Congratulations To The 2016 Skadden Fellows

Congrats to the 28 fellows, who come from 15 different law schools.

onDecember 22, 2015 at 5:27 PMDecember 23, 2015 at 8:19 PM

Congratulations to Skadden Arps on becoming the first “trillion-dollar M&A firm.” As noted by the American Lawyer, Skadden’s work advising DuPont in its planned merger with Dow Chemical “will yield a combined entity valued at a whopping $130 billion, making Skadden the first legal adviser to handle over $1 trillion in announced M&A deals in a single year.”

Skadden’s prowess in transactional practice comes as no surprise. I was recently chatting with a corporate partner at a rival firm who said he’s always glad when Skadden is on the other side of the deal, praising SASMF lawyers as “commercial” — which he meant as a compliment, a synonym for “business-minded” or “practical” (unlike lawyers at certain other elite firms that shall remain nameless).

A trillion dollars in deals — think about all the fees, glorious fees! You can’t blow all that cheddar on fancy suits and six-figure bonuses.

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Fortunately for the legal profession, Skadden devotes a good chunk of its profits to public interest law, most famously through its Skadden Fellowship program. Described as “a legal Peace Corps,” the program was established in 1988, in honor of Skadden’s 40th anniversary as a law firm. The two-year fellowships support graduating law students committed to public interest work as they embark upon specific projects at sponsoring organizations.

The Foundation just announced its 2016 class of Skadden Fellows. The 28 fellows come from 15 different law schools, with Harvard producing the most this time around (five fellows) and Yale and Michigan taking second place (four each).

Congratulations to the winners of the Skadden Fellowships, the public-interest world’s version of Supreme Court clerkships or Rhodes Scholarships, and good luck to them as they start working next year at worthy organizations around the country. For the full list of 2016 fellows and a list of which law schools have produced the most Skadden Fellows over the past eight years, flip to the next page.