Rise of the 'Beltway Bandit' Lawyers.

• Author: McKinley, Vern

White Shoe: How a New Breed of Wall Street Lawyers Changed Big Business and the American Century By John Oiler 448 pp.; Dutton, 2019

Washington, DC and its surrounding suburbs are known for an abundance of "Beltway bandits," those who make their living by feeding, either directly or indirectly, from the public trough. I recently reviewed a book recounting the storied history of one type of Beltway bandit: the accounting and consulting firms collectively called the Big Four ("Are the 'Big Four' on Their Last Leg?" Fall 2019).

This book, White Shoe by John Oller, traces the parallel historical development of the modern law firm. He worked as a "white shoe Wall Street lawyer" in the New York office of Willkie Farr & Gallagher, representing such prominent clients as Major League Baseball. In 2004 he wrote a history of the firm, which was a precursor to this volume.

In the prologue to White Shoe, Oller gives us some background on the curious term that provides the book's title. It comes from "the white buck shoes worn by generations of Ivy League college men who, as members of the WASP elite, went on to run the leading law, banking, and accounting firms on Wall Street."

Modernization of administration / Oller begins White Shoe with folksy stories about the structure of the late 19th century law firm. He colorfully describes cozy little operations made up of one or two partners supported by a handful of clerks who worked "without pay for a few years, performing secretarial duties in exchange for a desk and access to the partners' library."

Those law firms often eschewed the contemporary, emerging conveniences of telephones and typewriters because they were inconsistent with the era's social operating norms. Telephones were seen as lacking privacy because partners felt that "the only dignified way of communication between members of the legal profession was for them to write each other in Spencerian script, and to have the message thus expressed delivered by hand."

Similar attitudes were applied to the use of typewriters.

Documents were drawn up in longhand by men who stood or sat on tall stools at high slanting desks. The best penman would write page after page and pass them down the line to scriveners, who laboriously copied them at long tables. Finally, as the workload grew in the early 20th century, "firms began hiring female stenographers, secretaries and typists to replace most copyists."

Oller commits an early chapter to the "Cravath...