Wachtell, Lipton Brand Guidelines: A 1965 NYU Partnership, the Poison Pill & Black Rock

Law Review friends and a new kind of practice.

Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz was founded in New York in 1965 by graduates of New York University School of Law. Wikipedia names Herbert Wachtell and Jerry Kern as the founders, joined shortly afterwards by Martin Lipton, Leonard Rosen and George Katz, and says the four named partners had met as editors of the New York University Law Review. Its article on Lipton adds that from 1958 he had worked at a ten-lawyer firm, Seligson, Morris & Neuburger, alongside Rosen and Katz, and was teaching at NYU when the group formed the new partnership. The New York Observer, profiling Lipton in December 2005, described him as having founded the firm in 1965 with fellow NYU law graduates.

The firm grew up with the takeover market. Wikipedia says it rose to prominence on Wall Street at a time when brokers and investment bankers were launching small firms that drew little attention from the established firms. The Observer wrote in 2005 that Wachtell, together with Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, helped redefine the mission of a law firm: both became mergers-and-acquisitions and takeover specialists, hired for a contest rather than kept on retainer, which loosened the old ties between particular investment banks and particular law firms.

The name has a short form, and two ways of saying it. The Observer noted that outsiders usually call the firm “Wachtell,” while people inside say “Wachtell Lipton,” in recognition of Lipton’s role. Wikipedia gives “Wachtell” as the common name and spells out its pronunciation as “WOK-tel.” This guide uses the two-name form, Wachtell, Lipton.

The poison pill and the partnership.

Wachtell’s reputation rests on mergers, takeover defence and corporate governance. The shareholder rights plan, usually called the poison pill, was devised by Martin Lipton in 1982 as a response to hostile tender offers, according to Wikipedia, and spread during the takeover wave of the early 1980s. The Delaware Supreme Court upheld such a plan in Moran v. Household International in 1985, which Wikipedia describes as the first case in which a US state court upheld a shareholder rights plan. The firm’s own Wikipedia article lists that case among the Delaware rulings in which it acted, alongside Paramount Communications v. Time in 1989 and Air Products v. Airgas in 2011.

Lipton’s standing in the field drew colourful comparisons. The Observer quoted a former Securities and Exchange commissioner, speaking to The American Lawyer, as saying that if mergers and acquisitions had an Elvis Presley, it was Lipton. Wikipedia’s article on him says that by the early 1980s he and the Skadden partner Joseph Flom were the dominant rivals in the field, and that clients hired one because the other was on the opposite side.

The firm is organised differently from most large American firms. Wikipedia says it works from a single Manhattan office and is one of the smallest firms in the AmLaw 100, the annual list published by The American Lawyer. Its article on Lipton says the firm was “founded as a handshake among four friends,” has no written partnership agreement, and divides partners’ shares equally on a seniority basis. In 2005 the Observer put the firm at under 200 lawyers.

The links to NYU continued alongside the practice. Wikipedia says Lipton taught corporate law and securities regulation there as a lecturer and adjunct professor from 1958 to 1978, chaired the law school’s board of trustees from 1988 to 1998, and went on to chair the university’s board.

How large US law firms present themselves.

Large American law firms tend to present themselves with restraint. Many are named after founding or senior partners, and their names are often set as sober wordmarks: a serif with a long institutional pedigree, or a plain grotesque sans, usually in a single colour. Navy, near-black and white are common choices, with an occasional accent kept for links and headings rather than for decoration. Long partnership titles are frequently cut down over the decades to two surnames joined by an ampersand, or to a single surname used in conversation.

Their websites are built around how clients and recruits search. Practice-area and industry pages sit near the top, alongside a directory of lawyer biographies, each with a headshot, admissions, education and representative work. Latham & Watkins, for example, organises its main menu under People, Capabilities, Achievements, Insights and Global Citizenship, and lists every office by city on its About Us page.

Publishing is a large part of the presentation. Firms issue client alerts on new laws and rulings, along with articles, podcasts and webcasts grouped under headings such as insights or thought leadership. Many also publish pro bono reports, figures on community service and reports on diversity and inclusion, and some set out environmental commitments for their offices.

Recruiting pages form a separate register, written for law students and junior lawyers: summer associate programmes, training, office life and alumni networks. Across all of these pages the visual system usually stays quiet, so that the firm’s name, its people and its record of work carry the identity. The guides in this series look at how individual firms use those conventions, and where their histories and names differ.

Black granite above Sixth Avenue.

For its single office, the firm settled in one of Manhattan’s most recognisable modern towers. Wikipedia’s article on the CBS Building — the 38-storey tower on Sixth Avenue between 52nd and 53rd streets known as Black Rock, the only skyscraper designed by Eero Saarinen — says that in the early 1990s, as CBS began leasing out space, Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz signed a lease for floors 27 to 33, and that the firm renewed its lease in 2018. The nickname comes from the facade, angled piers clad in dark Canadian granite alternating with dark-tinted glass, so that the tower reads as a single slab. Wikipedia says the building was designated a New York City landmark in 1997 and was renamed 51W52 by the investment firm that bought it in 2021.

The Observer described the inside of the firm in 2005: hallways panelled in anigre wood and black granite that, in the paper’s words, “practically purr with restraint,” and a conference room on the 31st floor of the tower. It added that the firm had never adopted casual Fridays. The same profile set the firm’s size against that of Skadden, which it said had many times as many lawyers.

For a design guide, Wachtell, Lipton shows how a firm can be known through its founders’ names, a single address and an idea in takeover law rather than through a network of offices. Compare Skadden, the New York firm the Observer paired with Wachtell in reshaping mergers practice, and White & Case, a firm with offices in dozens of countries. For this guide we use granite black, a warm stone grey and paper white with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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