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Anthony Lin
New York Law Journal
February 6, 2007

It's bowling night at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, and even the firm's biggest names are staring down pins at New York City's Bowlmor Lanes.

Mergers and acquisitions partner Dennis J. Block, in a white T-shirt, determinedly hoists a ball in hopes of leading his group to victory. But his score for the game is a mediocre 83, and his team barely seems in contention.

Over in the last lane, firm Chairman Robert O. Link is cutting a more jovial figure. Wearing a shirt that goofily declares, "The captain of my team did not submit a design so all I got was this crummy t-shirt," the captain described laughs about how he took up bowling during long layovers in the Midwest.

But between jokes, Link rolls a steady stream of strikes and spares. His team does not win (the environmental practice group is victorious), but Link individually bowls 145, two games in a row.

"Don't let him fool you," someone says as Link, 52, takes down another frame. "He's the most competitive person you'll ever meet."

In the competition that matters most to him, Link also has been coming out on top of late. Over the past three years, Cadwalader, once largely dismissed as a second-tier firm, has surged into the very top ranks of the nation's law firms in terms of profitability Am Law 100 survey by The American Lawyer magazine, a New York Law Journal affiliate, Cadwalader had profits per partner of more than $2.5 million in 2005, topped only by perennial leaders Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz and Cravath, Swaine & Moore and ahead of Sullivan & Cromwell, Davis Polk & Wardwell, Simpson Thacher & Bartlett and other elite names. The figure was also more than double Cadwalader's profits per partner from 2002, when the firm ranked just 15th in the nation by that measure.

Last week, Link, the firm's chairman since 1994, said Cadwalader's profits per partner jumped again in 2006 to $2.9 million on revenue of $555 million. He said he saw no reason 2007 should be different.

"Are we going to have difficulty sustaining this?" he asked. "No, short of some cataclysmic event that hits everyone else too."

But to others in the profession, Cadwalader's apparent success is itself something of a cataclysmic event. The oldest law firm in America and once one of the most genteel, Cadwalader under Link went through a wrenching and controversial 1990s turnaround during which it transformed itself into perhaps the nation's most aggressively profit-focused law firm. Today's Cadwalader, at which big producers are lavishly rewarded and underperformers are shown the door, presents a stark alternative to the more conservative ways of New York's traditional top-tier firms.

"They are definitely the firm to watch," said the managing partner of one leading New York firm recently overtaken by Cadwalader in the profit charts. "Even though they recognize the business realities, most law firms still hold on to certain ways of doing things. Cadwalader is run like a corporation."

But whether a law firm