Turks and Brahmins.

• Author: Allen, Charlotte

Turks and Brahmins Turks and Brahmins. Ellen Joan Pollock. Simon & Schuster, $21.95. Until the mid-eighties, lawyers at New York's Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy, once the largest law firm in the country, wore nearly identical dark blue suits to their offices at One Chase Manhattan Plaza, headquarters of their chief client, the Chase Manhattan Bank. And not just any dark blue suit, but a boxy, ultra-staid version--always with a plain white shirt, never stripes--that was the Milbank livery, as peculiar to the firm as its custom of a partners' lunch every Monday at the Down Town Association, a private club a block away from the Milbank offices. As compensation for attendance, each partner got a crisp $10 bill fresh from the nearby Federal Reserve.

Besides Chase, Milbank's other major client for at least six decades was the Rockefeller family, which owned Chase. Strong personal alliances between Milbank partners and the Rockefellers ensured that the family and the bank would account for most of Milbank's business for years. The firm did all the legal work on the building of Rockefeller Center.

Milbank carefully nurtured its "insular, noble culture," to use the words of Ellen Joan Pollock, a Wall Street Journal writer and editor, who in this book chronicles the firm's more recent vagaries as its ties to Chase and the Rockefellers loosened. For 50 years, from 1931 to 1981, the firm never took on a "lateral" partner from the outside; all its 65 or so partners had apprenticed with the firm as salaried associates straight from mostly Ivy league law schools. Until 1984, no Milbank partner ever had left the firm to become a lateral-hire partner elsewhere. The partner compensation system was an old-fashioned "lockstep" one, in which the size of a partner's profit share depended strictly on seniority, not on rainmaking skills (Milbank partners flinched at the very idea of making rain) or hours billed.

By 1984, the 200-lawyer Milbank was an almost laughable anachronism, left behind in the great law office revolution of the late seventies and early eighties, when both old and new firms ballooned in size, dumped lockstep compensation for "merit" systems that rewarded achievers, raided each other for star players, and hustled ceaselessly for clients. If Milbank carefully recruited its associates for future partnership, other firms "leveraged" them, as the jargon goes, hiring them in quantity, working them around the clock (at huge salaries), and using...