A New (Can't Sit Still) Chief for Cravath
from
July/August 2007
by James Chitwood
Running an elite Wall Street law firm is, of course, a pressure-filled job. So Evan Chesler, the new presiding partner at Cravath Swaine & Moore, copes by tapping—his foot, his finger, his lucky pen.
He has also been known to build things: stick figures out of coffee stirrers, strings of paper-clip art, and when his daughter was young, faux wedding rings for her made out of drinking-straw covers. Then there’s his ongoing vigil to guard against off-center framed pictures; enter a room and he feels compelled to tilt an edge here, push a side there, all to bring the space back into harmony. “I’m a prolific fidgeter,” says Chesler, who rapped his pen so repeatedly during a trial this past January that a fellow lawyer finally grabbed his hand to make him stop. “My colleagues give me grief about it, but I’ve had this series of nervous tics forever.”
Then again, it takes a man with vast reserves of energy, nervous or otherwise, to undertake the challenges of Chesler’s job. He succeeded Robert Joffe as presiding partner of Cravath on January 1, becoming the second litigator (after Joffe) to run the firm. Chesler, 57, not only oversees Cravath’s strategic vision, which requires grappling with questions about how to deal with globalization, but also remains active in litigation. Lately, for example, he’s been working high-profile cases that include a lawsuit brought by client Bristol-Myers Squibb for alleged patent theft and a defense of Merck in securities litigation relating to Vioxx.
To juggle his duties, Chesler works 15-hour days, attending to firm matters early in the morning and late in the evening, before and after his trial day. “He has a unique ability to formulate his ideas as he goes,” says Allen Parker, Cravath’s deputy presiding partner. “It’s a skill he honed as a litigator, because he had to speak on his feet. So if he’s in front of a group, he will say, ‘These are the six things we need to do,’ and then he can literally formulate them as he goes.”
Chesler has always had a knack for oration—Parker says that speaking presence is the first thing people notice about him. At Christopher Columbus High School in the Bronx, Chesler competed on the debate team, was elected president of the student organization, and served as the editor of the student newspaper. He also ran track, though he says with a laugh, “I was a very good student but a relatively lousy runner.”
An unconventional thinker and something of a free spirit, Chesler played rhythm guitar in a band—he says the name is “too embarrassing to repeat; remember, these were the ’60s”—that once opened for the Lovin’ Spoonful. Bored with high school, he left after his junior year when he got early acceptance and a scholarship from New York University. He studied history and Russian studies but says he knew he wanted to be a lawyer. “I remember in the 10th grade, when I read Democracy in America by de Tocqueville, being struck by a line about how the established religion of America is the rule of law, and lawyers are the priests. It made me realize the unique role the law had in this world, and even at 15 I thought it was a compelling idea.”
After tacking on a master’s in Russian studies at Hunter College and receiving his J.D. from NYU, he joined Cravath in 1976 and rose to partner by 1982. During that ascent, he served as counsel in numerous antitrust cases, including the 13-year defense of IBM against monopoly charges, which famously produced 60 million pages of documents.
With his promotion to presiding partner, Chesler faces a new kind of challenge. Bucking the trend of globalization, Cravath is opting not to chase expansion. The firm’s 463 lawyers are, with the exception of a small London office, all based in New York City. In an era when international law is increasingly lucrative, this carries certain risks, including the loss of opportunities in the most potentially profitable site of all, China. But Chesler argues that Cravath can work globally without a physical presence. “That has not impaired our ability to do very significant international transactional work,” he says. “Don’t confuse the geographic footprint with the nature of our work. We have chosen not to be in the branch-office business, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have a very busy international practice. Twenty-five years ago it was a regional, local-centric kind of world. You made your widgets in Prague, say, you raised your capital in your backyard, you worried about local utilities, and you got your workforce locally. If you were an American law firm, you had to set up an office in Prague. Now we can be effective from a distance.”
He concedes that his opinion could change. “One of the things I’m doing on the job is learning,” he says. Cravath, the oldest law firm in Corporate Board Member /FTI Consulting’s Top 20, has been in business since 1819, he notes, adding: “Think about it—our country has only been in business since 1776. Having said that, one of the things that has killed many institutions is a blindness to change and an unwillingness to change. Our biggest challenge is to be nimble and flexible and effective in a very different world than our predecessors’.”
Still, about at least one thing he remains inflexible: that lucky pen with which he taps. Long since dry of ink, it’s a gold Cross pen engraved with his initials that he received as a present from a family member upon graduating from law school. “I can’t write with it, obviously,” he says. “But I never go to court without it.”
There can always be argument about whether it’s better to be lucky or good, but it’s inarguably best to be both.
