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The Firms That Could Rival Cravath — In Hollywood
By Ed Beeson | August 19, 2016, 9:51 PM ET
Owen J. Roberts, Weymouth Kirkland, Elbert Tuttle and Charles Evans Hughes, pictured from left, are
law firm founders with stories fit for the silver screen.
Who knew lawyers had such great stories to tell? Well, who knew that besides lawyers?
A new novel is shining a light on one of the greatest scientific rivalries in history, between the famed
inventor Thomas Edison and the industrialist George Westinghouse, over who would be crowned the
father of America’s burgeoning electrical system. But the book is making waves in legal circles for the
light it is shining on one of the great lions of the sector: the attorney Paul Cravath.
A thriller from Academy Award-winning screenwriter Graham Moore, “The Last Days of Night” recreates the astonishingly tense, and occasionally gruesome, rivalry between two geniuses as they fought
over the glory — and more importantly the crucial patents — for an invention that changed mankind
just before the dawn of the 20th century: the electric lightbulb.
But rather than tell the tale through the view of either inventor, Moore decided to reveal his story
through the eyes of the young Columbia Law grad who represented Westinghouse: Cravath, who’s
perhaps best known these days as the first name in the esteemed law firm Cravath Swaine & Moore LLP.
Moore — who picked up an Oscar for his work on “The Imitation Game,” a film about World War II
codebreaker Alan Turing — said he stumbled upon Cravath’s work during his years of research for the
novel, which was published last Tuesday. But the attorney quickly struck him as the perfect vehicle to
guide the reader through both the action on the ground between Edison and Westinghouse and the
stuffier stuff of science and patent litigation.
“Because he was an attorney, he could provide a lens for the reader,” Moore told Law360. “He’s very
smart, observant and pays a lot of attention to detail, but he’s also a layperson to science.
“That to me was really exciting,” Moore continued, “because it meant the reader got to be inside the
head of this smart, ambitious, 26-year-old attorney, who is quivering at the boots to be in the same
room as Thomas Edison, arguably the most famous person in America at the time.”
“The Last Days of Night,” which moves at a page-turner clip, is racking up kind reviews and is slated to
become a major motion picture directed by Morten Tyldum, who also helmed “The Imitation Game,”
and starring the Academy Award-winning actor Eddie Redmayne.
All this talk, however, makes Law360 wonder what other stories of big moments from the past could be
dramatized from the point of view of name partners and law firm founders. With the help of law firm
historians and others, we present pitches for stories ripe for the Hollywood treatment.
“Six Cents”
The Firm: Kirkland & Ellis LLP
The Pitch: Freedom of the press faced a major challenge in the early 20th
century when Henry Ford, the famed American industrialist, took umbrage
with the Chicago Tribune and its powerful editor and publisher Robert
McCormick, suing them over an editorial that declared him an “anarchist” over
his stance on America’s involvement in the then-raging civil war in Mexico.
It was up to two attorneys — Weymouth Kirkland and his young associate
Howard Ellis — to defend the newspaper and the fundamental rights of the
press. For three years, they fought a fierce battle in the courts against Ford and
his armies of lawyers, building up to a landmark 1919 trial in northern
Michigan, home of Ford’s factories.
Weymouth Kirkland
The story starts in the year 1916. The Mexican Revolution is raging, and the
forces of Pancho Villa, leader of the revolution, cross the Rio Grande and raid a
small town in New Mexico. President Woodrow Wilson orders an expedition into Mexico in retaliation.
Ford, a noted pacifist, decries the invasion, prompting McCormick to blast the automaker in the pages of
his Tribune newspaper. “Henry Ford is an Anarchist,” the editorial insists. Ford, incensed, accuses the
Tribune of libel and slaps the paper with a $1 million lawsuit — or about $20 million in today’s dollars.
Preparing for trial is no small task. A central element of the defense is diving into claims of mistreatment
that Ford’s own workers suffered when, as members of the National Guard, they returned from the
expedition into Mexico. However, those same men are now being sent to fight the German military in
World War I. Getting their story means sending Ellis to the European front, where against a backdrop of
falling bombs and dying soldiers, the intrepid young lawyer is able to find and depose the very men
whom Ford employed and who are now serving in the trenches of the Great War.
The trial commences in May 1919. Both McCormick and Ford end up testifying, and the trial becomes
not just about the issue of libel but also about the broader story of American power abroad through its
incursion into Mexico. The jury deliberates and comes back with a verdict that the Tribune had indeed
libeled Ford. But the real winner is the newspaper. The jury decides the damages owed to the
industrialist are 6 cents. McCormick never pays the judgment.
“A Teapot Tempest”
The Firm: Montgomery McCracken Walker & Rhoads LLP
The Pitch: Before there was Watergate, there was the Teapot Dome scandal.
The time is 1924. President Warren G. Harding had died in office a year
earlier, and investigators were sorting through the corruption and
cronyism that flourished under his short administration. The most
notorious was the awarding of lucrative contracts to tap oil reserves in
the Teapot Dome formation of Wyoming and elsewhere. To get to the
bottom of this, Harding’s successor, President Calvin Coolidge, rings up
Owen J. Roberts, a Philadelphia lawyer who co-founded the firm now
known as Montgomery McCracken Walker & Rhoads, and former U.S.
Sen. Atlee Pomerene of Ohio.
The story opens two years earlier. A black handbag is delivered to
Albert Fall, a former New Mexico senator whom Harding made his
secretary of the interior. Inside the bag is $100,000 in cash. It was
purported to be the proceeds of a loan, but the young man who hands
it to him is the son of one of Fall’s friends, an oilman who’s just
received the exclusive drilling rights for oil reserves in California.
Meanwhile, another oilman friend of Fall’s has ended up with the
drilling rights in Teapot Dome, a strange rock formation in Wyoming
that’s found to hold crude.
Owen J. Roberts
Fast forward to 1924. Harding is dead, Fall has resigned, and Congress is getting nowhere in its
investigation. Cue Roberts. The 48-year-old Republican lawyer known as “the fighting Welshman” is
tapped to investigate the activities of his own party. Teamed with Pomerene, a Democrat, the two
traipse across the U.S. and Canada, from Washington to Toronto to Colorado, tracking fleeting evidence
of the scheme in a shoe-leather investigation that at the time was compared to a Sherlock Holmes
mystery. Among their discoveries was more than $230,000 in war bonds that had secretly made its way
to Fall from the company that took control of the Teapot Dome.
Roberts leads the eventual trial against Fall and scores the first-ever conviction against a Cabinet
member for crimes committed while in office. He would later argue a case before the Supreme Court
that would ultimately strip the corrupt leasing contracts from an oil baron who took control of the
Teapot Dome reserves and return it to the control of the U.S.
Epilogue: Roberts is elevated to the U.S. Supreme Court. Today, the oil reserves under the Dome
continue to earn the U.S. millions of dollars a year.
“Luz Angeles”
The Firm: O’Melveny & Myers LLP
The Pitch: It took a visionary and his lawyer to bring light to the City of Angels.
It is the late 19th century, and Los Angeles is
beginning to emerge from its shell as a rowdy
backwater and become the international
megalopolis it is today. William Kerckhoff, a lumber
magnate, has the idea of harvesting the power of
the nearby San Gabriel River and turning it into
hydroelectric current that could light up the city.
It is an ambitious plan. Commercial electricity
production isn’t yet a decade old, and the
hydroelectric industry is just getting started.
Kerckhoff, however, turned to his lawyer, Henry
O’Melveny, to help him see it through.
Over the course of his 60-year career in the law,
They face a number of conflicts along the way. A
powerful group of agricultural interests that had
Henry O’Melveny helped Los Angeles grow from a
settled along the San Gabriel coalesce to fight
small frontier village to a major metropolis.
Kerckhoff’s plans for a hydroelectric plant, for fear of
it disrupting the flow of the river. Other obstacles
come up, as workers are injured, contractors cause problems and local towns raise objections.
Seven years later, the men are finally clear of their legal and construction woes and ready for their
biggest test. It is 1898. Kerckhoff stands with O’Melveny in a receiving station in downtown LA, waiting
for the fixed minute when it was time to go. In nearby Azusa, water from the San Gabriel spills on the
generating wheels, which begin to turn and perhaps make something of a hum, all while Kerckhoff and
O’Melveny wait with bated breath just two-thirds of a mile away.
“The hopes, the fears, the perplexities and the labor of seven years were crystallized in that second of
time,” O’Melveny would later recall. And then results of their great experiment reveal themselves —
16,000 volts of electricity had coursed its way to Los Angeles and was transformed into the power to run
a city streetcar.
“Habeas Corpus”
The Firm: Sutherland Asbill & Brennan LLP
The Pitch: It is a night in May 1931 that changed Elbert Tuttle’s life and
steered him to the cause of habeas corpus.
Tuttle, a young attorney in Atlanta and member of the Georgia
National Guard, is called into action to save John Downer, an AfricanAmerican man accused of rape, from a lynch mob in rural Elberton,
Georgia. Against a seething swarm of 2,000 white vigilantes, some
armed with sticks of dynamite, Tuttle and his fellow guardsmen spend
a fearful night trying to secret Downer and another black prisoner
away from the jail where they are held, and away from a brutal end
that all too often characterized Southern justice in those times.
Ultimately, it was a clever plan to disguise the prisoners as guardsmen
and escape under the cover of darkness that got them out unharmed.
But as Tuttle, a lawyer who co-founded what would become
Sutherland Asbill & Brennan, witnesses first-hand, Downer was saved
from the mob only to be railroaded in court. A trial was held just over a
Elbert Tuttle
week later, and after 12 hours of proceedings and six minutes of
deliberation, a jury of 12 white men found Downer guilty of rape. A
judge quickly sentenced him to death and quickly closed his avenues to appeal. An execution was
scheduled for the following month.
After the verdict, Tuttle, a Cornell-trained lawyer raised in Hawaii, grows determined to stop the
execution from happening. Along with civil rights activist and lawyer A.T. Walden, Tuttle and Bill
Sutherland, his law firm partner and brother-in-law, mount a legal fight to secure Downer a new trial.
Tuttle is just shy of his 31st birthday at the time.
Their strategy to win a federal court’s writ of habeas corpus succeeds, and a new trial moves forward.
But all of the issues with the fairness of the case and the questions raised about the evidence against
Downer have no effect on the outcome. Downer is convicted by a jury in 1933 and immediately
sentenced to death. He’s executed the following year, proclaiming his innocence until the end.
In 1937, Tuttle and Sutherland take up the appeal of Angelo Herndon, a black man who was sentenced
to up to 20 years on a chain gang after being convicted of violating Georgia’s insurrection laws because
he organized a rally for a local communist party. Tuttle, Sutherland and a New York lawyer take the case
all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which on a 5-4 vote, strikes down Georgia’s insurrection laws
and exonerates Herndon.
Epilogue: Tuttle continues his fight to protect the habeas corpus rights of disenfranchised people,
winning another Supreme Court case in 1938 called Johnson v. Zerbst. He later becomes chief judge of
the Fifth Circuit, where he advances the implementation of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark
desegregation ruling, throughout the Southeast.
“Balance the Power”
The Firm: Hughes Hubbard & Reed LLP
The Pitch: The strength of a country can be measured by its restraint
of power. In 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was at
loggerheads with the U.S. Supreme Court led by the conservative
Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes Sr. Seeing pieces of his New Deal
legislation struck down as unconstitutional, Roosevelt came up with
a legislative plan to overhaul the federal bench and stack the high
court with as many as six new justices.
Roosevelt unveils his plans in February of that year, and tries to sell
the American public the next month during one of his famous
fireside chats broadcast over the radio. The proposal has a certain
popular appeal, but private fears swell about the president’s clear
desire to usher in the biggest reform to the judiciary in the history of
the country.
Some begin to look to Justice Hughes, a veteran of politics and law
who is approaching 75, as the one to defuse the situation. Two
weeks after Roosevelt’s address, members of Congress ask the chief
justice to testify on the legislation, an offer Hughes says he will
accept if he’s accompanied by his liberal colleague, Justice Louis Brandeis.
Charles Evans Hughes
However, it is Justice Brandeis who talks the chief justice back. Members of the court shouldn’t be
making a foray into the political arena, Brandeis cautions. With this in mind, Justice Hughes picks up his
pen instead and drafts a letter to Congress, stating what he says to be the facts of Roosevelt’s plan, but
really sending a warning about the political ambitions he harbored. This warning seems to do the trick,
swaying legislators away from supporting the bill and helping it die on the vine.
It's here that the plot thickens. About a week after Justice Hughes delivered his letter, the high court
makes a move that historians have dubbed the “switch in time that saved nine.” The conservative
Justice Owen Roberts gives a surprise fifth vote to uphold the constitutionality of a minimum wage law,
marking an end to high court blockades to New Deal legislation. Justice Hughes, in his memoirs, writes
that there was no political influence on the court’s decision in the case. The full story, however, may be
lost to history.
Epilogue: In the end, Roosevelt got what he wanted without adding chairs to the court. By virtue of
serving as president for more than 12 years, FDR was able to outlast most of the court, appointing a
total of eight justices by 1941.
Ed Beeson is a feature reporter for Law360’s In-Depth magazine. He’s not a real screenwriter, but he’d
like to play one on TV.