1910 – 1950
After Sam’s untimely death in 1910 at age 58, two of his sons, first William (Yale ’08, Columbia Law ’10), and then Louis (Yale ’15, Columbia Law ’20), sustained their father’s practice into the mid-20th Century, eventually under the name Cohen, Cole, Weiss & Wharton, expanding its reach into representations ranging from major newspapers, such as The Chicago Sun and The New York Post, to the most significant technological developments of the day in film, television and theatre.

In May 1946, having steadily grown the practice, Louis S. Weiss catapulted the firm into the ranks of the City’s first-tier legal powerhouses by recruiting two nationally known leaders of the bar—the former general counsel of the U.S. Treasury Department during World War II, Randolph E. Paul, and the former National War Labor Board chair, Lloyd K. Garrison—to form Paul, Weiss, Wharton & Garrison. Four years later, in May 1950, the firm added the foundation of what was to become one of the country’s foremost litigation practices with the addition of former U.S. District Judge Simon H. Rifkind.

Enduring in heritage, eclectic in personality, enterprising in practice and most famously ecumenical in attitudes, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison sought to become a different kind of law firm. The goal, Simon Rifkind wrote in 1963 in the Statement of Firm Principles, is “to achieve the highest order of excellence in the practice of the art, the science and the profession of the law; through such practice to earn a living and to derive the stimulation and pleasure of worthwhile adventure; and in all things to govern ourselves as members of a free democratic society with responsibilities both to our profession and our country.” The firm’s governance is dedicated to the principle of one partner/one vote, no matter seniority or client appeal, and to universal service in all aspects of firm administration, with attendant transparency in firm management and collegiality in firm culture. Its partners are committed to providing excellence in the rendition of legal services at the pinnacle of the profession while remaining actively engaged in matters of social consequence. To this end, the firm seeks to attract lawyers reflecting a wide variety of religious, political, ethnic, cultural, gender, sexual orientation and social backgrounds characteristic of the city of its home.

The firm’s partners and counsel have included a two-time Democratic presidential nominee (Adlai E. Stevenson), an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (Arthur J. Goldberg), a Counsel to the President (Theodore C. Sorensen), and appointees in the administrations of 16 consecutive U.S. Presidents, from Herbert Hoover to Joseph Biden.
Among its ranks have appeared a U.S. Senator; two U.S. Attorneys General; a U.S. Secretary of Labor; a U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security; an Acting U.S. Treasury Secretary; a U.S. Undersecretary of State; a U.S. Undersecretary of Commerce; the first chair of the National Labor Relations Board; a chair of the Federal Communications Commission; a Commissioner of Internal Revenue; a chair of the Federal Trade Commission; the General Counsel of the U.S. Department of Defense; the first General Counsel of the Peace Corps; two persons named Special Masters by the U.S. Supreme Court; a chief judge of a federal circuit; three federal district judges; a member of the New York Court of Appeals; a longtime Justice of the First Department’s Appellate Division; a U.S. Bankruptcy Judge; a Chancellor and a Vice Chancellor of the Delaware Chancery Court; a lead prosecutor in the Nuremberg war crimes trials; a chief counsel to the U.S. House Subcommittee investigating the Internal Revenue Service; a chief counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee investigating the Iran-Contra Affair; three U.N. Ambassadors; and assorted envoys on U.S. missions overseas.
Of the six women who have served or are currently serving on the U.S. Supreme Court, three began their careers as summer associates at Paul, Weiss.
The firm was the first major New York City firm to break down the barrier of Jews practicing with Gentiles, the first to hire a Black associate, the first to hire a Black woman associate, the first to make a woman a partner, the first to move its offices to midtown Manhattan, and the first to open a full-service office on mainland China.
The firm and its lawyers participated in efforts to free the Scottsboro Boys by winning reversal of their conviction in the U.S. Supreme Court; to save the Jews of Europe from the Holocaust by changing American policy toward immigration; to ease the suffering of those who escaped that horror by providing refuge in America; to break racial segregation by plotting the attack on Plessy v. Ferguson and later working on the briefs in Brown v. Board of Education; to assure U.S. publication of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover by challenging restrictions on its import; to establish the principle of one-person one-vote by cracking Georgia’s county-unit rule; to bring free Shakespeare to Central Park by overcoming Robert Moses’ efforts to stop it; to resist the death penalty by defending scores condemned to die and obtaining a historic victory in the U.S. Supreme Court forbidding execution of the mentally disabled; to protect a woman’s right to choose by fighting attacks on Roe v. Wade; to introduce educational public television to the airways by forming the Public Broadcasting System; to defend the teaching of evolution in the public schools by persuading the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down Louisiana’s Creationism Act; to start the Gateway National Park system by setting up its first beachhead; to battle ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Bosnia by supplying an American forum for its victims to testify against Radovan Karadzic; to rescue the NAACP Legal Defense Fund from near-death at the hands of Southern Senators bent on its demise; to conceive and implement the Times Square TKTS booth by inventing the Theater Development Fund; to obtain needed drugs for victims of AIDS by fighting FDA resistance to granting approvals; to defeat apartheid and introduce democracy in South Africa by founding the South Africa Free Election Fund; to fight discrimination against gays and lesbians by arguing the first legal test on gay marriage in New York and then prevailing in the U.S. Supreme Court in the Windsor case establishing a constitutional right for gays and lesbians to marry; to promote sane and stricter gun control legislation; and to save the City of New York from bankruptcy by representing the City in its darkest hour.
The firm is credited with bringing the first purely environmental law case in the country—a 1963 action successfully stopping a proposed power plant on landmark Storm King Mountain in the Hudson River Valley—and championed representations pro bono publico decades before the term entered the lexicon of major law firms. Its members have headed the Legal Aid Society, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the National Urban League, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Educational Alliance, the United Negro College Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, The Alliance for the Arts, Citizens for Clean Air, U.N. Watch, the American College of Trial Lawyers, the American College of Real Estate Lawyers, the American Council on Race Relations, the Greater New York Community Council, New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, the New York State Bar Association and the New York City Bar Association. Few matters of national, state or local significance, and today increasingly of international moment, have occurred without touching its halls. In his posthumously published autobiography, one of its most storied partners, Arthur L. Liman, knowledgably wrote that “[e]very economical and social upheaval in the country has found its way into our office.”
The firm’s clients have included the largest financial institutions in the world, and the earth’s neediest citizens. In between are names, by way of tiny sample, such as Spiro T. Agnew, Julie Andrews, Kofi Annan, Brooke Astor, the Berrigan Brothers, Andy Capp, Hugh L. Carey, Lucia Chase, Joan Ganz Clooney, William Sloan Coffin, Willem de Kooning, William O. Douglas, Pierre DuPont, Leo Durocher, Philo Farnsworth, Federico Fellini, Marshall Field III, Curt Flood, Jane Fonda, Henry Ford, Jr., Otto Frank, Anna Freud, Hugh Hefner, Leona Helmsley, Don Henley, Anita F. Hill, Langston Hughes, Hubert H. Humphrey, Steve Jobs, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, Robert F. Kennedy, Calvin Klein, John Lennon, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Nelson Mandela, Thurgood Marshall, John McEnroe, Golda Meir, Marilyn Monroe, Vladimir Nabokov, Joe Namath, Paul Newman, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, William S. Paley, Joseph Papp, I.M. Pei, Cole Porter, Charles Revson, David Rockefeller, Steve Ross, Mark Rothko, Anwar Sadat, Dorothy Schiff, Richard Serra, Paul Simon, Stephen Sondheim, Eliot Spitzer, Jessica Tandy, Donatella Versace, Robert Vesco, Andy Warhol, Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber, Jock Whitney and August Wilson.