This paper explores Wall Street law firms’ geometric growth during the 1980s, as shifts in regulation and global debt markets drove a frenzy of investment-bank-led mergers and takeovers. As deal activity accelerated, New York’s so-called Jewish firms set off on an unprecedented hiring spree: By 1989, the number of corporate lawyers in the city had roughly doubled from a decade earlier.
This paper seeks to answer a series of related questions: Why did Jewish firms serve as the vanguard of new forms of legal work, particularly corporate transactions and strategic bankruptcies related to financialization? Who were these new associates that they hired to do this work? And what was the nature of that work? How was it different than what WASP firms had traditionally done for their clients in the age of managerial capitalism?
This paper argues that the growth in Jewish law firms had two key outcomes. One, growth democratized and diversified the legal world. The need for hundreds of associates to vet deals meant that first Jewish firms, then traditionally-WASP-led firms began hiring at second-tier law schools, and for the first time, increased their ranks of traditionally-underrepresented groups: first, white-ethnics and white women, then other minoritized lawyers, male and female. Two, rapidly-expanding associate cohorts led to white-collar proletarianization. As Jewish law firms grew in scale and specialization, highly-trained associates were deskilled—asked to toil over less and less meaningful intellectual piecework. And partners, far from mentoring associates with an eye towards partnership, sought to profit from their sweated productivity before moving on to exploit new cohorts of recruits. In the 1980s, finance’s logic of liquidity remade the legal world, with Jewish firms leading the way. And those firms, in turn, would became the shock troops for the financialization of American life.