EARLE YAFFA
Skadden, Arps, Slate,
Meagher & Flom
New York
STEVEN BRILL
Going Corporate
The American Lawyer
New York
Skadden’s Yaffa set the mold for today’s C-suite professionals.
IN THE LAST 30 YEARS, The Am Law 200 has increasingly come to resemble corporate America—with the profits and global footprint to
match. Guiding this transition behind the scenes
is a phalanx of “C-suite” professionals, such as
chief marketing officers, chief revenue officers,
and chief operating officers. These men and
women walked through a door that was opened
by Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom’s
Earle Yaffa. He became Skadden’s first and only
managing director in 1980. And because of Yaffa’s success in such a sensitive role, other firms
opted to follow Skadden’s model and appoint
people with business expertise to prominent
management jobs.
In 1979 Skadden brought in Yaffa, then at
Arthur Young & Co., to overhaul the firm’s IT
systems. A year later, he came on full-time as the
firm’s managing director. Yaffa worked on strat-
egy and assumed oversight of all nonlegal as-
pects of the firm, including operations, finance,
and technology. As Skadden grew from 200 law-
yers in 1980 to more than 800 lawyers in 1987,
he jumped into analyzing the competitive land-
scape and designing a customized billing and fi-
nancial reporting system to track collections, re-
alization, and profitability. “Yaffa thought about
law firm finances in a way others hadn’t—run-
ning a firm by financial metrics—and measuring
a firm’s success by finances,” says law firm con-
sultant Peter Zeughauser.
IN 1985 BRILL HAD AN IDEA: Why not rank
U.S. law firms by financial performance, just
like public companies on the Fortune 500?
Brill’s innovation, The Am Law 50 (eventually
expanded to 200 firms) rocked the secretive
world of large law firms. While some say the
rankings corrode firm culture—encouraging
lateral movement, overemphasizing partner
pay, and discouraging lockstep—there’s an
upside: increasing the transparency of a
powerful, multibillion-dollar industry. “If you
take [private] enterprises and report which
work most efficiently and productively,”
Brill told The American Lawyer in May 2012,
“you’re enhancing the marketplace.”
MARK HARRIS
Axiom
New York
WHEN MARK HARRIS was an associate
at Davis Polk & Wardwell in the 1990s, he
decided that the pyramid structure of law
firms—a broad base of associates and a
small set of partners—was outdated and inefficient. In 2000 Harris, along with Stanford
MBA Alec Guettel, cofounded Axiom, an alternative legal services business that allows
clients, including such companies as Cisco
Systems Inc. and Google Inc., to “insource”
Axiom attorneys or “outsource” legal functions to Axiom itself. Axiom’s business model has disrupted the industry by allowing clients to pay a fraction for services that had
been performed by outside firms.
BEN HEINEMAN JR.
General Electric Company
Fairfield, Connecticut
BEFORE BEN HEINEMAN JR. took over as
general counsel at General Electric Company in 1987, in-house counsel were seen as
“Rolodex lawyers,” farming out most of their
work to outside counsel. Heineman changed
that, peppering GE’s legal department with
partners from such firms as Baker & McKenzie and Williams & Connolly. Many of them
went on to the executive ranks of companies like Home Depot Inc., Pfizer Inc., and
Tyco International Ltd, among others. By
luring all-stars to GE and assigning them demanding matters, Heineman proved that in-house work was worthy of top-notch talent.
