four previous “waves” of dealmaking: railroads in the 19th century; the Roaring 20s; conglomerate-building in the 1970s; and LBO-fueled hostile takeovers in the 1980s.

2. Den of Thieves Author James Stewart (another former Cravath lawyer) won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting for the Wall Street Journal on the insider-trading scandals of the late 1980s. He turned that research into this book about the high-flying lives and hard crashes of Mike Milken, Ivan Boesky, Marty Siegel, Dennis Levine, and the rest. Concepts like “Revlon Duties” take on an entirely new meaning after reading the stories of the men involved and their motivation. Even more so than Wasserstein, Stewart gives full attention to the lawyers involved, both those who tacitly (or overtly) allowed the activities to take place, and those who prosecuted the offenders. (Bonus, check out The Partners: Inside America’s Most Powerful Law Firms, Stewart’s first book, a collection of essays on top firms, including Cravath).

3. Eat What You Kill: The Fall of a Wall Street Lawyer.  Fascinating, cautionary tale of what can happen in the high-pressure world of corporate law firms. John Gellene was a junior partner at Milbank who took on more than he could handle for lateral rainmaker Larry Lederman. Both of them were trying to skate between holders of junk bonds (see the two books above) in a crumbling market, the vulture investors who were scooping the notes up, and the companies that were trying to restructure. Gellene eventually went to federal prison for filing a false bankruptcy affidavit, in which he failed to disclose a conflict that would have disqualified the firm. The book also touches on the changes in the legal industry that led to white shoe Milbank bringing in not only a lateral partner (from a no-name firm, no less), but a Jew. Author Mitt Regan clerked for Ginsburg when she was on the DC Circuit then for Brennan on the Supreme Court. He was also an associate at Davis Polk, and is now on the faculty at GULC.

4. Skadden: Power, Money, and the Rise of a Legal Empire similarly focuses a lot on the upheaval of a law firm in the late 1980s, but this time from one of the “upstarts.” Formed in the 40s, Skadden was already a huge firm at the center of M&A activity by the time Joe Flom gave Lincoln Caplan “warts and all” access to the firm. While the story focuses on the rise of the firm, it was researched from 1988-1993, at which time the lawyers were involved in many of the biggest deals. Author Caplan went to Harvard Law, but became a consultant before going on to journalism.

5. Speaking of Skadden, M&A Titans: The Pioneers Who Shaped Wall Street’s Mergers and Acquisitions Industry puts Joe Flom and Marty Lipton at the center of thirty years of the M&A boom. The book traces how not only did these two bring together deals and dealmakers, but how the skills transferred over into their development of their firms.

What do you think of our choices? Read any of the books? Anything we missed?

Full disclosure (which we would do even if the FTC wasn’t making noises about disclosing affiliate programs).  Links to books on the site, including in this post, are to our affiliate program at Amazon.  If you buy a book after clicking on a link from here, we get a few cents.  We’re not shilling for the books, we’re just providing a link we’d give anyway. 

Here are the covers:
BIG DEAL:

DEN OF THIEVES:

EAT WHAT YOU KILL:

SKADDEN:

M&A TITANS:

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