Jim Hurlock

OIL ON CANVAS

BY EVERETT RAYMOND KINSTLER

James B. Hurlock:
Footnotes to
a Portrait

DUANE D. WALL

Introduction

During the last five years, I had the privilege of leading the team that produced a book of the history of White & Case, from its founding in 1901 to the present, which was published in May 2017. The editorial board for that project included four partners—George Crozer, Maureen Donovan, Gene Goodwillie and Wendell Maddrey—who, along with me, worked closely with Jim Hurlock for many years. As we began work on that book, we were reminded of the significant extent to which Jim’s visionary leadership in the last two decades of the 20th century had transformed White & Case into the leading global law firm it is today. But the need to condense 115 years of White & Case history into a book of about 300 pages made it impossible to devote proper attention to Jim’s remarkable journey to international success and his impact on the Firm.

It was then that the five of us decided to write a book about Jim. But knowing Jim as well as we did, we were sure he would not agree to let us write such a book if we told him of our plans. So we swore ourselves to secrecy and in mid-2013 began our work in earnest. I produced the first draft in June, my four partners in this collaborative effort added their perspectives on Jim and his career, and then the five of us edited and supplemented each other’s work until we put “pencils down” on a final draft in November.

In the book, we tell the story of how a single individual can change the course of a major organization. We explain how Jim’s international experience—observing the reconstruction of Europe after World War II, anticipating the rising economic influence of emerging markets, and participating in the transition of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe from communism to free market economies—shaped his thinking about the role of law firms in the global business landscape. We depict the attributes and characteristics that defined Jim and made him the great leader he was, including his relentless pursuit of his global vision for the Firm. And we portray his leadership in action, linking these personal qualities to the decisions he made and the actions he took to prepare the Firm for the future.

Jim learned of the book for the first time shortly after we completed our final draft in November 2013, when Hugh Verrier, the Chair of the Firm, handed him a copy in early December. Surprised by this fait accompli, Jim graciously agreed to let the Firm proceed with its plan to publish the book after he and his wife, Lyn, reviewed it and corrected a few facts. They also provided the family photographs that appear in the book.

Our plan was to launch this book about Jim after the Firm’s history book. However, when it took longer to complete the Firm history book than we originally expected, we proceeded with a limited pre-publication distribution of the book about Jim in December 2014. About 60 spiral-bound copies were given to Jim and Lyn’s family members and close personal friends.

In April 2016, Jim died following an automobile accident, leaving us far too soon. But the distribution of the book about him while he was still alive allowed him and his family and friends to reflect on and appreciate the impact he had on White & Case and a broad range of people both inside and outside the Firm during his long career.

The text of the book is the same as it was when Jim first saw it in December 2013 except for editorial revisions and changes to reflect that Jim is no longer with us.

The Foreword refers to a portrait of Jim hanging on the 29th floor of the Firm’s New York office at the time we wrote the book, together with the portraits of six other Firm leaders. Since then, the Firm moved its New York office from 1155 to 1221 Avenue of the Americas, where Jim’s portrait now hangs on the 50th floor together with portraits of the Firm’s co-founders, DuPratt White and George Case.

The book you are about to read is the result of a collective effort by friends and colleagues of Jim who wanted to share the admiration and respect they developed for him over many years. I hope you will enjoy reading about Jim as much as we enjoyed knowing and working with him.

Duane D. Wall

January 2018

Foreword

Portraits of seven historical luminaries of global law firm White & Case adorned the walls of its conference center on the 29th floor of the Firm’s New York office while it was at 1155 Avenue of the Americas. No formal process existed to determine which partners’ portraits should be placed in the Firm’s pantheon, but each of the partners depicted in the portraits played critical roles in the establishment and development of White & Case and were leaders in their contemporary legal, business and philanthropic communities.

Justin DuPratt White (1869–1939) and George Bowen Case (1872–1955) were there. They became the founding fathers of the Firm on May 1, 1901, when they began operations in a two-room office at 31 Nassau Street, about three blocks north of the New York Stock Exchange. One of their early assignments was the organization of Bankers Trust Company in 1903, the beginning of a relationship that continued until and after Bankers Trust was acquired by Deutsche Bank (also a White & Case client) in 1999.

During World War I, DuPratt White and George Case both distinguished themselves. White was made a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor by the French government in 1919 in recognition of his and the Firm’s work in representing J.P. Morgan & Co. in helping Great Britain and France purchase war materials in the United States, writing contracts with some 1,000 suppliers for about $3 billion. And President Woodrow Wilson appointed Case to the American Red Cross War Council that took charge of all of the Red Cross’s efforts to provide support for American and Allied soldiers and their families during the war.

Charles J. Fay (1871–1950) joined the Firm as its third partner in 1907, represented the New York Shipbuilding Corporation and the Hog Island Shipyard during World War I, and for many years played a major role in the Firm’s relationship with Bankers Trust.

Joseph M. (“Colonel”) Hartfield (1882–1964) was a four-foot, ten-inch giant of a man from Kentucky who was described by Martin Mayer in 1955 as “one of the most effective trial lawyers in the country.” His many contacts at all levels of society enabled him to generate significant business throughout his career, and he was a powerful force within the Firm. The Colonel was widely known for his volunteer work for nonprofit institutions, and a plaque at the center of the Grand Tier railing of the Metropolitan Opera House honors his service and contributions to the Metropolitan Opera Guild and the Metropolitan Opera Association. Also active in Democratic politics, he helped arrange for the 1928 Democratic Convention to be held in Houston.

Soon after becoming a partner of the Firm in 1912, Hartfield was made an honorary Kentucky Colonel by the governor of the state, and Charles Fay began the custom of calling him “Colonel” because Fay said Hartfield was too small to be called Mister and too bright to be called Joe. Hartfield never forgot his Kentucky roots, and his annual trips by railcar to the Kentucky Derby, taking along a group of clients and friends, were always grand occasions.

Irving S. Olds (1887–1963) spent the year after graduating from Harvard Law School as a law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, joined the Firm as an associate in 1911 and became a prominent corporate lawyer, left the Firm to serve as chairman and CEO of U.S. Steel Corporation from 1940 to 1952, and returned to the Firm as one of its leaders for the next 11 years.

Orison Marden (1906–1975)—whose father, Orison Swett Marden, wrote best-selling inspirational books with titles such as Making Life a Masterpiece and Every Man a King—created his own inspirational story by excelling at whatever he did throughout his long career. One of the Firm’s leading litigators, he is equally well remembered for his commitment to making legal services available to all regardless of ability to pay. He worked as a volunteer lawyer for the Legal Aid Society of New York for 45 years and served on its board of directors for 27 years. The Society keeps his memory alive through its Orison S. Marden Awards, given each year to one or more lawyers on its staff for outstanding dedication and service to clients. The New York City Bar Association Fund remembers him with the Orison S. Marden Memorial Lectures on ethical and legal aid topics. Marden is also one of the few lawyers to have served as president of the New York City Bar Association, the New York State Bar Association and the American Bar Association.

The seventh portrait, page 1 and 2 of this ebook, is of James B. (“Jim”) Hurlock (1933–2016). When Jim became Chair of the Firm on January 1, 1980, he knew these six predecessors would be hard acts to follow, but he proved to be more than just up to the task. Over the next 20 years, Jim’s strategic vision and energetic leadership transformed White & Case into the global law firm it is today.

On the day he became Chair, the Firm had about 150 lawyers in its New York office and an additional 35 lawyers based in much smaller offices in Paris, Brussels, London, Washington, D.C. and Hong Kong. Almost all of its lawyers were U.S. nationals, and almost all of its clients were U.S. entities. When he stepped down as Chair in 2000, Jim passed down to the next generation a much different firm: more than 1,000 lawyers of more than 60 nationalities in 31 offices in 24 countries, a multinational client base and the other characteristics of a truly global law firm that are noted in this book.

The history of the Firm, including its transformation into a global law firm, is recorded in the recently published White & Case: The First 100 Years & Beyond. This book is about Jim and the role he played in the transformation: his vision of a global law firm; his role in turning that vision into reality; the attributes and characteristics that made him an effective leader; and his willingness to seek out new frontiers and pursue relentlessly the opportunities they presented.

The portrait of Jim was painted by Everett Raymond Kinstler, the renowned painter of more than 1,200 portraits, including the official White House portraits of Presidents Ford and Reagan, portraits of more than 50 presidential cabinet officers and portraits of famous personalities including movie stars Katharine Hepburn, Paul Newman and John Wayne, authors Arthur Miller, Ayn Rand and Tom Wolfe, and John D. Rockefeller III.

The portrait is a good likeness of Jim, and his smile reflects his wry sense of humor, but those who knew him well do not believe the portrait fully or accurately portrays the Jim who was the visionary leader of White & Case. The shoulders in the portrait are not broad enough. The strength of his six-foot, two-inch frame is not self-evident. The portrait does not exude the personal presence that enabled Jim to dominate a room or a meeting. He appears too relaxed to be the man who was always in constant motion. He does not have the look in the portrait of the dynamic leader who was always moving forward, never looked behind, and never stopped challenging both himself and everyone around him. And Jim appears oddly out of place, posing in a chair, this man who so often said to his colleagues: “You never get new clients sitting in your office.”

Not even Kinstler, as gifted as he is, could do the impossible: reflect in full on a 34- by 40-inch canvas the essence of a man who was always a little larger than life.

This book, with its 33 “footnotes,” is written in the hope that, while the portrait cannot be changed, those who have the opportunity to stand and study it after reading this book will look at it a little differently with the benefit of these insights into Jim’s visionary leadership.

Brief History of the Portrait

Another of Jim’s attributes not reflected in the portrait is his anathema for self-aggrandizement. Jim could not have achieved what he did without being ambitious, but he always preferred that his achievements be evidenced by the success of the things he helped build, whether a team, a practice or a firm. He never sought public recognition of his personal success either as an accomplished international lawyer or as the head of a global law firm. He seldom accepted any such recognition when offered.

The partners who approached Jim on behalf of the Firm with the proposal to add his portrait to the Firm’s collection were aware of Jim’s reluctance to accept any public recognition of his accomplishments, and they were not surprised when he rejected the proposal when they first presented it to him. Even though Jim was aware of Kinstler’s reputation and admired his work, including the portrait of Orison Marden, it took these partners several weeks to persuade Jim to agree to let the project proceed.

Kinstler then took over and painted the portrait, using both photographs of Jim and sittings at Kinstler’s studio in the National Arts Club on Gramercy Park.

After the portrait was completed, Jim’s partners had an equally difficult time persuading him to attend an unveiling ceremony. But he finally agreed, and the unveiling took place at a small (at Jim’s request) reception at the Firm’s New York office in the summer of 2002, attended by his partners, family members and friends.

Jim’s personal accomplishments as a lawyer and his 20 years of visionary leadership of White & Case more than justify the place of prominence given to his portrait at the Firm’s former and current New York offices.

JIM AT THE HELM OF HIS SLOOP “WHITE JACKET”

Part I

The Journey to Globalization

Part I covers Jim’s evolution into an internationalist and the singular role he played in transforming White & Case into a global law firm. The attributes and characteristics featured in Part I are those Jim had or developed before becoming the leader of the Firm, and ones that became evident to all those who followed his lead during the 20-year journey to globalization. These include his global vision for the Firm, his relentless pursuit of the vision, his strategic opportunism and his strong belief that he should pass down to the next generation a firm that was better than the one passed down to him and his generation.

FOOTNOTE 1

Development Into Internationalist

The Jim depicted in the portrait is an urbane, sophisticated internationalist who helped transform White & Case into a truly global law firm. If Kinstler had been so inclined, he could have given the casual viewer a hint of Jim’s internationalism, perhaps including a map in the background of the portrait.

This Jim is the result of an evolutionary process that began when he was born in Chicago in 1933, in the early years of the Great Depression. His mother moved to Cleveland with Jim and his sister a few years later, after divorcing Jim’s father, and the family eventually settled in Shaker Heights, a Cleveland suburb. Jim spent his high school years at Western Reserve Academy in nearby Hudson.

At Western Reserve, Jim excelled not only academically but also in athletics, lettering in football, wrestling and track in his junior and senior years. His athletic prowess earned him the Cleveland Touchdown Club Award, given to the city’s independent schools’ most valuable football player. Jim always thought that wrestling taught him the advantage of having an individual strategy, including elements of surprise and innovation, and helped him hone his sense of survival; track taught him the importance of endurance; and football taught him the value of knowing as much as possible about the talent of each of the members of the team and understanding that the team as a whole works together best by getting the most out of each of its players. His athletic prowess also undoubtedly helped him evade a knife attack and overpower the two intruders who broke into his Paris apartment years later in the middle of the night. He held one of them down until the French police arrived and always regretted that the second one escaped as he was subduing the first.

Jim continued his academic excellence at Princeton, where he graduated summa cum laude; was elected to Phi Beta Kappa; received the highest grade possible (1+) for his thesis on underestimated characters in Shakespeare, Faulkner and Dostoyevsky; and was awarded the Pyne Prize, Princeton’s highest general distinction for undergraduates.

While at Princeton, Jim applied for and was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University. During his interviews for the scholarship, he became a little worried about his chance of success when one of the interrogators, after looking over Jim’s résumé, asked him why he had been willing to play second string on Princeton’s football team for each of his four years there. Always a straight shooter, Jim responded with the candor for which he would later become well known at White & Case: “Because I wasn’t good enough to play on the first.”

At Oxford, Jim played on the first string he created for himself by reading law (concluding with a series of oral exams conducted in Latin) and making a number of lifelong friends. One of these friends, future movie star Dudley Moore, would occasionally sneak Jim into the Magdalen College Chapel in the middle of the night and entertain him with an impromptu organ recital, sometimes playing a piece Moore described as “Bach as Mozart would have written it.” Another of these friends, James Buckley, joined Jim in pursuing a legal career after Oxford and later became a partner of the London law firm that is now Macfarlanes.

It was Buckley who, in a sterling example of English understatement, suggested to Jim in a letter delivered at the June 2000 celebratory dinner held at the New York Botanical Garden in commemoration of Jim’s 20 years of leadership of White & Case: “Perhaps, Jim, your exposure to Oxford all those years back may have encouraged your global ambitions.”

“May have,” indeed! For Jim, Oxford was separated from Cleveland by much more than the Atlantic Ocean, and Jim spent his time at Oxford learning all he could about the Common Market (a predecessor to the European Union) and exploring Europe on school holidays. On one of these holidays, while touring southern France on a motor scooter, his frustration with cargo trains that seemed to go on forever when he stopped at railroad crossings turned to fascination when he noticed that each commercial container hailed from a different country. For Jim, this seemed living proof that the Common Market was more than a dream: The cargo trains were the blood of commerce, being pumped through the veins of Europe by the ever-more-powerful heartbeat of the Common Market.

And as he sat there, watching the train cars flash by, Jim began to visualize the Common Market not as Europe only, but as the globe itself, an early epiphany of the globalization yet to come.

His sojourn in Europe made Jim eager to leave his academic life behind and enter the working world, but he had one more stop to make along the way: Harvard Law School. Fortunately for Jim, Harvard gave him a year’s credit for reading law at Oxford, and he received his law degree in just two years.

It was at Harvard that Jim met Margaret Lyn Holding, a recent Wellesley graduate, at a cocktail party at Lincoln’s Inn, the law school’s social club. Jim and Lyn began dating seriously after Jim finished law school and they both had moved to New York. They married in July 1961.

Jim had joined White & Case as an associate in 1959, attracted to the Firm in part by the diversity of its people. He had learned during his interview process that the Firm “had a lot of people from outside New York,” including “a lot of Southerners, mainly because of Colonel Hartfield.”

Jim always considered the Rhodes Scholarship that took him to Oxford as one of the most important milestones in his legal career, helping him to become the internationalist at heart who would lead the transformation of White & Case into a global law firm.

Jim’s academic career came full circle when he was asked to speak on April 23, 2012, at the Waring Prize ceremony at Western Reserve Academy. Among Jim’s many accomplishments, he is the only graduate from the Academy who has ever been awarded a Rhodes Scholarship.

FOOTNOTE 2

Evolutionarily Visionary

Jim became Chair of White & Case on January 1, 1980, but his journey might have taken a more nautical path if his eyesight had been as sharp as his world view. The eyeglasses he is wearing in his portrait are a manifestation of the poor vision that kept him from being admitted to the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, which was his first choice of undergraduate schools. With the Academy ruled out, he went to Princeton, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Already internationally inclined when he arrived at the Firm in 1959, Jim was pleased to be selected shortly thereafter by Lowell Wadmond to help work on the resolution for Arabian American Oil Company (“Aramco”) of a dispute involving Aramco’s Trans-Arabian pipeline. Wadmond was not only one of the Firm’s most accomplished litigators, but also one of its foremost practitioners of international law, working with Aramco and other clients such as Scandinavian Airlines and Sonja Henie. Aramco’s successor company, the Saudi Arabian Oil Company (“Saudi Aramco”), went on to become the largest oil company in the world and remains a leading client of the Firm some 60 years after the initial work handled by Wadmond.

Wadmond was impressed with Jim and his work, and in the receiving line at Jim and Lyn’s wedding in the summer of 1961, he asked Jim when the two of them would be returning from their honeymoon. When Jim replied they would only be spending two weeks in Jamaica, Wadmond responded: “Well, you’d better plan to leave the next day for India.”

And so he did! The day after his honeymoon.

A client of the Firm, International Minerals & Chemical Corporation (IMC), along with Standard Oil of California, had been pressured by the U.S. government to construct a fertilizer plant on the east coast of India. The project was part of an arrangement between India and the United States, but by the summer of 1961 the nationalist Nehru government was balking at proceeding. The Firm was reluctant to assign a partner to the matter because it appeared the project would at best take years to develop, might never be completed and would involve a considerable number of time-consuming trips. So Wadmond gave Jim, a second-year associate, his first lead role in what developed into a major matter for the Firm.

Jim undertook his new assignment in 1961 and made frequent and unbearably long flights between New York and New Delhi in jet engine passenger planes that had replaced propeller planes only a few years earlier. Then, in 1962, the Firm surprised Jim by asking if he would consider relocating to the Paris office the Firm had reopened in 1960 after closing it in 1940 as World War II intensified. The flights to India would be shorter from Paris, and Jim relished the idea of living abroad again. However, a number of partners, including Wadmond, cautioned Jim not to make the move, believing that spending time abroad in a new office could slow his development as a sophisticated New York lawyer and might delay his partnership at the Firm.

Jim appreciated the concern and advice but never seriously considered turning down the opportunity. By that time, he was an internationalist at heart and was convinced that on-the-ground experience in another country would accelerate his development as the international lawyer he wanted to become.

Jim arrived in Paris in January 1963 with Lyn and their first son (James Bickford III, born in New York City in 1962), and their second son (Burton Charls) was born in Paris in 1964.

Both Jim and Lyn began working to improve their French immediately after arriving in Paris, and Jim soon became fluent enough to conduct business over the phone. They also tried to understand and blend into French society and had made considerable progress by the time Jim encountered two intruders that broke into his and Lyn’s apartment in November 1964. A French newspaper (which Jim refused to speak to about the incident) published an account of the incident that portrayed Jim as a rough and tumble lawyer, a James Bond–like action hero who, in allegedly downplaying the incident, said, “In Chicago, our gangsters are a lot tougher than that.” The newspaper fabricated the quote and appeared to think “Chicago” sounded better than “Cleveland,” but the article gained Jim a little notoriety and added another line to his résumé as someone who was never afraid to face a tough fight and was an opponent better avoided than confronted. According to White & Case lore, the only time Jim was distracted during his late-night encounter was when Lyn called out from the bedroom, “Jim, please stop making all that noise.”

While continuing to work on the fertilizer plant project in India and other matters undertaken by the Paris office, Jim learned lessons about working in a small White & Case office that proved valuable throughout the rest of his career. In a small office not closely connected with its U.S. headquarters in the pre-telex, pre-fax and pre-Internet age, if the lawyers in the office didn’t generate enough business to keep themselves busy, they weren’t busy. If they didn’t get the legal work done, it didn’t get done. If they didn’t change burned-out light bulbs, they had to work in the dark. As Jim worked hard to get all these things done, including joining the Traveler’s Club to meet out-of-town businessmen in an effort to generate work, he came to believe that the things you had to do to run a law firm were probably about the same at the Firm’s large New York office as they were at its small Paris one. The lawyers in New York had to rely on themselves to bring in the work, get it done, send out the bills, and change the light bulbs or arrange for someone else to do it. So, reasoned Jim, if you knew what it took to run a small office, shouldn’t you be able to run a large one? And weren’t firms like White & Case only groups of offices, large and small, even if located in multiple countries?

In late 1965, while pondering such things and continuing his work on the project in India, Jim was recalled to New York so partners there could “look him over one last time” before deciding whether to make him a partner. Jim didn’t think the “one last look” requirement made sense for any firm with international ambitions and would later help White & Case abandon this practice.

Back in New York, more than six years after his first visit to India, the fertilizer plant that was at the time the largest public-private construction project in India’s history was given the green light to proceed. The successful result of the battle undertaken by Jim as a second-year associate did not go unnoticed by the partners in New York. Jim became a partner in 1967, about a year shy of the regular eight-year partnership track that Wadmond and others had worried might be extended for Jim because of his stay in Paris.

But not before he had one more overseas adventure.

Since his return from Paris to New York in 1965, Jim had lobbied the Firm’s partners to open an office in Brussels. French President de Gaulle was threatening to nationalize foreign-owned businesses. If he did, the business of the Paris office would suffer, and Brussels was one of the cities to which U.S. businesses were likely to relocate. Brussels was also the home of the European Economic Community (EEC), a predecessor of the European Union, and, in Jim’s view, very few law firms had realized how important EEC law would become as markets continued to become global.

Jim’s constant lobbying finally carried the day, and at the beginning of 1966, the Firm announced it was opening an office in Brussels, sending mid-level associate Frank Brown there to get it organized. Later that year, Brown was driving through one of Brussels’ tunnels when his car collided with a car coming from the opposite direction. Brown, his wife, Nancy, and his mother were seriously injured. Brown’s father, pharmaceutical industry giant Francis Cabell Brown, was killed.

Jim left the next day for Brussels to help look after Brown and his family. Nancy Brown was near death at the time of his arrival. When Jim learned the attending physicians had given up hope for her, he arranged through personal contacts to bring in specialists. Jim spent a week shuttling between the hospital and the office, attending to matters that needed immediate attention, with short stops at his hotel to catch a few hours of sleep. Thanks in large part to Jim’s intervention, Nancy survived. Her condition stabilized, and about a month later the three surviving Browns were healthy enough to make the trip back to the United States, where they eventually made a full recovery. While Jim could not foresee it at the time, Nancy Brown was not the only one who would benefit over the years from his intervention in life-threatening situations.

Jim had been too busy in Brussels to worry about whether partnership deliberations were ongoing in New York while he was away, and he was pleased to be told upon his return that he would be elevated to partner, effective January 1, 1967.

But Brussels was not finished with Jim. He had barely settled into his new office at 14 Wall Street and begun to enjoy his early days as a partner when the Firm asked him to return to Brussels to run the office there. He had spent time in Paris and done well there. He had lobbied for a Brussels office. He was now a partner. He was the logical choice.

Jim considered moving to Brussels another opportunity to enhance his development as an international lawyer, and he arrived in April 1967 with Lyn and their three sons, the last of these (Matthew Hunter) having been born in June 1966. Jim was now in charge of his first White & Case office, and in developing his plans to grow the practice, he made one of his early strategic decisions about how to build a global law firm: Hire the best local talent possible, practice local law as well as any of the local law firms to the maximum extent permissible under local rules and offer clients the additional benefits of the Firm’s global resources. At the time, non-Belgian law firms were not permitted to advise on Belgian law. They were, however, permitted to hire Belgian lawyers. Faced with an exclusionary local-practice restriction similar to ones he would encounter elsewhere when he began to expand the global reach of the Firm, Jim decided to make the most he could of the local rules and began hiring talented Belgian lawyers who knew local customs and practices and had valuable contacts from which to generate business. Having adopted this approach, Jim made cross-border business a strategic priority and the Brussels team became adept at locating deals in which at least one of the parties was non-Belgian, collaborating with friendly Brussels law firms when issues of Belgian law were critical to a specific matter.

Jim was enjoying his time in Brussels when, in 1969, with the Brussels office functioning well and de Gaulle’s threat about nationalizing non-French-owned businesses ended, the Firm decided to relocate Jim to Paris to run the Paris office. The idea intrigued Jim, especially since in Paris the Firm could both hire French lawyers and, subject to limitations, advise on French law.

Jim liked the challenge of running the Paris office and might have remained in Paris for a protracted stay, but the U.S. Congress had already set in motion the market forces that would lead Jim next to London and result in a major confrontation with some of his partners in New York.

In 1963, the U.S. Congress enacted the now infamous Interest Equalization Tax (IET). The IET was designed to discourage U.S. investors from acquiring the securities of non-U.S. issuers but had the unintended consequence of fueling the development in London of the so-called “Eurodollar” market by causing non-U.S. companies to issue their securities in London rather than New York. As that market grew, U.S. banks bulked up their operations in London, increasing the importance of London and decreasing that of Paris. Indeed, the IET is one of the major reasons that London became and remains one of the most important financial centers in the world, as well as one of the factors leading to the global growth of the English “magic circle” law firms.

As Jim worked to grow the Paris office, he kept close tabs on the expansion of the Eurodollar market on the other side of the English Channel, and, as the decade of the 1970s began, he concluded that White & Case should open an office in London to take advantage of the new opportunities.

To more than his mild surprise, Jim had little trouble convincing his partners in New York of the need for the new office. They also had been watching with interest the growth of the Eurodollar market, understood its possible strategic importance and knew that Bankers Trust had operations in London.

They also had no doubt about which partner the Firm should send to run the new office.

FOOTNOTE 3

Pragmatically Ambitious

Jim opened the London office in August 1971, operating out of the house he rented until office space was found at 66 Gresham Street, only a few blocks from the imposing Bank of England building.

London law firms were concerned about what effect an invasion of New York law firms would have on the domestic market for legal services, and this concern caused the UK Home Office to include an undertaking in a foreign lawyer’s work permit that he or she would not engage in the practice of UK law. This reminded Jim of the similar barrier the Firm had faced in Brussels. In the UK, Jim’s stay at Oxford gave him credibility in the English market, and friends he had made at Oxford, including James Buckley, helped Jim establish close connections with Macfarlanes and a few other London firms to which the Firm would refer work when and as appropriate.

The restriction against practicing UK law notwithstanding, the London office made steady progress, including generating a regular flow of work from Bankers Trust International, a subsidiary of Bankers Trust Company.

Among those working with Jim during those early years of the London office were associates Lee Lundy, who later left the Firm to become General Counsel of Campbell Soup Company, and Duane Wall, who would later work with Jim on sovereign debt reschedulings and in various other capacities. Jim relied heavily on Lundy and Wall, both for getting the legal work done and for running the office, and developed a close mentoring relationship with each of them. It was while they were together in London that Jim mentioned to Wall his belief that a small White & Case office outside the United States was a microcosm of the Firm as a whole and a good training ground for larger leadership roles at the Firm-wide level, passing on to Wall the lesson Jim had learned during his first stay in Paris.

In the fall of 1971, shortly after Jim’s arrival in London, the IET gave rise to the confrontation between Jim and some of his partners in New York. One of the early financial instruments introduced in the Eurodollar market in London was the so-called “floating rate note” (FRN), a U.S. dollar note with an interest rate that would be periodically adjusted. The marketability of the FRN was partially dependent on its interest not being subject to the IET, and Jim agreed with one of the Firm’s clients that the Firm would be willing to issue a legal opinion to this effect. Unfortunately, when the tax partners in New York learned of this plan, they refused to let the Firm render the opinion. A cross-Atlantic confrontation ensued between Jim and the tax partners, eventually ending in a request by the Firm for a ruling from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service that when granted supported Jim’s point of view.

With that dispute over, another confrontation was brewing in the United States that would play a role in making New York the next stop in Jim’s career at the Firm. In 1972, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a fraud complaint against the Firm’s client, National Student Marketing (NSM), and charged the Firm and partner Jay Epley as aiders and abettors. The charges arose out of a merger transaction in 1969 and were the outcome of a lengthy investigation by the SEC.

White & Case partners were deeply divided on how to respond to the charges. Many of the litigation partners favored contesting the charges, believing the Firm had done no wrong and would be vindicated in court if the Firm decided to fight. Many of the corporate partners took the position that the Firm should seek an out-of-court settlement with the SEC, believing that a protracted, highly visible battle with the SEC would tarnish the reputation of the Firm and impair its ability to act for clients in securities issuances and other matters requiring interaction with the SEC. Jim watched developments in the NSM matter for the next few years from his side of the Atlantic and became convinced that the better course was to pursue the out-of-court settlement.

By 1975, Jim was faced with a series of personal and professional choices. He and Lyn had been outside the United States for more than 11 years, and they needed to decide if they wanted their three sons to spend even more time abroad before returning to the United States. Jim continued to be concerned about the NSM matter and doubted he could play any meaningful role from London in causing it to be settled. And after having spent time in Paris, Brussels and London—small offices with limited growth potential because of legal restrictions on the practice of local law and the slow pace of globalization of the financial and commercial markets—Jim had come to believe he would have to return to New York if he wanted to “play on a bigger stage,” build a large international practice, help accelerate the spread of the Firm’s business across national borders, and be in the position to have a greater impact on the future strategy and success of the Firm.

After weighing the pros and cons for months, Jim concluded that returning to New York was the right thing to do for himself, his family and the Firm. However, not all of Jim’s partners in New York were as enthusiastic about Jim’s return to New York as he was. Jim had lobbied for the Brussels and London offices. He had stared down some of his New York tax partners over the IET opinion. He was in favor of ending the battle with the SEC about NSM. One of these partners allegedly said at the time: “You understand, don’t you, that if we let Jim come back to New York, we’ll someday have to let him run the Firm?”

And as it turned out, no truer words were ever spoken.

FOOTNOTE 4

Strategically Opportunistic

Jim and Lyn returned to New York in 1975 and had recently moved into a house in Greenwich, Connecticut, when the Firm was presented with an opportunity Jim believed could be reputationally and financially beneficial to the Firm and also help it accelerate the expansion of its business across national borders.

In 1975, the government of Indonesia found itself mired in financial difficulty because Pertamina, the state-owned oil company, was in arrears in external debt payments due under various loan agreements. These arrears, in turn, arguably triggered cross-default clauses included in credit agreements between Indonesia’s central bank (“Bank Indonesia”) and international banks. Bank Indonesia had hired three of the world’s top investment banks—S.G. Warburg (London), Lazard Frères (France) and Kuhn Loeb (New York)—to help it find its way out of what was the first sovereign debt crisis of recent vintage.

“The Troika” (as the three investment banks came to be known when working together for sovereigns) recommended that Bank Indonesia retain a law firm to represent it in dealing with the international banks and, with the consent of Bank Indonesia, approached White & Case on Bank Indonesia’s behalf.

Jim was convinced the Firm should seize the opportunity to represent Bank Indonesia. But he first had to overcome a number of obstacles. More than a few of his partners were concerned that representing Bank Indonesia would create ethical or business conflicts with creditor banks that were clients of the Firm. Jim proposed that the Firm seek to guard against this possibility by requesting that Bankers Trust consent to the Firm’s representation of Bank Indonesia. A number of partners also wondered if the Firm should represent a government that at the time did not appear to be acting as a good citizen of the Western financial system.

Jim took a strategic view of the Indonesian financial crisis. It would most likely be the first of many sovereign debt reschedulings. For the good of the Western financial system, Jim believed that Indonesia needed to repay its debts and remain a valued contributor to the system, and the international banks needed to agree to a rescheduling of Bank Indonesia’s debt on terms that were economically viable for Indonesia. And what better way to achieve these objectives than to have a law firm representing Indonesia that took this view of the crisis and would work with Bank Indonesia, the Troika and the international banks to resolve the Indonesian financial crisis in a way that could serve as a pattern for other sovereign debt crises in the future.

With considerable trepidation, Jim’s partners decided to let him move forward with the representation. Jim did so by first obtaining the consent of Bankers Trust, which helpfully was not one of the major creditors and was not expected to play an active role in any rescheduling negotiations. He then proceeded to gain the trust of Bank Indonesia and the Troika by helping Bank Indonesia decide on the terms on which it should reschedule its external debts and negotiating forcefully with the banks and their lawyers to obtain their agreement to those terms. After watching Jim in action with the banks, including demanding an apology from a bank Jim suspected of having leaked information to the press about what were considered to be confidential negotiations, the Indonesian financial team that had felt the entire Western financial system was aligned against it now believed they had a champion on their side who understood the banks and would not let Bank Indonesia be forced to accept unsustainable commercial terms.

They also came to appreciate Jim’s sense of humor—reflected to some extent by the smile in his portrait—that he often used to good advantage. In one of the negotiation sessions with the banks, a Japanese banker who appeared agitated that Jim seemed to be getting the better of the negotiations for the Indonesians, said to Jim: “Mr. Hurlock, on this point you are absolutely wrong,” to which Jim responded with no hesitation: “Well, Sir, I am seldom wrong, but when I am, I am wrong absolutely.” Jim’s response created spontaneous laughter around the room and let the negotiations proceed in a less tense atmosphere.

By the time Bank Indonesia’s external debt had been rescheduled and the Pertamina crisis had ended, Jim had endeared himself to the Indonesians. The volume of the Firm’s work grew rapidly in the late 1970s and the early 1980s to include all external debt financings for both Bank Indonesia and the Department of Finance and, beginning in 1980, all project work for Pertamina. As a result, the Indonesian government requested in 1983 that the Firm post lawyers to Jakarta who operated out of offices at Bank Indonesia on the basis that the Firm would only work from there on behalf of governmental ministries and state-owned companies. These arrangements remained in place through the late 1990s, during which time the Firm acted as external counsel to the Indonesian public sector on most of its major transactions and projects. The steady flow of challenging legal work in and involving Indonesia proved to be a fertile training ground for many lawyers who would grow into leadership positions at the Firm, including Duane Wall and Hugh Verrier, both future heads of the Firm, as well as Troy Alexander, Hank Amon, George Crozer, Ken Ellis, Peter Finlay, Carolyn Lamm, Wendell Maddrey and Philip Stopford.

As Jim had envisioned, the representation of Indonesia also put the Firm in a strong position to represent other sovereigns that encountered financial difficulties. Over the years, the Firm’s sovereign practice would grow to include more than 60 sovereigns and their state-owned enterprises, helping them with their debt reschedulings, capital markets financings, project finance and infrastructure development projects, privatizations, international trade issues, litigation and arbitration cases, and a broad range of other matters.

While the Firm’s close relationship with Indonesia clearly served as the launch pad for the Firm’s sovereign practice, it was also instrumental in the development of the Firm’s expertise and reputation for handling transactions involving emerging market economies and “first of its kind” projects, many of which required innovative legal solutions and the type of commercial approach Jim adopted in sovereign debt reschedulings. In particular, the Indonesian experience laid the groundwork for the growth of project finance and international arbitration as two of the Firm’s major practices.

The projects undertaken by the Firm for Indonesian state-owned companies included Pertamina’s major Balikpapan and Cilacap refinery expansions and its Arun and Bontang LNG projects. To facilitate the development of these projects on terms consistent with the so-called “negative pledge” clause included in loan agreements between Indonesia and the World Bank, the Firm devised an innovative trust borrowing structure that would be used to raise billions of dollars of financing. Over the years, these projects and others like them for sovereign and private sector clients enhanced both the resources and reputation of the Firm’s project finance practice, one of the multiple benefits traceable to the Firm’s sovereign practice.

The Firm would also go on to represent Indonesia and other sovereigns and their state-owned enterprises in a broad range of proceedings commenced in national courts and various arbitral tribunals. One of the early cases on behalf of Indonesia, Amco Asia v. Republic of Indonesia, required a series of hearings before the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) over several years and remains one of the most frequently cited cases in the investor-sovereign state context. Large arbitration matters like the Amco case solidified the Firm’s entry into the international arbitration “club” and became one of the building blocks of what would become one of the Firm’s most globally recognized practices.

By helping Indonesia resolve its debt crisis, Jim had achieved one of the objectives he had in mind when he left London for New York: help accelerate the expansion of the Firm’s business across national borders and into new markets.

FOOTNOTE 5

Deeply Devoted to Clients

As the Indonesian debt crisis was ending, Turkey was facing similar financial challenges, which led the Turkish government to call on the Troika and White & Case in 1978.

One specific problem facing the Turkish government was the need to reschedule external debt owed by Turkish commercial banks under lira deposits convertible (at the option of the holder) into U.S. dollars (CTLDs) and guaranteed by the Turkish Central Bank, as well as Central Bank debt outstanding under credit agreements with international banks. With Turkey’s economy in a steep downturn, the Central Bank did not have access to the U.S. dollars necessary to permit the conversion of the CTLDs and the timely servicing of the international bank debt. The Turkish government decided that a rescheduling of the CTLDs was the most viable means of resolving this crisis.

Unfortunately, the combination of the complicated legal structure of the CTLDs and the chaotic state of Turkey’s economy caused the international banking community to question whether a rescheduling was possible even if the banks would be willing to go along with it.

This lack of belief by the banks was so pronounced that, when Jim and Duane Wall attended an initial meeting in New York of banks and their lawyers to discuss the rescheduling, no bank in the room was willing to claim to have prepared the term sheet for it, copies of which were stacked in the middle of a conference room table.

Later, the rescheduling was further endangered when no bank would agree to play the traditional role of “agent bank” for the CTLDs. The bank playing this role ordinarily engages lawyers to draft the documents, distribute the drafts to all creditor banks for their comments, collect comments from the banks and lead the negotiation of the drafts with the debtor government.

Into this void stepped Jim Hurlock. If no bank was willing to act as agent bank, then Jim and the White & Case team, with George Crozer as Jim’s first lieutenant, would take over the role ordinarily played by the agent bank. After explaining the situation to Turgut Özal, the Turkish deputy prime minister in charge of economic affairs, Jim and the White & Case team took charge of an early draft of the CTLD documentation prepared by a law firm for one of the banks, received comments back from the banks and led the negotiations. To avoid being overwhelmed by the number of comments that began to pour in from the banks holding CTLDs, Crozer prepared a series of about 100 ways to respond to comments from the banks the Turkish government was unwilling to accept. This enabled Crozer to direct White & Case team members to use response “number 12,” etc.

When the CTLD rescheduling was concluded against all odds, Özal felt Jim had personally carried it to conclusion by force of personality and a relentless dedication to his client. And as it turned out, the Turkish debt rescheduling was the first, and for many years the only one, where the rescheduled debt was repaid as agreed without any extension of the debt or any amendment of the documents.

When Özal was elected prime minister of Turkey in 1983, he still held Jim in high regard. Over the next decade, the Turkish government relied heavily on White & Case for work on a large volume of matters for the Turkish Treasury and Central Bank and the country’s state-owned banks and companies. After one successful loan negotiation led by Jim, the head of the Turkish team beamed at Jim and said with great delight: “Ah, Mr. Hurlock, you fight like a Turk!”

Not surprisingly, Özal began to suggest (some say demand) that White & Case open offices in Ankara and Istanbul to be able to conduct its Turkish government-related work even more effectively. Jim finally acceded to this request in 1985, five years after he became Chair of White & Case.

FOOTNOTE 6

Impatient Leader-in-Waiting

In the portrait, Jim is sitting quietly in a chair, as if waiting for Kinstler to add the final touches.

As a leader-in-waiting, patience was one of the things Jim seldom exhibited to his partners.

Upon his return to New York from London in 1975, Jim seized the Indonesian opportunity, then solidified his position as the leader of the Firm’s new sovereign practice by helping Turkey reschedule the CTLDs, but he also used his increasing influence at the Firm to address strategic issues and push the Firm in the direction of globalization.

The Firm’s dispute with the SEC about the National Student Marketing case was still ongoing in 1975, and soon after his return to New York Jim began to lobby his partners for an out-of-court settlement of the matter. In 1977, a settlement began to look more likely when Ed Schmults rejoined the Firm after a stint on President Ford’s senior staff. Schmults was a highly regarded corporate partner who had also served as general counsel for the U.S. Treasury under President Nixon and was well liked by partners of all levels of seniority. Jim knew Schmults well and encouraged him to negotiate a settlement with the SEC and persuade partners to accept it. Schmults, who already shared Jim’s view, negotiated a very favorable settlement, and worked hard to build the broad consensus among partners with strongly held, divergent views that led to acceptance of the settlement by the Firm in 1977.

The dissension among partners about how to resolve the NSM matter helped accentuate another disagreement that had been ongoing for years. Until the mid-1960s, the Firm had been managed by its two founding fathers or by senior partners who had known one or both of the founders personally. After the mid-1960s, the Firm implemented a number of governance structures, each of which, for the most part, left management of the Firm in the hands of its most senior partners. As the Firm grew, and financial and commercial markets expanded and competition among law firms became more intense, the mid-level and newer partners of the Firm began to feel that a more modern and businesslike approach to the management of the Firm was needed.

Upon his return to New York, Jim joined those who were outspokenly in favor of a change in the management structure and leadership team. And he was more vocal than most because of what he perceived as a reluctance of the senior management group to embrace a strategy of international expansion.

Jim encountered this directly in the spring of 1978 when, with the Firm’s business in Indonesia expanding rapidly, Jim decided the Firm should open an office in Asia to put lawyers closer to the Firm’s Indonesian clients. Jim wanted to open the office in Singapore, a short plane ride from Jakarta, but Singapore’s attorney general was unwilling to grant the Firm an exemption from Singapore’s prohibition against foreign law firms opening offices there. Blocked as he had been in Brussels and elsewhere by similar exclusionary practices, Jim looked northward to Hong Kong. Flights to Jakarta would be longer from Hong Kong than from Singapore, but Hong Kong would be an equally good base from which to exploit opportunities arising in Indonesia and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. After discussing his proposal with a number of partners, Jim was invited to present it at a meeting of the nine-partner management committee. Jim appeared at the meeting as scheduled, made the presentation, and was surprised when only one or two of the committee members asked questions and none of them appeared very interested. When Hal Fales, the chair of the committee, declared the meeting had come to an end without acting on his proposal, Jim objected, insisting he needed an answer so he could plan on how to handle the business flowing in from Indonesia. The committee acquiesced, giving Jim the office he wanted but leaving him disappointed that the Firm’s senior management had not engaged in any detailed discussion about the pros and cons of opening the office or how the growth of the sovereign practice fit into the Firm’s overall strategy.

In retrospect, it was inevitable that the management of the Firm be restructured to include a younger and more diverse group of partners, and this occurred in the fall of 1978. After considerable internal turmoil, a new management structure was developed and incorporated into an amendment to the Firm’s partnership agreement. Under the new structure, a four-partner management committee was elected and permitted to select a chair of the committee. Thereafter, the Chair of the Firm (and chair of the committee) was to be elected annually by the Firm’s partners.

Hal Fales was selected as the chair of the management committee for the initial one-year term. The question then became: Who should, a year later, be the first partner to be elected Chair of the Firm by the Firm’s partners?

Partners who had wondered if Jim should be permitted to return from London were uncertain as to whether he should be elected to run the Firm. The early returns from the sovereign practice were promising, but there were lingering concerns about potential conflicts with the Firm’s bank clients. The management of the Firm had agreed to the opening of the Hong Kong office only because Jim had insisted. How many more offices would he want to open when he could both propose and approve them? What effect would that have on the Firm’s profitability? And perhaps just as troubling, Jim was already among those who believed the Firm should consider changing its lockstep seniority-based partner compensation system to a performance-based one. Would that fracture the Firm’s culture?

On the other hand, many partners felt the Firm needed stronger leadership and, in particular, a Chair who would pursue a more businesslike approach in the management of the Firm. They also wanted a leader who would develop a strategy for the way forward in the face of the uncertainties about the Firm’s business created by the NSM matter, the ongoing expansion of financial and commercial markets, and the increasing competition in New York by the large New York firms and a growing number of out-of-state firms. In short, the Firm needed strong leadership and a vision for the future from its next Chair.

For the partners who were uneasy about handing the leadership of the Firm over to Jim, Ed Schmults was considered a logical alternative. His success as a corporate lawyer and his governmental service gave him the stature many of the partners were looking for in their next leader. He had played a major role in settling the NSM matter and was popular among the partners. However, when the time came for the partners to elect the Chair of the Firm, Schmults let it be known that he did not want the top job, being reasonably certain he would soon be leaving the Firm to return to Washington, D.C. if Ronald Reagan were to win the upcoming presidential election.

With Schmults out of the picture, the prophetic question asked five years previously, “You understand, don’t you, that if we let Jim come back to New York, we’ll someday have to let him run the Firm?” was about to be answered.

FOOTNOTE 7

Decisive Leader

Jim was elected Chair of the Firm in late 1979 and assumed office on January 1, 1980. By that time, Jim had run the Firm’s Paris, Brussels and London offices, lobbied for opening the Hong Kong office, and launched the Firm’s sovereign practice, increasing the opportunities for lawyers throughout the Firm to participate in corporate transactions and disputes outside their home countries. Jim had been in London when the Firm opened its office in Washington, D.C. in 1974, but he had supported opening there in keeping with his view that the Firm should be present in the capital of every country in which any of the Firm’s large offices were located.

But now, as Chair, Jim had to decide how to take the Firm as he then found it and make it even better.

He began by taking a close look around the Firm, and he saw many things he didn’t like. The Firm had about 150 lawyers in New York and about 35 lawyers in much smaller offices in Paris, Brussels, London, Washington, D.C. and Hong Kong. Almost all of its lawyers were U.S. nationals. Almost all of its clients were U.S. entities.

Jim had much higher aspirations for the White & Case of the future. He did not, however, as some of his partners may have thought he would, put a map of the world on his office wall and stick colored pins in all the countries where he expected to open offices. “Global” was not at that time a term used to categorize law firms or one that Jim used as such in developing his strategy for the Firm going forward. That said, Jim’s strategy was global. He envisioned the Firm as having a geographic reach that would include the world’s leading financial and commercial centers and other cities where the Firm’s clients would be in need of sophisticated legal services. All of the Firm’s offices would have strong local capability and be prominent in their home markets. The nationalities of the Firm’s partners would reflect the Firm’s move toward multiculturalism. The Firm’s principal practices would have the strength and depth to fuel the expansion of the Firm’s geographic reach and the growth of its offices. The New York office would continue to grow and serve as a source of strength for the Firm’s worldwide operations. The Firm’s client base would be composed of major clients from the world over that needed a law firm that could handle their most important cross-border transactions and disputes. The Firm’s lawyers would be entrepreneurial and able to create opportunities as well as to recognize and seize others as they arose. Many of the Firm’s lawyers would be at ease working anywhere in the world, whether on a brief assignment or during a long-term stay.

As Jim often explained: “I want lawyers we can put on a plane to anywhere in the world who will be on the ground and fully acclimated and operational within 24 hours.” For lack of a phrase that includes all of these characteristics, those who watched Jim help recruit and develop the careers of many of the Firm’s lawyers over the years came to think of the totality of these characteristics as his “entrepreneurial, multicultural model.”

Jim realized, however, that the journey to globalization would be a long one without many guideposts along the way to keep the Firm or him pointed in the right direction. With the Firm’s strengths and weaknesses being what they were, how likely was it that White & Case could become the firm Jim envisioned and overcome the threats to success that it would face along the way?

The so-called SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis developed by Albert Humphrey at Stanford in the 1960s and 1970s was not commonly used by law firms at that time in their strategic planning, but Jim instinctively put it to good use to refine his vision for the Firm and develop the strategy for converting the vision into reality.

Jim began his SWOT analysis of the Firm by looking first at opportunity. The Firm’s clients, including Bankers Trust, were expanding abroad. The Eurodollar market was becoming more robust. Financial and commercial markets were expanding across national boundaries. The Firm’s sovereign practice was in full swing, opening doors to new markets and practice areas. Technological advances would continue to shrink the world. The marketplace for sophisticated legal services was no longer limited to New York and London but expanding to include the world at large.

Jim was convinced the opportunity for greater expansion abroad would be magnified by the lack of competition on the world stage. Although a few New York law firms had small offices in London, Paris and Hong Kong, none of the large New York firms had evidenced aspirations for global expansion of the kind Jim had for the Firm. This would give the Firm the “first mover” advantage.

Jim also felt the New York legal services market had become overcrowded, and he continued to be concerned that the NSM matter had reduced the ability of the Firm to compete against other firms for major corporate or financial matters that required interaction with the SEC. While Jim never gave up on New York, he liked the idea of moving ahead of competitors in markets around the world in which they had little or no interest.

From Jim’s perspective, the Firm had already seized first-mover advantage by establishing operations in the United States, Europe and Asia and taking advantage of increasing opportunities in emerging markets. All the Firm needed to do now was take maximum advantage at the global level of these successful strategic moves.

There would be challenges ahead, but Jim was confident they could be overcome.

To begin with, the Firm’s offices outside the United States would need to grow. At the time, the Paris, Brussels, London and Hong Kong offices were small, and growth elsewhere outside the United States was hampered by the restrictions against the practice of local law by foreign law firms. Jim knew this would restrict growth over the short term, but was confident the spread of financial and commercial markets across national boundaries would eventually result in the relaxation or removal by all major countries of their exclusionary practices. In the meantime, the Firm could base lawyers in its non-U.S. offices and grow them more rapidly as restrictions against the practice of local law began to collapse.

The size and strength of the New York office and some of the Firm’s practices would also need to be enhanced. The Firm’s traditionally strong bank finance practice in New York would be able to help develop bank finance practices in non-U.S. offices. The capital markets and M&A practices in New York were well established but their size and reputation would need to be enhanced if they were to support non-U.S. offices in doing deals and generating business. Other practices would also need to become more robust to help the non-U.S. offices provide the full range of services needed by the Firm’s clients. Jim was confident these objectives were achievable in parallel with and in support of continued geographic expansion.

To Jim, the most serious threat to the achievement of his vision for the Firm would most likely be the unwillingness of his partners to embrace it. Some of them were worried about how the Firm could control the quality of legal work across a far-flung empire. Litigators were concerned that adding new offices abroad would increase the possibility of conflicts of interest that would result in the Firm’s losing out on large litigation matters. Almost all partners wondered if opening more offices would have an adverse impact on the Firm’s profitability. And could the Firm’s collegial culture be maintained if lawyers were scattered around the globe?

Jim knew enough about the theories and terminology of law firm management to recognize that the most effective way for a firm to move forward was for as many of its partners as possible to share a common vision with sufficient commitment to make them willing to align their professional goals and objectives with the goals and objectives of the firm. At the same time, Jim knew enough about the partners of White & Case to realize it was not possible at that time to build a consensus among them to commit to an aggressive global strategy.

Undeterred, Jim believed that the one job at which any leader must not fail is to lead. He also believed a leader should never wait for his or her partners to develop a consensus among themselves about a course of action that the leader would then implement. Instead, he believed he should develop the vision and strategy of the Firm, then work hard to build the consensus necessary to achieve the vision and implement the strategy. With these things in mind, and being convinced his vision for the Firm should be adopted along with the global strategy it entailed, Jim decided without announcing it to aim high, but pursue the vision at a pace that would permit partners to buy into it along the way as they watched the Firm expand abroad one step at a time.

And to get things started, Jim did something that surprised many of his partners.

FOOTNOTE 8

Tackler of Obstacles

Many of his partners were fearful that Jim would begin his tenure as Chair of the Firm by opening more offices outside the United States and focusing almost entirely on making the Firm more international. But the Firm didn’t open another office anywhere in the world until more than three years later. Instead, to the surprise of partners worried about what Jim’s first moves might be, Jim began by tackling three issues he considered critical for the Firm, whatever strategy it adopted for the future.

The Firm’s Partner Compensation System

Upon his return from London five years earlier, Jim had begun lobbying for a change of the Firm’s lockstep seniority-based system to one that was performance-based. This change was initially resisted by many partners. Senior partners were concerned they would be treated unfairly after spending their careers moving up slowly on a lockstep basis. Partners at all seniority levels wondered if the move to a performance-based approach would lead to an “eat what you kill” mentality and adversely affect the Firm’s collegial and collaborative culture. For his part, Jim believed the change to a performance-based system would enhance the Firm’s ability to attract and reward the entrepreneurial lawyers who would be needed to grow the Firm both inside and outside the United States and otherwise help the Firm achieve the aspirations Jim had for it.

After protracted debate and discussion among partners, the change to a performance-based system was adopted in 1981. To help alleviate the concerns of senior partners, Jim agreed that long-term performance would be one of the factors taken into account in making compensation decisions.

The Firm’s Unfunded Pension Plan for Partners

Jim had thought for some time that the unfunded plan for partners was becoming a financial burden on the Firm that would eventually become unsustainable. After undertaking a financial analysis that demonstrated these concerns were legitimate, Jim proposed that the plan be terminated. This proposal met with considerable resistance, especially from senior partners, but Jim persevered. The plan was terminated in 1983. Under the termination plan, “grandfather rights” were granted to existing partners to preserve their accrued benefits under the plan.

The Firm’s Move to New Offices in New York

Shortly after becoming Chair of the Firm, Jim began to realize the Firm was running out of room for growth in its New York offices. In 1912, DuPratt White and George Case had moved the Firm’s offices into the new Bankers Trust building at 14–16 Wall Street, with White & Case using the 14 Wall Street entrance and address. In 1963, the Firm had moved its bank finance and trusts and estates lawyers into the Bankers Trust building at 280 Park Avenue. Now, with the Firm needing room to grow, Bankers Trust didn’t have any extra space it was willing to lease to the Firm, and Jim was reluctant to divide the Firm’s New York operations into three separate offices. The staffing and other logistics of operating two offices had already proven difficult enough.

Before Jim became Chair of the Firm, several committees had agreed that additional space would eventually be needed. Even so, the resistance to Jim’s plan to move offices was considerable. Some of the more senior partners did not want to give up the Firm’s 14 Wall Street address. Many were concerned about relinquishing close proximity to the Firm’s largest client. And almost all were worried about what would be a significant increase in rent.

The deliberations were protracted and at times acrimonious, but Jim persevered, confident that the benefits of the move would become obvious to all if he could only get it done.

The Firm gave up its 14 Wall Street and 280 Park Avenue addresses over Memorial Day weekend in 1984, officially opening its new office at 1155 Avenue of the Americas at Sixth Avenue and 44th Street on June 1. The building into which it moved was a newly constructed 41-story black granite building. The movie Star Wars: Return of the Jedi had premiered in 1983, and for a number of years the building was familiarly known as the Darth Vader building. The move attracted attention because no major law firm was located so far north and so far west in midtown Manhattan.

Jim’s confidence regarding the benefits of the move soon proved to be justified. By 1987, the Firm had grown to about 430 lawyers, more than twice its size on the date of the move, and the close to 200 lawyers in New York were more than the Firm could have accommodated in the two Bankers Trust buildings. And as time passed, the rent that seemed expensive at the time looked more than reasonable compared to the price paid by other law firms as they began to join White & Case in midtown Manhattan.

While Jim was aware of the concern of many partners about moving out of the Bankers Trust buildings, he had noted before the move that the captive-client model of which the Bankers Trust–White & Case relationship was a prime example had begun to break down. Jim felt confident the physical separation from Bankers Trust would hasten the day when the Firm would no longer be seen as Bankers Trust’s captive law firm, causing other banks to be more willing to use the Firm. The expansion of the Firm’s financial institution client base in the years following the move became one of the primary drivers of the Firm’s success in building out its global reach.

Although Jim had considered these three issues to be critical for the Firm generally, he also saw them as obstacles to his plans to expand the Firm abroad. The lockstep compensation system would not have been flexible enough to let the Firm deal with compensation ranges prevailing in the markets into which the Firm would expand abroad. The unfunded pension plan would have become an even greater burden as the Firm grew both inside and outside the United States. Without the move from the Bankers Trust buildings, the Firm’s New York office would not have been able to become large enough to serve as a source of strength for the Firm’s expanding worldwide resources.

With these three obstacles removed, Jim could now devote his undivided attention to turning his global vision for the Firm into reality.

FOOTNOTE 9

Multiculturalist Plus

For White & Case to achieve the global aspirations he had for it, Jim knew the Firm would have to be willing to have non-U.S. national partners. Otherwise, the Firm’s non-U.S. offices would never have the strong local law capability Jim believed was one of the critical features of a truly global law firm.

Over the years, several associates in the Paris office had been considered for promotion to partner but none of them had been elevated to that position, with one of the topics of discussion always being whether the Firm should ever admit a non-U.S. national to the partnership. Jim decided the time had come when Paris associate Jean-Luc Boussard was proposed for partnership in 1982. With Jim’s strong support, Boussard became a partner of the Firm on October 1 of that year. Boussard, a corporate lawyer, went on to have a successful career at the Firm, later running the Paris office for many years.

As it turned out, the nationality test was discarded at an opportune time. Not long after Boussard became a partner, Jim began discussions with his longtime friend, Gillis Wetter, to open an office in Stockholm. Wetter was an international arbitrator, and Jim was convinced that the Firm’s international arbitration practice would continue to grow, especially with the work the Firm would be doing for Indonesia and other sovereign clients. Wetter also believed Stockholm would be the beneficiary of an expected increase in proceedings involving Russian companies that had arbitration clauses in contracts providing for arbitration in Sweden under Swedish law.

When the Firm opened its office in Stockholm in 1983, Wetter became the second non-U.S. national partner, the first non-U.S. national to head a White & Case office and the first partner during Jim’s tenure as Chair to join the Firm from another law firm.

Claes Zettermarck joined the Stockholm office as counsel in 1983, shortly after it opened. His mission was to help build a transactional practice to complement Wetter’s arbitration practice. Zettermarck became a partner in 1986 and built, with the help of others, a strong finance, corporate and private equity practice. He also later served as head of the Stockholm office and as a member of the Firm’s management board.

When applied to an organization, the term “multiculturalism” is often used to refer to the diversity of its demographic makeup. The addition of Boussard, Wetter and Zettermarck as partners obviously made the demographic makeup of the Firm more diverse. But Jim wanted the Firm to incorporate multiculturalism in the broader sense of being open to cultural as well as demographic diversity.

Multiculturalism plus.

To do this, Jim took several steps during his career to expand the cultural diversity of the Firm in ways that, at the same time, helped the Firm move forward in its journey to globalization.

Perhaps first and foremost was Jim’s never-ending effort to recruit talented lawyers of all nationalities who fit his entrepreneurial, multicultural model. In addition to lateral hires such as Wetter and Zettermarck, he also believed in intermingling cultures at all the Firm’s non-U.S. offices by having U.S. and, later on, UK lawyers located there for short- or long-term stays, confident that having U.S., UK and local lawyers working side by side would result in each of them learning lawyering and people skills from the others that would make all of them more effective lawyers. Jim had agreed to come back to New York from Paris in 1965 to let partners in New York have “one last look” before making him a partner, but that requirement never made sense to him. In 1976, before he became head of the Firm, he had been a strong supporter of the view that Hank Amon not be required to return from London to New York, and that year Amon became the first U.S. associate of the Firm to be promoted to partner while abroad. That same year, John Riggs, a U.S. partner in the Paris office, became the first U.S. partner to announce his intention to reside abroad indefinitely.

As the Firm began to expand abroad under his leadership, Jim agreed to long-term (five years or more) and indefinite assignments of the Firm’s U.S. partners to lead or practice in non-U.S. offices of the Firm. Among the partners who were examples of this approach were Riggs, who remained in Paris throughout Jim’s 20-year tenure, and George Crozer, who was located in Jakarta and the Firm’s Hong Kong office for more than 20 years.

With his entrepreneurial, multicultural model in mind, Jim also formalized and intensified programs for non-U.S.–trained lawyers from around the globe to spend time in New York, London and other U.S. offices of the Firm. Fittingly, among the earliest participants in this program were an Indonesian lawyer from Pertamina and a Peruvian lawyer from a state-owned bank. Over the years, Jim would recruit and welcome young lawyers from around the world, who then would head out to various White & Case offices or become trusted local lawyers or valued clients upon returning to their home countries. Among the non-U.S. lawyers who came to the New York office for a short stint and stayed with the Firm were Peter Finlay, an Irishman who is one of the Firm’s senior project finance lawyers, and Hugh Verrier, a Canadian, who is currently Chair of the Firm.

When Jim recruited laterally, he did it not only in search of entrepreneurial lawyers, but also to nurture and enhance the culture of the Firm by adding to it the best parts of the cultures of other law firms. Even before Jim became head of the Firm, he had noted that the movement of partners among law firms was becoming more prevalent, and he recognized that this trend would present the Firm with the opportunity to bring in talented lawyers both in the United States and abroad as the trend accelerated.

After Wetter joined the Firm in 1983, the Firm added lateral partners at a steady pace at home and abroad in pursuit of its global objectives; and Jim worked to improve the Firm’s lateral partner recruiting and hiring processes to ensure that each new lateral would be successfully integrated into the Firm and that the Firm’s culture would be enhanced by the infusion of partners who came with perspectives and experiences that were a little different from those at White & Case.

FOOTNOTE 10

Relentless Pursuer of Global Vision for the Firm

Jim was now prepared to turn his attention to the outside world. The partner compensation system had gone from lockstep to performance-based. The unfunded pension plan had been terminated. The Firm had moved to a new office in New York. And the Firm was now willing to accept partners who were non-U.S. nationals or came from other firms.

Many White & Case partners at that time thought that “going global” referred to opening offices around the world. Although new offices were an essential component of Jim’s strategy, his vision of a global firm was more multifaceted. He envisioned offices in key locations, strong local capability in all offices, strong principal practices, a more robust New York office, a global client base and lawyers with all the characteristics of his entrepreneurial, multicultural model.

After about three years as Chair of the Firm, Jim began his relentless pursuit of his global vision for the Firm.

Brand New Practice

Jim had already led the development of the Firm’s sovereign practice. About the same time the Firm moved to its new New York office in 1984, Gene Goodwillie suggested to Jim that the Firm should commence another new practice that was consistent with Jim’s strategic objectives and had the possibility of expanding the Firm’s domestic and international client base.

That year, U.S. federal district courts began enforcing U.S. patents more aggressively in response to the boom in the technology industry. This shift in approach by the courts resulted in major patent litigations such as Polaroid’s lawsuit against Kodak alleging infringement of seven instant-photography patents. White & Case and other large New York firms began to see significant opportunity in handling large patent cases, especially when it became unclear whether the boutique patent firms that had historically dominated the area had the talent and legal resources to handle the largest of these cases.

At the time, White & Case had no patent lawyers, but this did not deter Jim from embracing Goodwillie’s idea and leading the Firm into yet another new frontier, one that could help the Firm grow the New York office and also add a new practice in a rapidly expanding industry that was international by nature.

Beginning with a few new hires, including patent lawyer David Bender from AT&T, the Firm embarked on a long journey that often seemed uphill but that resulted in building from scratch one of the Firm’s major practices. Among the clients for which the Firm handled major patent cases were large U.S. and non-U.S. pharmaceutical companies, such as Novartis and Pfizer, and other clients, expanding the Firm’s overall client base and including more non-U.S. clients.

Existing Practice and New U.S. Office

In the early 1980s, Jim supported strongly the growth of one of the Firm’s principal practices and the opening of a new office for the Firm.

At that time, major U.S. and non-U.S. banks became heavily involved in the leveraged buyout (LBO) market that developed to finance a flurry of M&A activity. Joe Halliday was one of the key players in the Firm’s LBO finance team, with Bankers Trust as its key client in LBO finance transactions. In 1985, Halliday surprised Jim and the rest of his partners by announcing he was leaving the Firm to join Skadden Arps. Although lateral moves by partners were becoming more common by then, Halliday’s departure shocked his partners. Halliday had spent his career at the Firm and was thought to be White & Case to the core.

Jim regretted Halliday’s departure but viewed it as an opportunity for one or more of the other partners to take charge of the Firm’s LBO finance practice and drive it forward. That partner turned out to be Sean Geary. He took charge of an LBO finance team that included Eric Berg, David Joyce and David Koschik and became a prominent figure in the LBO finance market, participating in almost every major LBO finance transaction of the decade. Among the most notable of these transactions were Kohlberg Kravis Roberts’s takeover of Jim Walter’s Corporation in 1987 and its takeover a year later of RJR Nabisco, the story of which is told in detail in the book Barbarians at the Gate.

Geary’s and the Firm’s success in the LBO finance market gave a psychological and financial boost to the New York office. It also gave Jim the opportunity to support the opening by the Firm of an office in Los Angeles to work with New York–based banks that established LBO teams in Los Angeles to handle LBO finance deals expected to originate on the U.S. West Coast. Jim was also pleased to have an office on the West Coast that could participate in the so-called Pacific Rim business between Asia and the United States that was expected to develop.

New U.S. Office With Cross-Border and Domestic Objectives

In 1986, with Bank of America and other banks moving their Latin American business headquarters to Miami, Jim closed the Palm Beach office near the end of that year because it did not fit into his strategic plans, and opened an office in Miami early in 1987 by acquiring the boutique Miami corporate, finance and real estate firm Walker, Ellis, Gragg & Deaktor. This gave the Firm a base for its Latin American work and a presence in the southeastern region of the United States.

New Non-U.S. Offices Important for the Firm’s Sovereign and Emerging Markets Practices

While keeping things moving in the United States, Jim devoted much of his own time to building the Firm’s sovereign and emerging markets practices and opening offices to build and service these practices as well as establish a presence in the markets where these offices operated.

During the 1980s, the Firm represented a number of sovereigns in emerging market countries in their external debt reschedulings, including Costa Rica in 1983 and 1985, Peru in 1983 and Panama in 1985. The first wave of these rescheduling exercises typically involved a detailed review and analysis of the country’s entire external debt portfolio on an agreement-by-agreement basis. As with Turkey, Jim ensured the Firm provided the resources required to help the country get its financial house in order. For example, in the Peruvian rescheduling, the Firm negotiated about 900 separate agreements with more than 150 creditors. The detailed negotiations were overseen by Duane Wall with assistance from Wendell Maddrey, then a junior associate, working out of a dedicated conference room featuring a “debt thermometer” to monitor daily progress toward the targeted levels.

From the earliest stages of the sovereign debt crisis in the 1980s, Jim recognized the need for long-term solutions to the problems faced by the debtor countries. The approach of the international financial community at that time was to address one or, at most, two years of debt obligations at a time, often including terms that would result in even higher levels of debt for the borrower country. Jim was a vocal and persistent critic of this “muddle through” approach and dedicated himself to the development of structures that would provide meaningful debt relief and provide the debtor countries with the opportunity to achieve sustainable economic growth. Jim pursued these issues with his usual tenacity and intellectual vigor, both in the context of negotiations with the various creditors and interactions with key policymakers at the IMF, World Bank and other institutions. Jim published numerous articles on the need for new approaches to sovereign debt and testified at Congressional hearings on sovereign debt issues hosted by U.S. Senator Bill Bradley (himself a Princeton graduate and former Rhodes Scholar). The Firm also helped draft legislative proposals designed to encourage relief for highly indebted countries.

Over time, these efforts by Jim and others resulted in rescheduling terms that reflected more sustainable and balanced solutions, including the so-called “Brady Plan” approach, which encompassed debt reduction, extended repayment periods and support from the World Bank as key components. As part of its longstanding representation of Costa Rica, the Firm helped it negotiate a debt restructuring that was concluded in 1990 and resulted in substantial levels of debt relief, including the repurchase of a significant portion of its external debt for 16 cents to the dollar. An editorial in The New York Times stated that this restructuring “breaks the mold and gives beleaguered nations cause for hope.”

Thereafter, Jim led the White & Case teams that concluded successful negotiations on behalf of Bulgaria, Croatia, Nigeria and Poland with their governmental and commercial bank creditors. Bulgaria successfully completed a comprehensive Brady Plan restructuring of its external bank debt in 1994, which resulted in a 50 percent reduction of the country’s external debt repayment obligations. Croatia’s bank debt was successfully renegotiated shortly after the country achieved independence, which included taking on a portion of the external debt previously incurred by the government of Yugoslavia. The Firm represented Nigeria in a comprehensive debt restructuring that was concluded in 1992 and included a buyback of 60 percent of Nigeria’s debt stock at discounted prices and conversion of the remaining debt into long-term collateralized bonds. Poland’s Brady Plan restructuring reduced that nation’s overall external bank debt by approximately 45 percent and included innovative features such as limiting the amount of past due interest payable by Poland and lessening the cost of collateralizing the long-term conversion bonds issued by Poland in connection with the rescheduling. Jim even managed to find his way into the meeting room with Poland’s bilateral governmental and official “Paris Club” creditors, which is likely the first (and perhaps last) time that an outside lawyer participated in a Paris Club negotiation.

In May 2001, Poland awarded Jim the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland for his role in resolving Poland’s external debt crisis and putting the country on the road to economic health.

As these success stories helped spur the growth of the Firm’s international practice, Jim looked for the opportunity to open offices that made sense for the Firm’s sovereign practice, its expansion into new markets and its other strategic goals.

The Firm opened offices in Ankara and Istanbul in 1985 at the request of Prime Minister Özal after the successful rescheduling of the unwieldy CTLDs. These offices originally got much of their work from the Turkish Treasury and Central Bank and Turkish state-owned companies, but they eventually developed into full-service law firms for clients with business in Turkey or the surrounding region.

Then, on June 12, 1987, U.S. President Ronald Reagan, in a speech at the Brandenburg Gate near the Berlin Wall, issued the challenge to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “Tear down this wall!” And torn down it was, officially on November 9, 1989, with the grant by the East German government of free passage between East and West Germany, and physically by the end of 1990.

With the Soviet Bloc collapsing, Jim anticipated that the resulting economic turmoil and the reentry of former Soviet Bloc countries into the international financial system would create significant opportunities for the law firms willing to seize them.

Coincidentally, the Firm had recently embarked on a joint venture with a German firm that involved opening a Frankfurt office and reopening the Brussels office the Firm had closed in 1980.

Jim decided the best way to identify and act on opportunities in those countries would be to have people on the ground. He also recognized that the limited information available made it difficult to know whether it made sense to open an office in any of those countries. Jim was not about to sit still, however, and persuaded Hank Amon to relocate to the Brussels office and deploy in the former Soviet Bloc countries other lawyers Jim would send to Brussels.

Young associate Dan Arbess, who had already been sent by Jim to Prague to look for and develop opportunities in Czechoslovakia, joined Amon in Brussels in September 1990, and mid-level associate Steve Harder relocated from New York to Brussels in January 1991. This three-person team went wherever opportunity called, with Arbess concentrating on Czechoslovakia and Harder on Poland. The personal contacts they made in those countries resulted in the Firm being retained by their governments on major transactions, including the joint venture between Czech carmaker Skoda and Volkswagen as well as the development of their privatization programs that established the framework for private ownership of state-owned property and enterprises.

Putting people on the ground and encouraging them to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities quickly paid off. A meeting between Arbess and Czechoslovakia’s President Václav Havel—which would not have happened if Arbess had not been in Prague—led to Arbess helping organize a diplomatic mission of Havel and others to the United States. On the ground in Warsaw, Harder met Grzegorz Domanski, one of the leading players in Poland’s privatization movement, which led to introductions to key representatives in Poland’s Ministry of Privatization.

Jim said on many occasions, “You never get new clients sitting in your office,” and the on-the-ground efforts of Amon, Arbess, Harder and others who later joined the fray helped underscore this message.

The Firm’s success in Czechoslovakia and Poland, the reputation of its sovereign practice and the entrepreneurialism of its lawyers all played roles in similar success stories in Moscow and Budapest, including the Firm being retained by Russia and Hungary to assist them with their privatization programs.

In 1991, the Firm opened offices in Prague, Warsaw, Moscow and Budapest to be closer to its government-related clients in those countries and to begin looking for new opportunities as the Firm’s work on the privatization programs began to wind down. The Prague and Warsaw offices were opened under the supervision of Amon from Brussels with Arbess in Prague and Harder in Warsaw. The Firm staffed the Budapest office from Brussels and New York until it arranged more permanent staffing about a year after the office opened. The Firm’s first lawyer in Moscow was Alex Papachristou, a non-partner recruited from another law firm. Arbess, Harder and Papachristou were all examples of Jim’s willingness to let non-partners play key roles in Firm initiatives if he thought they could get the job done.

This worked out well for the Firm, helping it establish a strong Central and Eastern European (CEE) practice with local and international capability to represent both public and private sector clients. The work for the governments of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Russia and Hungary also resulted in the Firm developing a major privatization practice, further enhanced the reputation of its sovereign practice, and helped the Firm make contacts throughout the CEE that have helped the Firm generate over the years significant financial, corporate and arbitration matters from that region.

Once again, Jim had led a timely first-mover initiative that extended the Firm’s global reach, strengthened key practices and involved many more of its lawyers in cross-border legal work.

New Office in a Major Financial Center

In keeping with Jim’s view that the Firm should have offices in all major financial and commercial centers, the Firm opened an office in Tokyo in 1987. At that time, foreign law firms in Tokyo were not permitted to practice Japanese law, and that restriction limited the growth of the Tokyo offices of non-Japanese law firms. Then, in the mid-1990s, the Japanese government relaxed this restriction to permit foreign and Japanese firms to share office space and expenses, but not profits. White & Case was the first of nine international law firms to take advantage of this new approach. In 1995, the Firm began sharing space and working closely with a group of Japanese lawyers operating under the name of Kandabashi Law Offices. The Firm was aided in this effort by the addition in 1992 of three lateral partners, Bob Grondine, Gary Thomas and Chris Wells, each of whom had been in Tokyo for many years and intended to remain in Tokyo for the rest of their careers. The Firm and Kandabashi Law Offices became known for working together effectively and built up one of the largest Japanese law practices of any non-Japanese firm.

First Office in Latin America

White & Case opened an office in Mexico City in 1991. At that time, the Firm had assigned an associate, Ken Lee, to work in Mexico City with the Ritch y Rovzar law firm as a way to become more familiar with the Mexican market and monitor how it would be affected by the anticipated implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Jim had become impatient with this low-key approach caused by the restrictions against the practice of Mexican law by non-Mexican lawyers. After taking a look at NAFTA, Jim concluded that it would permit a U.S. firm to open an office under its own name and to hire Mexican lawyers who could practice Mexican law. He called Ken Lee and asked him to arrange a meeting with the relevant Mexican authorities to confirm Jim’s reading of NAFTA. When Lee expressed reluctance and told Jim he thought the relevant authorities were unlikely to agree with Jim’s view of NAFTA, Jim responded: “You seem to have mistaken what I just said to be a suggestion.” The meeting was arranged, and Jim’s view was confirmed, enabling the Firm to be the first non-Mexican firm under the then existing Mexican regulations to open in Mexico under its own name. Later, after Alexis Rovzar left the Ritch y Rovzar firm to pursue independent business interests, Jim persuaded him to return to the practice of law and become the head of the Firm’s Mexico City office, which Rovzar did in 1995.

New Office to Strengthen the Firm’s Scandinavian Practice

The circumstances surrounding the opening of the Helsinki office in 1992 were less dramatic but equally interesting. Gene Goodwillie was on a business trip to Helsinki about six months before the office opened and had met one evening with Petri Haussila, a Finnish national who was then a senior associate based in New York at another law firm. Goodwillie learned from Haussila that he wanted to return to Finland and was disappointed his current firm did not seem interested in finding a way to let him do so.

When Goodwillie returned to New York, he discussed Haussila with Jim, who decided to pursue the opportunity. Jim arranged to meet Haussila, was impressed by him and brought him in as counsel to open an office in Helsinki, with the understanding that Haussila would be promoted to partner if the Helsinki office performed well under his leadership, which it did.

Jim welcomed the addition of a Helsinki office that would work in conjunction with the Firm’s Stockholm office to build a larger Scandinavian practice generally. But he also judged Haussila, a highly competent U.S. securities lawyer as well as a qualified Finnish lawyer, to be a prime example of his entrepreneurial, multicultural model.

New Office in a Nation’s Capital

A year later, in 1993, the Firm opened an office in Riyadh. It had previously opened an office in Jeddah in 1989 by recruiting Hassan Mahassni, Neal Grenley and Sandy Kritzalis to join laterally from another firm with offices in Jeddah. Some partners expressed reservations about having an office in the Middle East, but Saudi Arabia’s economic potential and the likely positive effect on the Firm’s relationship with Saudi Aramco of having an office in the Kingdom carried the day. Although Jeddah is one of the commercial centers of the Kingdom—at the time several countries maintained their embassies there—Riyadh is the home of the country’s central bank, Ministry of Petroleum and other governmental agencies and, in 1993, was poised to grow as a center for financial institutions. Jim also thought an office in the capital of the country would put the Firm in an even stronger position to serve Saudi Aramco.

New Office to Strengthen the Firm’s CEE Practice

In 1994, the Firm opened an office in Almaty, the capital of natural resource-rich Kazakhstan, to strengthen the depth and geographic reach of the Firm’s CEE practice.

First Office of Any Foreign Law Firm in South Africa

In 1995, after the United States lifted the anti-apartheid restrictions against South Africa, the Firm opened an office in Johannesburg, becoming the first foreign law firm to open an office in the country. The idea of the Firm’s being a “first mover,” as it had been in Turkey, Mexico, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere, appealed to Jim. He thought the office in Johannesburg would be able to serve as a good base from which to do business not only in South Africa, but also in the southern part of a continent that would undoubtedly become more important to the world’s economy. Shortly after opening the office, the Firm was retained by the government of South Africa to handle the privatization of the state-owned telecommunications company, Telkom, a major transaction for such a new entrant to the market.

Another New Office in a Nation’s Capital

The Firm’s office in Bratislava was officially opened in 1999, but lawyers from the Firm had been located there for several years, operating as a branch of the Prague office. By 1999, business originating from or centered in Slovakia had increased to the point where Jim believed that adding Bratislava to the Firm’s letterhead would result in even more business.

New Office to Strengthen the Firm’s Latin American Practice

The success of the Firm’s Mexico City office and the growth of its Latin American practice led Jim to the conclusion that the Firm should open in Brazil, and an office in São Paulo was opened in 1997 under the leadership of Don Baker, a Portuguese-speaking associate from the Miami office who Jim believed fit the entrepreneurial, multicultural model, and who became a partner in 1999.

Growth of the London and Paris Offices

As the Firm continued to expand its geographical reach, an increasing number of law firms were developing global aspirations and taking aggressive steps to turn their aspirations into reality. In particular, four of the so-called magic circle firms in London (Allen & Overy, Clifford Chance, Freshfields and Linklaters) were in the process of transforming themselves into major global firms and began to refer to themselves as such, aided by the fact that the “harmonization” rules of the EU gave them the authority to open offices in any country in the EU, hire local lawyers and practice local law.

The trend toward the relaxation or termination of national restrictions on the practice of national law by non-national law firms was beginning to accelerate, removing what Jim considered to be one of the major impediments to true globalization.

Having been a pioneer in the globalization of law firms, Jim had no intention of letting other firms adversely affect the continued globalization of White & Case. From Jim’s perspective, the magic circle firms appeared to be expanding first into the rest of Europe under the harmonization rules, acquiring French, German, Dutch and other firms or entering into affiliations with firms in those countries, with a view toward merging later with their affiliated firms. Jim expected that, after conquering the rest of Europe, these firms would then try to work their magic in the United States by expanding their operations in New York.

Jim believed it would be harder for the magic circle firms to begin and grow operations in New York than it would be for the Firm to expand its office in London, especially since in 1993 new rules came into effect allowing English solicitors to practice in partnership with U.S. lawyers and become, in effect, full-service English law firms.

White & Case formed a new limited partnership to take advantage of these changes, and Jim began to push harder for the growth of the London office. During the development of the Eurodollar market, New York law and English law had become the two dominant choices of law for international loan agreements, and when competing for business, law firms from the United States and the UK would often attempt to espouse the virtues of their own country’s system. Jim’s elegant solution to this debate was to build up large offices in both New York and London to be able to handle transactions under both sets of laws on a global basis.

He also pushed harder for growth in the Paris office. By that time, the Paris office was relatively large, but Jim thought it should be even larger if the Firm was to continue to compete effectively in France against the magic circle firms and an increasing number of other competitors.

FOOTNOTE 11

Dedicated to the End

Due to term limits in the Firm’s partnership agreement, Jim knew in 1998 that his tenure as Chair of the Firm could not extend beyond April 1, 2000. With this date now on the horizon, he could have rested on his laurels and let a new leadership team take the Firm forward, but he had no intention of being a lame duck or acting like one.

There was too much left to be done in Europe and elsewhere.

London

The London office had grown during the 1990s but not as much as Jim believed was necessary. Jim began discussions in early 2000 with a UK team led by Maurice Allen, a well known UK lawyer, about joining the Firm in London. These discussions were ongoing when Jim’s 20-year tenure as Chair of the Firm ended on April 1, 2000.

Germany

Jim also felt strongly that the Firm needed to build a significant operation in Germany, and the Firm made its first move to that end by opening a small office in Frankfurt in 1999. Later that year, an opportunity arose to merge with German firm Feddersen Laule Ewerwahn Scherzberg Finkelnburg Clemm, and merger discussions with that firm were ongoing when Jim stepped down as Chair of the Firm.

China

Jim had also been keeping track of expanding financial and commercial activity in China. Convinced that China would become an even more important player in the world’s economy, Jim led the initiative to open an office there. Under existing local regulations, non-Chinese law firms were permitted to apply for a single office initially and a second one five years later. After a lengthy internal deliberation, the Firm decided to open its first office in Shanghai in early 2000 while Jim was still Chair of the Firm. Jim had a hard time choosing between Shanghai and Beijing but eventually favored Shanghai because he expected it to become the financial center of mainland China and the best point of entry for the Firm to the mainland. Beijing could be added five years later if it then seemed advantageous.

United States

Jim was also not quite through with his plans for the United States. The Firm had begun its intellectual property practice in 1984, and it had grown considerably by 1999 but was not yet a force in the IT area. Jim was convinced the Firm could not build a significant IT practice without an office in Silicon Valley, the IT center of the United States. Jim led the initiative to open an office there and, with Duane Wall, made several visits to the West Coast to recruit lateral partners for the office.

The Firm opened an office in Palo Alto in 1999, less than a year before Jim handed the Firm over to a new leadership team.

FOOTNOTE 12

Strong Sense of Stewardship

Jim always felt indebted to DuPratt White, George Case and the other partners of the Firm’s prior generations who had passed down to Jim and his generation a firm of which they could be proud.

In personal terms, he felt even more indebted to his mentor Lowell Wadmond and others who had helped him shape his career and given him the opportunities that let him flex his career-building muscles in India and other parts of the world.

As he neared the end of his tenure as Chair of the Firm, Jim remained committed to building a global law firm for the next generation. To get that done, Jim believed he had one more mission to accomplish, not only to preserve his legacy and the legacy of all his predecessors, but also to ensure the Firm would endure and continue to prosper.

He had to make sure the Firm’s management structure was best suited for the large global firm of which he had been the primary architect.

As he thought about this mission, he became concerned that a four-partner management committee could not sufficiently represent the diversity of the Firm now that it had become global. The two-year term of the Chair and the other members of the management committee resulted in frequent elections and almost constant electioneering, even if conducted very professionally. And perhaps most importantly, Jim was worried that a direct election by partners of the new Chair of the Firm could become contentious and lead to rifts among the leaders of the Firm who would need to work together closely to move the Firm as smoothly as possible into the second century of its history.

With these thoughts weighing on his mind, Jim formed a task force to review the management structure and election process. After lengthy deliberations and consultations with a broad range of partners, the task force made a proposal that was adopted by amending the partnership agreement. The key provisions of the amendment were: direct election by partners of an eight-partner management board; nomination by the management board of a “managing partner” as head of the Firm, subject to a yes/no vote by partners; and four-year terms for both the managing partner and the management board.

The first management board, elected in February of 2000, reflected the diverse Firm that Jim had built over his 20-year tenure and the strong leadership he viewed as essential to continued success.

Eric Berg had helped Sean Geary build the LBO practice and was now head of the Firm’s bank finance practice. George Crozer had worked with Jim on the Turkish debt rescheduling, helped him grow the Firm’s relationship with Indonesia and served as head of the Firm’s Asia offices as well as the Hong Kong office for many years. Peter Finlay had helped Jim on a number of Indonesian and other sovereign matters and spent three years in the Paris office and four years in the Istanbul office before relocating to the London office. Tim Goodell was an M&A lawyer and had served for several years in the role of the Firm’s administrative partner as then provided for in the Firm’s partnership agreement. Gene Goodwillie had spent time in the Paris office and been the head of the London office, the leader of the Firm’s client-relationship team with Saudi Aramco and the head of the Firm’s project finance practice. Rick Holwell was the head of the Firm’s litigation practice, had served on the four-partner management committee and would later be appointed as a federal judge. Duane Wall had been in the London office with Jim for several years; worked with him on the Indonesian, Costa Rican, Peruvian and Panamanian debt reschedulings; and had been on the four-partner management committee for the last 10 years of Jim’s tenure as Chair. Bill Wynne was head of the Firm’s M&A practice and had been a member of the four-partner management committee. Claes Zettermarck was an accomplished business lawyer, had led the Stockholm office for many years and would later become president of the Swedish Bar Association. In addition, Eberhardt Meincke was added to the management board as part of the process of integrating the Feddersen Laule partners into the Firm. Meincke was a banking lawyer who had close connections with clients in Denmark, was Honorary Advisor to the Royal Dutch Consulate General in Hamburg and had been appointed Ridder af Dannebrog by the Queen of Denmark in 1997.

Promptly after the election, the management board nominated Wall as the managing partner. Wall was elected by a yes/no vote of partners and assumed office on April 1, 2000. Goodwillie was shortly thereafter selected by the management board as its chair.

While waiting for the new management team to be elected, Jim had been thinking about what role, if any, he should play at the Firm after the new team took over. He was aware that some firms, either officially or informally, have a transition period and process for moving from one leadership team to the next, and that other firms elect the new leadership team six months or so in advance of the end of the term of the current leadership team to give the two teams time to arrange for a smooth transition.

In the end, Jim decided the best thing for the Firm would be for him to take the approach taken by most CEOs of major corporations: Step down and let the new leadership team take charge. Jim had been the leader of the Firm for 20 years, and, at some point, change is not only good, but vital for maintaining constant forward momentum. Jim had worked with Wall, Goodwillie and all of the other partners on the management board and knew them well. In his own way, Jim had been working on transitioning to a new management team for many years. He had been a mentor to the members of the management board with whom he had worked closely. He had given them opportunities to lead offices, practices and client teams as well as play other leadership roles. He had worked with several of them on the four-partner management committee. He had shared his vision of a global law firm with them every step of the long journey over the past 20 years. They should be ready to step up to the leadership of the Firm when he stepped down.

Shortly after the election, Jim met with Wall to tell him that he would be stepping down, to review all pending matters that needed to be dealt with and to assure Wall that he would be available to consult on matters that could be dealt with most expeditiously with the help of Jim’s historical knowledge. Jim also assured Wall that he was confident the new leadership team could and would keep the Firm moving forward.

Wall and the other members of the new team were determined for the Firm to make a smooth transition and announced, even before they took office, that they were committed to taking forward Jim’s ongoing initiatives and building an even stronger global firm.

Maurice Allen and his team joined the London office in May 2000, and over the next eight years the London office grew from 59 lawyers to about 340.

The merger with the Feddersen Laule firm was completed in August 2000, adding about 180 lawyers to the Firm, increasing the size of the Firm’s Frankfurt office and adding offices in Berlin, Dresden, Düsseldorf and Hamburg.

Over the next eight years, the Firm’s lawyer headcount more than doubled to about 2,400, adding depth to the Firm’s principal practices and increasing the size of all major offices; the Firm’s gross revenues more than tripled; and profits per equity partner more than doubled. The Firm’s gross revenues exceeded the $1 billion mark for the first time in 2005 and have continued to do so.

Hugh Verrier, another of Jim’s protégés, succeeded Wall as Chair on October 1, 2007. A Canadian, Verrier became the first non-U.S. national to become head of the Firm, exactly 25 years to the day after Jean-Luc Boussard became the first non-U.S. national partner. A coincidence perhaps, but also another historical marker of the progress of White & Case in becoming a truly global law firm. As then head of the Moscow office, Verrier was also the first head of the Firm not to be based in the New York office at the time of his election.

Jim had wanted to leave behind an enduring, global law firm, and he did.

Shortly after Verrier took office in October 2007, the worldwide financial crisis sent shockwaves throughout the world’s financial markets and economies. Rahm Emanuel was reported to have said, “Never waste a crisis,” and Verrier and his new leadership team did not waste this one. They kept the Firm on a steady course, reorganized the Firm into regional “sections,” formalized and expanded the Firm’s client teams and introduced official industry groups.

The global firm that Jim envisaged and helped build had not only endured through the financial crisis, but flourished. As one example of the proof being in the pudding, the Firm’s profitability was at its highest level ever in each of 2012 through 2016.

In an evolutionary sense, Jim was a visionary leader who transformed the Firm into a global enterprise by building out the geographical reach of the Firm around the world. Wall carried Jim’s vision forward by adding depth to the Firm’s principal practices and offices. And after 27 years of geographic expansion and lawyer headcount growth, Verrier is achieving the full integration of the Firm’s resources that Jim surely envisioned when he set the Firm on the path to becoming a truly global law firm.

JIM AND LYN HURLOCK IN INDIA, 1967

Part II

The Legacy

Jim always wanted to pass down to the next generation a better firm than the one passed down to his generation by those that preceded it.

And he did.

The Firm that Jim envisioned when he became Chair has become a reality. It has a geographic reach that includes all of the world’s major financial and commercial centers and other cities where the Firm’s clients need sophisticated legal services. The Firm’s offices have strong local capability to the extent permitted by local rules and are prominent in their local markets. The nationalities of the Firm’s lawyers reflect the Firm’s multiculturalism. The Firm’s principal practices have the strength and depth to enhance and continue to expand the Firm’s geographic reach and to support all of its offices. The New York office has the resources to continue to grow and serve as a source of strength for the Firm’s worldwide operations. The Firm’s client base is multinational. The Firm’s lawyers have an entrepreneurial spirit and are able to create opportunities and to recognize and seize them as they arise. Many of the Firm’s lawyers feel totally at ease working anywhere in the world, whether on a brief assignment or during a long-term stay, and otherwise fit the entrepreneurial, multicultural model.

Other law firms have become global, and each of them undoubtedly has unique features that reflect the contributions made by their leaders. None of these leaders is likely, however, to have played a greater individual role in his or her firm’s transformation into a global law firm than Jim played in the transformation of White & Case. Jim worked and lived in several countries as an associate; commenced the Firm’s sovereign practice and led other parts of the transformation before he became Chair of the Firm; began the transformation before most firms had any global aspirations; led the Firm on its journey to globalization even though many of his partners did not have much enthusiasm for the trip when it first began; pursued his global vision for the Firm relentlessly; handed leadership over effectively to a new leadership team; and passed down to the next generation a firm that would continue to endure and flourish.

White & Case today is a truly global law firm and has all of the characteristics of one. And one of these characteristics is so special that even Jim, the eternal optimist, had never dared to believe it was realistically achievable: Every single partner of White & Case believes the Firm should be the truly global law firm it has become. Partners felt that way by the time Jim stepped down as Chair of the Firm, and they feel that way today.

The 20-year journey that began with very few believers when Jim became Chair of the Firm ended with belief by all.

Jim had been faithful to his strong sense of stewardship and succeeded in passing down to the next generation a better firm than the one that had been passed down to him and his generation.

But Jim passed down more than that. He also passed down sterling examples of the attributes and characteristics that the future leaders of White & Case must possess if the Firm is to continue to move forward and evolve to meet whatever challenges the future may bring. Some of these examples are recorded in these “footnotes to a portrait.” Others are indelibly impressed in the hearts and minds of those who were so fortunate to accompany Jim on the 20-year journey he led to transform White & Case into a truly global firm.

JIM IN 1966

JIM WITH HIS PARENTS, JAMES B. HURLOCK, SR. AND ELIZABETH CHARLS, HIS SISTER BETTY AND THEIR GREAT DANE, ERIC, IN STROUDSBURG, PA, 1935

JIM AT AGE 4 IN CLEVELAND

LOWELL WADMOND WITH JIM AND LYN AT THEIR WEDDING IN 1961

JIM AT AGE 17

JIM AT AGE 21 RECEIVING THE M. TAYLOR PYNE PRIZE WITH MR. CLARK FROM AMERICAN EXPRESS (LEFT) AND PRINCETON PRESIDENT HAROLD DODDS (RIGHT), FEBRUARY 1955

LYN HOLDING, 1961

JIM AND LYN’S CHILDREN, JIMMY, BURT, MATTHEW, AND THEIR DOGS IN GREENWICH, CONNECTICUT, 1976

HURLOCK BOYS IN COURCHEVEL, 1970

JIMMY, BURT AND MATTHEW IN COURCHEVEL

HURLOCK FAMILY PORTRAIT, NANTUCKET, 1979

HURLOCK FAMILY SKIING IN COURCHEVEL, 1968

JIM, LYN AND THEIR DOGS, HONEY AND BEN, 2013

JIM AND HIS DOG, LEE, IN LONDON, 1974

HURLOCK FAMILY IN GREENWICH, CONNECTICUT, AUGUST 2013

JIM OUTFITTED FOR SHOOTING AT CLOVE VALLEY

JIM WITH HIS SON BURT AND GRANDSON CHARLS AFTER BASS FISHING IN NANTUCKET, 1998

JIM (CENTER) WITH BANK INDONESIA GOVERNOR RACHMAT SALEH (FAR LEFT) AND KUHN LOEB’S DAVID STEIN (RIGHT), JAKARTA, 1975

JIM, LYN AND JIM’S SISTER BETTY ABOARD THE ORIENT EXPRESS, OWNED BY WHITE & CASE CLIENT SEA CONTAINERS, ON THE INAUGURAL ROUTE TO VENICE IN 1982

HURLOCK FAMILY IN BEIJING, 1989

JIM AND LYN IN RED SQUARE DURING THE OPENING OF THE WHITE & CASE MOSCOW OFFICE, 1991

JIM IN STOCKHOLM

JIM ON AVENUE FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT IN BRUSSELS, 1967

LYN HURLOCK AND JOYCE NOONAN, WITH JIM STANDING BEHIND HIS LONGTIME SECRETARY, KATHY GRIFFIN, AND SUSANNE WAMBA AT A PARTY GIVEN IN JIM AND LYN’S HONOR AT THE FIRM’S NEW YORK OFFICE

JIM AND LYN DANCING AT THAT PARTY

JIM IN 2014

JIM RECEIVING THE OFFICER’S CROSS OF THE ORDER OF MERIT OF THE REPUBLIC OF POLAND

JIM AND LYN AT THE RECEPTION IN WARSAW

JIM RECEIVING THE 2010 ROOT/STIMSON AWARD AT THE NEW YORK STATE BAR HOUSE OF DELEGATES MEETING: PICTURED WITH PAST PRESIDENT PAUL MICHAEL HASSETT (LEFT) AND THEN STATE BAR PRESIDENT STEPHEN P. YOUNGER (RIGHT)

JIM AND JESSE, 2006

Part III

A Look Back: Insights Into Leadership in Action

In looking back at Jim’s 20 years of visionary leadership, what stands out most is the single-mindedness with which he pursued his vision of building an enduring global law firm. And he did it without any self-aggrandizement. In these respects, Jim embodies the peak of the five-tier hierarchy of leadership characteristics developed by business consultant and author Jim Collins. According to Collins, a Level 5 leader is a “paradoxical mix of personal humility and professional will.” In Good to Great, his best-selling and highly respected book on leadership, Collins elaborates:

Level 5 leaders channel their ego needs away from themselves and into the larger goal of building a great company. It’s not that Level 5 leaders have no ego or self-interest. Indeed, they are incredibly ambitious—but their ambition is first and foremost for the institution, not themselves.

Jim led White & Case aggressively and pushed hard for the things he believed the Firm needed to do to realize his vision for it, but none of his partners ever doubted that he was irrevocably committed to building a global firm. Some of those who most strongly disagreed with him about the way forward left the Firm, including a group of litigation partners in 1995 who cited concerns about quality control and the increasing possibility of loss of business due to conflicts of interest in a firm with offices spread out across the world. Others with views differing from Jim’s remained at the Firm, let their voices be heard and worked alongside Jim to move the Firm forward, even though they often believed the movement was not in the right direction. But most of Jim’s partners stayed the course and came to believe in his global vision for the Firm as they saw it grow and prosper as the vision became reality.

Jim’s relentless pursuit of his global vision for the Firm also helped him to work constantly toward the “alignment” that Jay Lorsch and Thomas Tierney praise in Aligning the Stars, their book on leadership of professional services firms.

Lorsch and Tierney define “alignment” as “creating organizational practices and structures that simultaneously fit the strategic requirements of a business and the needs of its key employees” and explain that “four aspects of the firm are central to the work of creating alignment: strategy, organization (which includes people systems as well as structure and governance), culture and leadership.”

Jim believed in and adopted a very straightforward approach to alignment: Globalize everything. The Firm’s leadership and strategy were aligned from the day Jim became Chair of the Firm. The Firm’s culture became multicultural as the Firm built out its global reach. Jim worked constantly on the organizational structure of the Firm to enable it to facilitate globalization.

However, a focus on Jim’s aggressive and straightforward pursuit of globalization only tells part of the story. All leaders, including those at Level 5, have a variety of other attributes that make them effective leaders. Part III summarizes the most prominent personal characteristics not described in Part I that enabled Jim to inspire those around him and succeed as a transformational leader. These skills and traits—a combination of Jim’s innate strengths and the lessons he learned from playing on the world stage—defined Jim’s personality and provided the inner compass for his leadership of the Firm.

FOOTNOTE 13

Leader, Manager and Administrator, in That Order

At the time he was elected Chair in 1980, Jim knew his partners felt the Firm needed a strong leader, and he understood they wanted and expected him to lead.

Harvard Business School has a case study on the “three-hat problem” facing the partners of any professional services firm. Each of these partners is an owner, manager and operator of his or her firm and must learn how to differentiate between the three roles and to address the challenges each of the three roles presents.

Jim was aware of that three-hat problem but also recognized that, as the Chair of the Firm, he had a different three-hat problem: how to be the leader of the Firm at all times; how to be its manager when management was called for; and how to become involved in administrative details when necessary.

Jim understood he had to know where to draw the lines between being a leader, manager and administrator, and how to make sure his partners knew what role he was playing when he dealt with them individually or in a group. He also knew the lines can become blurred and would not always be as clear to his partners as they were to him.

To keep the lines as clear as possible, when speaking with partners about any issue to which either leadership or management had to be brought to bear, Jim always tried to make it clear whether he was speaking as a leader or a manager. In his experience, if a partner thought Jim was speaking as a manager, saying what a manager needs to say, the partner was less likely to be inspired into action than he or she would be if Jim were speaking as a leader, saying only what Jim personally believed in and was passionate about.

This was easier for Jim to do than it might have been for others. All of Jim’s partners believed Jim was passionate about his global vision for the Firm. Any time Jim asked a partner to do something for the Firm to help it move closer to globalization, the partner knew he or she was being asked to do something Jim believed in, had done himself at some point in his White & Case career and thought was important for the Firm, usually making the partner feel pleased to be asked. Very few people turned Jim down on these occasions. One of those who did, an associate in New York to whom Jim offered in the presence of others the opportunity to go to the London office, said to Jim: “Frankly, sir, I’d rather go to Cincinnati.” This associate went on to have a successful legal career, but not at White & Case.

Jim believed any partner he appointed to a leadership position in the Firm should also try to draw lines between leadership, management and administration and make them noticeable to those under his or her leadership. On more than one occasion, Jim made a change in a leadership position because a leader became ineffective in the role due to his or her inability to draw the lines or make them noticeable enough.

In Jim’s view, a leader who only manages should move on to other endeavors.

FOOTNOTE 14

Inspirational Leader; Never a Down Day

To meet the leadership expectation of his partners, Jim tried to make every encounter with a partner or a group of partners one they would leave with the feeling that Jim was leading; that he understood the challenges facing the Firm and was addressing them; that he listened to and heard them; that he believed in and was passionate about his global vision for the Firm; and that the Firm was in safe hands and moving forward.

Even if a meeting was primarily about a management or administrative matter, Jim tried to find a moment to speak or act as the inspirational leader he was.

Jim often said that a leader must “never have a down day,” and he did his best to never have one himself. If he expected his partners to follow his lead, he must never waver, never falter, never stop moving forward, never give up, give in or give out.

Never have a down day.

FOOTNOTE 15

Holistically Perceptive

It is sometimes said that great leaders have the ability to “look around corners” and anticipate reactions to any actions they may initiate. Jim did better than that. He viewed the world the way a Grand Master does a chessboard or as Napoleon did the next battleground. He didn’t only anticipate reactions to his actions. In any matter, he took into account the position of all the participants, their talents, their resources, their motivations, their known and unknown strengths and weaknesses, and then decided what each of them would do next. He thought about how to press forward when he could and retreat if necessary. And then he stopped thinking and relied on his instincts. This was the process he used to decide how to deal with hundreds of banks in the Indonesian and Turkish debt reschedulings; how to respond to the collapse of the Berlin Wall; and how to develop his strategy for taking White & Case global.

FOOTNOTE 16

Consciously Well Connected

One of the qualities that helped Jim be holistically perceptive was his habit of making friends and acquaintances from all walks of life.

He made lifelong friends at Oxford. He joined the Traveler’s Club as an associate of the Firm in Paris to meet possible new clients. As his legal career progressed, he developed friends and acquaintances who were partners at large law firms; senior officers at banks, investment banks and insurance companies; key people at accounting firms, consulting firms and advertising agencies; owners or officers of business enterprises; and a variety of people in government and academia. It was through these friends and acquaintances that Jim kept his finger on the pulse of market developments and the world at large. They also introduced him to others in influential positions. From time to time they also helped Jim generate business for White & Case, as the Troika did with a number of sovereigns; establish useful relations with large law firms, as James Buckley did with Macfarlanes; or consider a possible trend-setting merger with the Firm, as did a top official at a large accounting firm.

In pre-Internet terminology, Jim had a large Rolodex.

FOOTNOTE 17

Forward Thinker

Rarely doing anything before deciding what to do next, Jim anticipated that representing Indonesia would lead to the representation of other sovereigns. He believed moving from the Bankers Trust buildings would result in other banks being willing to work with the Firm more than in the past. He believed his partners would buy into his global vision for the Firm if he took the approach of winning them over one step at a time.

His forward thinking helped make him holistically perceptive but was also an attribute unto itself.

One of Jim’s most basic instincts was to move forward, and moving forward with success required that he think forward as well.

He almost never looked back.

Didn’t want to.

Didn’t have time to.

In very personal terms, this attitude was evident to anyone who ever walked with Jim to a meeting or anywhere else. Jim always walked either fast or faster, and never looked back to see if you were keeping up with him.

He walked through life this same way.

FOOTNOTE 18

Tack-Into-the-Wind’r

Kinstler hinted in the portrait that Jim was an avid sailor by putting white sails in his dark blue tie.

Jim was a competitive sailor, familiar with the strategy of “tacking into the wind,” and he used that term on numerous occasions when describing how to navigate around various obstacles. A good example: When Singapore’s attorney general was unwilling to let the Firm open an office in Singapore as Jim would have preferred, he announced to his colleagues that the Firm would “tack into the wind” by opening one in Hong Kong.

Jim always preferred moving straight ahead, but never hesitated to use his nautical navigational skills when necessary.

FOOTNOTE 19

Entrepreneurial; Risk Taker

In many ways Jim was as entrepreneurial as DuPratt White and George Case had been in establishing their two-partner operation in 1901. He went to the Paris office as a third-year associate in spite of being told it might delay his becoming a partner of the Firm. He lobbied for the Hong Kong and London offices, then led the latter. He decided to take the Firm global during uncertain times and with limited support from his partners. These and other decisions he made were not without risk, but his keen analytical skills and his unerring intuition led him to believe the possible rewards were worth the risk.

His strong belief in entrepreneurialship affected how he approached many management decisions. He recruited laterals he judged to be entrepreneurial to open new offices because he knew they would not succeed without that trait. When he asked someone to take charge of a client relationship, be the head of a practice group or undertake some other mission, he gave that person broad authority and wide latitude to get the job done. And perhaps most importantly, he gave every partner significant autonomy in building his or her practice.

The representative of a major consulting firm who conducted a review of the Firm’s pricing practices during Duane Wall’s early years as managing partner reported to Wall that he couldn’t understand how the Firm made as much money as it did because White & Case gave partners more autonomy in running their practices than any firm he had ever consulted. The consulting firm suggested that the Firm impose more control over the clients that partners brought to the Firm, the fees they charged for their work and how they staffed their deals. Having been a close observer of Jim’s approach to entrepreneurialship for more than 20 years, Wall responded that he would be willing for the Firm to exercise more supervision over a partner’s practice than existed at the time, but never so much that it would cause partners to feel they had lost the autonomy Jim believed enabled them to be entrepreneurial and to build a successful and rewarding career.

Today, if you were to ask any partner of the Firm to describe its culture, he or she would undoubtedly include the entrepreneurial spirit of the Firm’s partners as one of its most defining characteristics.

FOOTNOTE 20

Business-Oriented Lawyer

His assignment as a second-year lawyer to the Indian fertilizer plant project may have accelerated Jim’s development as a business-oriented lawyer, but he would have become one anyway. He could draft documents, do legal research and write briefs and memoranda with the best of them, but he preferred to be involved in the business aspects of any matter on which he worked. This preference caused him to favor working with investment bankers to plan and structure a transaction over helping commercial bankers on project execution. And whatever he worked on, he wanted to know the pricing structure and the objectives of each of the parties so he could form his own conclusion as to whether the client he was representing was getting a good deal.

One of the times Jim decided his client wasn’t getting a good deal occurred when Jim was in the London office with Duane Wall. The client in question was trying to develop a natural resource mine in a distant country and was about to obtain financing for the project on extremely unfavorable terms from a group led by a major investment bank. While on vacation in Nantucket, Jim became so concerned about the severity of the terms of the financing that he instructed Wall to tell the client that the Firm would resign if the client decided to proceed with the financing, then to deliver the same message to the investment banker. This was not one of Wall’s all-time favorite assignments, but he agreed with Jim’s view that the financing terms appeared unfavorable enough to virtually guarantee the client would default on the terms, resulting in unresolvable legal issues and most probably the financial collapse of the project. Wall delivered the message, and to the great dismay of the investment banker, the client refused to proceed with the financing on the proposed terms.

Jim’s affinity for the business aspects of matters was evident during the Indonesian debt rescheduling to both the Indonesian financial team and the Troika and was one of the reasons the Troika recommended Jim to other sovereign clients. Over the years, many other clients noticed and appreciated Jim’s business orientation in dealing with their matters and came to rely on him for his business judgment as well as his legal skills.

Jim understood that a law firm is also a business enterprise and brought his commercial orientation to bear not only in developing his global vision for the Firm and the strategy to implement it, but also in dealing with Firm budgets, planning and financing major office moves, arranging credit facilities with banks and conducting all the other business-related matters involved in running a large global firm.

Jim sometimes had to deal with the trees but never lost sight of the forest.

FOOTNOTE 21

Befriender of Clients

Good lawyers are usually devoted to their clients, and Jim was deeply devoted to his.

Many lawyers, however, even very good ones, have an aversion to becoming personal friends with their clients. Some feel that personal and business relationships are incompatible. Others are worried that a personal relationship could adversely affect the objectivity required to give sound legal advice.

This was an aversion from which Jim did not suffer. During the course of his career, some of his clients joined his circle of friends, including a senior officer of a major U.S. bank; one of the key members of the Troika; the owner of an ocean-going tugboat company; and the CEO of a major container leasing company.

Some of these friends helped him build his practice by referring other clients to the Firm. Some were among the trusted advisors he relied on throughout his career. All of them helped him keep abreast of market developments and world events. To ensure these friends always received top-quality legal service as clients, Jim took the precaution of having other lawyers work alongside him on matters involving any of his friends.

Jim’s good friend from the Troika, David Stein of Kuhn Loeb, was also a client and had this to say about his lawyer friend in a letter written on the occasion of the dinner given by the Firm in Jim and Lyn’s honor at the New York Botanical Garden in June 2000:

A brilliant counselor and strategist for developing countries, corporations and even, on rare occasions, his beloved commercial banks, Jim is also the rarest of breeds—a person of extraordinary judgment and impeccable integrity. Thus he is as valuable a personal advisor to his many friends as legal advisor to his many clients. It is, indeed, fortunate for us all that we, his friends, will retain access to his wisdom and insight, irrespective of his future professional directions.

Well said!

FOOTNOTE 22

Controller of Quality

Jim was insistent that the Firm provide top-quality legal services in all of its offices. In constant pursuit of this objective, he promoted and recruited only the best lawyers; strengthened training, review and mentoring programs; and relied heavily on the Firm’s opinion, new business and conflicts clearance processes and procedures. Jim also let it be known that quality control was one of the primary responsibilities of each partner that came with the autonomy given to each partner to run his or her practice.

Another quality control measure Jim insisted be used throughout the Firm was teamwork, especially in cross-border matters involving multiple White & Case offices. Jim believed the more senior lawyers working on any matter would help train those who were not quite as experienced and would not be hesitant to report in a professional manner to the appropriate management personnel any significant concern about the quality of any other lawyer on that matter.

Jim was also concerned that the failure of any partner to work with any other partners might be caused in part by that partner’s being uncomfortable about letting other partners view his or her legal work and habits. To help ensure no such “rogue partner” worked alone unnoticed, Jim had the executive staff develop a computer program that would produce the name of any partner who had no other partners working on his or her deals and who was not working on any other partners’ deals.

The price of quality control is eternal vigilance.

FOOTNOTE 23

Empathetic Listener

One reason Jim made friends and acquaintances so easily was that he was an empathetic listener. When you spoke with him, you not only knew but felt you had his undivided attention. He was listening to you, understanding what you told him and giving you his immediate reaction to your views. He might agree with you, argue with you or tell you he wanted some time to think about what you had said. But he reacted to what you said. He and you were communicating.

And Jim not only listened to people, he heard them. He had a prodigious memory into which he sorted and filed anything he heard that might be of use to him in the future. This attribute enhanced his holistic perceptiveness as the leader of the Firm and added to the store of knowledge he accumulated to make the decisions that had to be made to lead the Firm forward.

Jim understood as well as anyone that if what you want is for people to want to speak with you, they need to know you will both listen to and hear them.

FOOTNOTE 24

Walker of the Halls

It has been said that leaders should “walk the halls” as a way of connecting with as many people as possible and demonstrating they are accessible and interested in gaining knowledge from all available sources.

Jim walked the halls, literally, and there were many halls to walk. In the New York office, he would begin on the top floor and work his way down, speaking to enough people on each floor to make his presence noticeable. On his regular visits to non-U.S. offices, he would speak with as many people as possible, lawyers and non-lawyers alike.

But Jim walked the halls in other ways as well. He made it his business to know as much about the people working with and around him as he possibly could. He had a constant stream of meetings with people when he was in New York. He took partners, associates and staff members to lunch on a regular basis.

Given the number of offices in the Firm, and the number of visits Jim made to them in the course of a year, he would surely have accumulated a record number of “frequent walker miles” if such an award program existed.

FOOTNOTE 25

Believer in Trusted Advisors

During Jim’s 20-year tenure, if he wanted to push an important initiative forward, he ordinarily had to get the support of the other three members of the Firm’s management committee. This is one of the reasons Jim formed over the years various teams of “trusted advisors” with whom he could discuss any new initiative before presenting it to the other three members of the management committee. These trusted advisors were partners or friends Jim knew from experience would give him their open and frank views about any new initiatives without worrying about the political consequences. The teams of trusted advisors varied from time to time and from issue to issue, but Jim always found them useful in helping him refine his approach to any particular new initiative. All of which caused Jim’s trusted advisors to trust him as much as he trusted them.

FOOTNOTE 26

Impressively Analytical and Articulate

Although Jim always listened to and heard people, very few wanted to engage him in any type of analytical argument. Jim was highly intelligent, as evidenced by his academic record, and holistically perceptive, as previously noted. These characteristics enabled him to see the “scene as a whole” of any issue, to analyze an issue and reduce the arguments for or against it to their most fundamental elements, and to articulate these elements with extreme clarity.

A concrete example of these attributes was his ability to prepare a draft of a letter or agreement and make almost no revisions when putting it in final form. He visualized the letter or agreement from beginning to end at the outset and wrote it as he visualized it.

Jim visualized the arguments for and against an issue in the same way, whether the issue related to politics, religion or how to run a law firm.

FOOTNOTE 27

Nonbeliever in Bureaucracy

Jim didn’t believe in creating an organizational structure with so many titles that you had to give some of them to people who couldn’t do much with them. He preferred a structure that was as flat as you could make it, the titles of which were held by people who earned them by demonstrating they had the capability to help move the Firm forward.

Under his preferred approach, most of the leaders of the Firm would be heads of practices and client relationship teams. During the build-out of the Firm’s geographic reach, he understood that he would need to put a partner in charge of every White & Case office, but he didn’t like creating positions for which the partners who occupied them might want to be compensated primarily for their management role. He always insisted that partners in charge of offices maintain an active legal practice, and he didn’t begin using the title of executive partner for the head of an office until a number of years after he became Chair of the Firm.

Jim always believed people with talent would step forward, and no one stood as ready as Jim to recognize them when they did.

FOOTNOTE 28

Talent Scout Supreme

From the day he became Chair of the Firm, Jim understood he would have to scout for talent both inside and outside the Firm. He knew in particular that the Firm’s lawyers would have to be entrepreneurial. Otherwise, they would not be able to open and grow offices, commence or strengthen practices and find the clients needed to build a global client base. As a whole, they would also need to be multinational and multicultural.

To find and develop these lawyers, he worked to improve lateral partner recruitment and integration, associate recruitment and training, and lawyer evaluation processes at all levels.

Jim also tried to identify and put in leadership positions the lawyers he believed had the talent to be “game changers” for the Firm, then help them perform. He adopted this approach, for example, in recruiting lawyers such as Troy Alexander, George Crozer, Peter Finlay, Wendell Maddrey, Philip Stopford and Hugh Verrier to spend time in Jakarta to build out the Indonesian practice; in letting Sean Geary take over the leadership of the Firm’s LBO finance team in the mid-1980s; and in giving Hank Amon and his team broad operating authority in the former Soviet Bloc countries after the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

Jim’s nonbelief in bureaucracy and his experience as a second-year associate in India made him willing to put associates as well as partners in charge of missions if he thought the associates could accomplish them.

FOOTNOTE 29

True Self-Confidence and Self-Awareness

It is often said that leaders must be impartial and objective. Among Jim’s attributes that satisfied these criteria were his true self-confidence and self-awareness.

Jim’s outstanding academic record surely boosted his self-confidence, but he appears to have been born with it. He always seemed to be aware of what he could do, what others could do and whether what he could do was best.

Wherever his self-confidence and self-awareness came from, they were sources of the impartiality and objectivity that helped him run the Firm and “herd the cats” that consultants claim prowl the halls of large law firms.

Jim tried hard to maintain the Firm as a meritocracy, selecting the best people for roles that needed to be played regardless of whether he liked the person he selected. It has been written that many strong leaders have difficulty encouraging and promoting others because they don’t want to develop anyone under them who can replace them. Jim took the opposite approach: Identify the “play makers” around you, put them in leadership positions and take pride in their success.

Without doubt, his own self-confidence and self-awareness enabled him to do that.

FOOTNOTE 30

Concern for Everyone Around Him

At a personal level, Jim had a genuine concern for everyone around him.

Jim played an important role in making sure Nancy Brown survived that fatal car accident in Brussels.

He also persuaded one of his colleagues at the Firm to obtain early treatment for testicular cancer after hearing about his symptoms. He insisted that another partner let him arrange for better treatment for a serious illness. He helped another partner in a serious car wreck on the West Side Highway in New York City get immediate medical attention. He arranged for an intervention for any partner with a problem with alcohol, even personally escorting the partner to the intervention site and ensuring the partner then went to a prearranged treatment facility. He said to more than one partner: “You are a very valuable partner of the Firm, and if you deal with this issue successfully you may continue as such.”

These are only a few of the more notable examples of the effort Jim made to help anyone he became aware of who had a serious problem.

One of the reasons he could help people get good medical care was his long relationship with NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. He was elected in 1986 as a trustee of the Presbyterian Hospital in the City of New York and became a trustee of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital in 1988 at the time of the merger with New York Hospital. He became a life trustee in 2008. Throughout his tenure, he served on the budget and finance, human resources and legal affairs committees. His knowledge of and friendship with many of the doctors at NewYork-Presbyterian enabled him to refer people to those doctors or find out from those doctors the names of other doctors to whom referrals could be made.

Jim had a deep concern for the welfare of everyone at the Firm, from the newest staff member to the most senior partner. He personally devoted a considerable amount of time over the years to working with the Firm’s benefits team to ensure that the Firm’s health and retirement programs were as good or better than those of any other law firm.

The many people to whom Jim gave this type of care and attention were among his most ardent admirers.

FOOTNOTE 31

Brand Ambassador and Defender

Jim was the Firm’s most avid brand ambassador. He lived and breathed White & Case and was always looking for ways to position the Firm as the truly global law firm he wanted it to become and which it eventually did. And one reason for his success in getting this done was a simple one: Over the course of the 20-year journey to globalization, more and more of his partners joined him as ambassadors of the Firm and its brand.

Jim was also a fierce defender and protector of the Firm’s name and reputation. If a client or anyone else criticized the Firm, Jim always took the side of the Firm until he could inquire into the validity of the criticism. If an article appeared in a magazine or newspaper about global law firms or the global nature of the legal services industry that did not mention White & Case, the Firm’s media relations team received an immediate call from Jim for an explanation of how that could have happened.

Jim was equally protective of the “brand” of the Firm’s lawyers, always giving them the benefit of the doubt if the quality of their legal work or lawyering skills was questioned by anyone either inside or outside the Firm. At the same time, Jim would take lawyers to task privately if he learned they deserved it, always making sure they understood that they must also be defenders and protectors of the Firm’s brand.

FOOTNOTE 32

Culture Carrier

Every leader of a firm should be one of its chief culture carriers, and Jim not only carried the Firm’s culture, he personified it. Many of the footnotes in this book describe the role Jim played in defining, nurturing, preserving and refining the Firm’s culture.

No discussion of the Firm’s culture would be complete, however, without mentioning its “open door” policy. No one at White & Case is ever to have his or her door closed unless absolutely necessary for the purpose of confidentiality. Every “open door” is a reminder of the open-mindedness of the Firm and that anyone in the Firm has access to all others for help or counsel for any reason, professional or personal.

Jim was one of the primary proponents of the open door policy. While on a visit to a non–New York office, he once saw a fairly new lateral partner not only close his door when he left for the day, but lock it. Jim reminded that partner of the open door policy, to which the partner replied with words to the effect: “Old habits die hard.” Counterculturist or not, this partner had a relatively brief stay with the Firm.

The doors and minds at White & Case remain open.

FOOTNOTE 33

Citizen of the World

Following the example established by DuPratt White and George Case, Jim provided leadership for many years to highly respected organizations that have far-reaching positive effects on the New York City community as well as the national and international communities.

Given his personal commitment to the Firm’s sovereign and international law practices, it is not surprising that two of these organizations relate to international law.

Jim was a founding board member in 1986 of the International Development Law Organization (IDLO), headquartered in Rome, Italy. He served as chairman from 2001 to 2004, when he retired from the board. IDLO is the only intergovernmental development organization whose sole focus is the rule of law. Jim is credited by IDLO as having led its development into an institution of truly global scope. In 2001, the United Nations granted IDLO observer status, leading to the creation of a permanent observer office at the UN.

Jim was also a trustee and chairman of the Parker School of Foreign and Comparative Law, which is affiliated with Columbia University but retains its own director and board of trustees. The Parker School is devoted to the teaching and study of subjects relating to the international commerce and foreign relations of the United States.

Two other organizations to which Jim provided leadership over the years reflect the active interest he took in things other than the law.

The first is NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. His long relationship with the hospital has already been noted.

The second is the Corporation of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the largest independent oceanographic institution in the United States. Jim was elected a member of Woods Hole in 1993 and elected a trustee in 1996. He was a life trustee and served on numerous committees during his tenure as a trustee.

In 2010, in recognition of Jim’s visionary leadership of White & Case and his civic and community service, the New York State Bar Association bestowed upon Jim its Root/Stimson Award for exemplary commitment to community service.

The Root/Stimson Award is the type of lifetime achievement recognition of which Jim was certainly deserving.

Jim was, truly, a citizen of the world.

Acknowledgments

EDITORIAL BOARD

Duane Wall—Editor-in-Chief

Mikki Mahan—Editorial Advisor

George Crozer

Maureen Donovan

Gene Goodwillie

Wendell Maddrey

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Kim Robak

Lillian Martinez

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James Ligi

Kevin Harper

LEGAL REVIEW

Stefan Mentzer

Jennifer Paradise

RESEARCH

Kerri Spennicchia

Sheree Williams

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