Cravath Brand Guidelines: The 1819 New York Firm Behind the Cravath System

A Manhattan practice, an Auburn partnership and a merger in 1854.

Cravath dates its history to 22 March 1819, when Richard M. Blatchford opened a law office in New York City, the firm says on its own history page. The International Directory of Company Histories, in its entry on the firm, adds that in 1823 the retired judge Elijah Miller formed a partnership with the young William H. Seward in Auburn, upstate New York, and that the Auburn firm merged into the New York firm in 1854, creating Blatchford, Seward & Griswold. Seward went on to serve as governor of New York and as Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of State, and the firm says both founding families served Lincoln during the Civil War.

The early clients were banks and inventors. The Directory says the Bank of England chose Blatchford as its agent and counsel in the United States in 1826; English Wikipedia lists clients including Samuel F. B. Morse in the 1840s, Cyrus McCormick, Elias Howe and Charles Goodyear in the 1850s, and George Westinghouse in the 1880s. After the Civil War the firm worked for railroads, and in 1890 it helped incorporate the American Tobacco Company, according to the Directory.

The name changed with the partners. The Directory gives the sequence as Seward, Da Costa & Guthrie in 1885; Seward, Guthrie, Morawetz & Steele in 1893; Guthrie, Cravath & Henderson in 1901, after Paul D. Cravath joined in 1899; Cravath & Henderson in 1913; Cravath, Henderson, Leffingwell & de Gersdorff in 1920; and Cravath, de Gersdorff, Swaine & Wood in 1928. On 1 March 1944 the firm adopted the name Cravath, Swaine & Moore, which English Wikipedia says has not changed since. In everyday use the firm is simply “Cravath.”

A way of hiring and training lawyers that carries the firm’s name.

The firm’s name is attached to a method as much as to a practice. English Wikipedia credits Paul Cravath with devising the Cravath System, “combining a distinct method of hiring, training, and compensating lawyers.” The Directory describes its parts: hiring new law school graduates, training them as associates and, after several years, admitting the strongest to the partnership, with partner pay based mainly on seniority. The firm’s own page today describes it as a model in which “our partners come from the ranks of our own associates,” and in which associates rotate through practice areas within their department until they are considered for partnership. English Wikipedia notes that lateral partner hires were rare before 2020.

The firm grew slowly through the first half of the twentieth century. The Directory records offices opened in Washington, D.C. and Paris in the 1920s; the Paris office closed in 1934 and the Washington office was later closed too. Through the Depression and the Second World War the firm worked on railroad reorganizations, bank trust work and securities issues, and Time Inc. was its leading publishing client from 1928. In the late 1930s, the Directory says, the Martindale-Hubbell directory listed 18 partners, and the writer Ferdinand Lundberg, in Harper’s Magazine in 1939, called the firm a “law factory.” Paul Cravath himself was a founder of the Council on Foreign Relations in 1921. By 1944 it had 72 lawyers and by 1948, 97, the Directory says. Robert T. Swaine, whose name the firm carries, published its three-volume history, The Cravath Firm and Its Predecessors, 1819–1947, in 1948.

After the war the firm took on long cases. The Directory says it defended IBM in antitrust lawsuits that ran from 1969 to 1982. English Wikipedia lists the Schechter Poultry case of 1935, in which the Supreme Court struck down codes made under the National Industrial Recovery Act, and the firm’s work in the 1960s on behalf of the Congress of Racial Equality’s Freedom Rides.

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.

Three offices and a third century.

Cravath has stayed comparatively compact. English Wikipedia describes a firm of about 500 lawyers, most of them in New York, with a London office opened in 1973 and a Washington, D.C. office opened in 2022; a Hong Kong office, opened in 1994, closed nine years later. “We are not, and do not strive to be, the largest law firm measured by number of offices or lawyers,” the firm says on its website, which lists its offices as New York, London and Washington, D.C. English Wikipedia names Faiza Saeed as presiding partner.

The firm marked its bicentennial in 2019. That March, English Wikipedia says, the New-York Historical Society opened an installation on the firm’s two centuries of legal work, and in the same year Fisk University in Nashville launched a Cravath Scholars programme for its students; the Cravath family’s ties to Fisk go back to the university’s founding during Reconstruction, the firm says. On its website the firm presents itself through practices, people, careers and news, with separate pages for the Cravath System, pro bono work and an alumni journal, and on 5 November 2026 it announced a new group of partners and of counsel.

For a design guide, Cravath shows how a firm can turn its own training method into part of its name, and keep a long partnership title while answering to one word. Compare Davis Polk, another New York firm with nineteenth-century roots, and Sullivan & Cromwell. For this guide we use navy, ivory and a claret with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Cravath’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.