"Among my classmates at Harvard, the thing that bright young guys did was securities law or tax," another white-shoe partner remembers. "Those were the distinguished fields. Litigation was for hams, not for serious people. Corporations just didn't sue each other in those days.
我哈佛的那些同班同学中,那些聪明年轻的家伙干的事情不是证券方面的就是税收方面的。”一位“白鞋”公司的合伙人回忆说,“那些是特别的领域。诉讼只针对那些玩得过火的人,那些规矩的人不会遭遇诉讼。那时的企业一般不会相互起诉。”
What the old-line firms also did not do was involve themselves in hostile corporate takeovers.
那些老牌法律公司还有一样不做,那就是涉及恶意并购、恶意接管的案子。
It's hard to imagine today when corporate raiders and private-equity firms are constantly swamping up one company after another, but until the 1970s, it was considered scandalous for one company to buy another company without the target agreeing to be bought.
这一点在今天很难想像,现在,上市公司和私人直接投资公司不断吞并一家又一家公司,一直到20世纪70年代,人们还认为一家公司在另一家公司没有出让计划时,强行购买该公司是可耻的。
Places like Mudge Rose and the other established firms on Wall Street would not touch those kinds of deals.
诸如默基·罗斯律师事务所和华尔街其他一些法律公司是不会受理这些案子的。
"The problem with hostile takeovers is that they were hostile," says Steven Brill, who founded the trade magazine American Lawyer.
“恶意接管的问题是他们的行为带有敌意,”商业杂志《美国律师》(AmericanLawyer)的创始人斯蒂分·比瑞尔(StevenBrill)如是说,
"It wasn't gentlemanly. If your best buddy from Princeton is the CEO of company X, and he's been coasting for a long time, and some corporator raider shows up and says this company sucks, it makes you uncomfortable. You think, if he goes, then maybe I go too.
“这里不讲究绅士风度。如果你的来自普林斯顿的拍档是公司的首席执行官,他的经营业绩不断下滑,这时候有些人出来中伤企业,说这个公司很烂了,这会让你很不舒服。你想,如果他离开,或许我也要离开。
It's this whole notion of not upsetting the basic calm and stable order of things."
这是平息事态、恢复正常秩序的办法。”
The work that "came in the door" to the generation of Jewish lawyers coming out of the Bronx and Brooklyn in the 1950s and 1960s, then, was the work the whit-shoe firms disdained:litigation and, mor important, "proxy fights," which were the legal maneuver at the center of any hostile takeover bid.
20世纪50年代和60年代,对于布朗克斯地区和布鲁克林地区犹太籍的那一代律师来说,“找上门来”的业务只有诉讼,稍微比较体面一点的,也只是代理人之间的竞争纠纷,这是恶意兼并案例寻求法律支持的主要地方,这些业务是那些“白鞋”公司所不齿的。
An investor would take an interest in a company; he would denounce the management as incompetent and send letters to shareholders, trying to get them to give him their "proxy" so he could vote out the firm's executives.
任何一个投资人要想从一个公司中牟利,他就会指责那一家公司管理者不胜任公司的管理职务,他会写信给公司股东,试图劝说他们把公司“代理权”让给他,他从而可以投票,将现任的执行官赶下台。
And to run the proxy fight, the only lawyer the investor could get was someone like Joe Flom.
如果这个投资者想要发动这场竞争代理人的战争,他需要找的,就是像乔·弗洛姆这样的人。
In Skadden, the legal historian Lincoln Caplan describes that early world of takeovers...
法律史学林肯·开普兰(LincolnCaplan)在《司卡登》(Skadden)一书中这样描述企业兼并的早期世界……