Historically, “white-shoe” firms (a term derived from the ugly white buck shoes favored by American Ivy League students) are the elite accounting, banking, consulting, and legal firms serving the largest corporate clients in the financial industry. Their bias for Ivey League schools is by design; the idea is that hiring the top students of these schools commands top quality services in the respective fields, and they can in turn mark up the prices for these services like a Prada bag. These firms emerged with the financial booms and busts in the late 19th century, and they are primarily composed of the social “elite” (mostly WASPs) with family connections and influential networks. “Big” law grew out of a need for expertise from multiple areas of law, multi-state jurisdictions, and the complicated legal matters of the largest corporations where millions and billions of dollars are on the line.

During these times, Paul Cravath (of Cravath, Swaine & Moore) developed a management model that underpins the misery of modern big law firms. These are practices that became industry standard across big law firms.

Compensation, probably the most popular topic, is one of the ways to attract top talent entering into a bidding war among firms. There is a practice of uniform, lockstep compensation (the “Cravath scale”), meaning all the firms have the same salary and salary raises every year. This means associates generally do not worry about trying to take a cut of the fees generated from the client for their work, rather they have billable hour targets and also get relatively (compared to their banker counterparts) modest bonuses as well. This also means that a twenty-something fresh out of law school can get over two hundred grand a year for emailing PDF pages for signatures.

Recruitment, like other white-shoe industry, there is a focus on only hiring from the top law schools through a formalized recruitment process (“on-campus interviews” or “OCIs”). This is a proxy for finding good talent; if they went to Harvard, then they will probably be good lawyers and we can sell them to clients as a lawyer who went to Harvard. They have no idea who will make good lawyers, so let the law schools do the work and let’s see who survives the arbitrary interview process.

Training, for associates, follows an apprenticeship model of learning skills incrementally under the skills of a senior. Typically, the levels of advancement among associates, although not typically reflected in their title, is a junior (1-3 years), midlevel (3-5/6), and senior (5/6-8+). New lawyers are thrown into the deep end and learn by doing and observing. And being yelled at.

Promotions, generally speaking, are automatic if you have enough billable hours and survive layoffs, but only until around the 8th year. Although many firms have moved away from this, traditionally by the 7/8th year you are considered for partner and are promoted “up” to partner or are kicked “out”. It’s a survival of the fittest model. Or survival of whoever can say “will do” for nearly a decade without losing their mind.

The success of the Cravath System led to adoption by other white-shoe firms, but it has evolved significantly. For example, many firms are fine to keep senior associates past year 8 and keep them billing hours profitably. But this Cravath System obvious leads to a lot of toxic norms in big law that are still widely pervasive.

There a big law firms in other jurisdictions that go by various names (e.g., the Magic Circle in London, the Seven Sisters in Toronto, etc.), and there are sometimes even debates about which firms count as big law in New York (e.g., top 100 Vault or Chambers ranked firms). However, compensation is usually the most important factor among lawyers, so it is a pretty good proxy for whether a firm should be considered big law.