Biglaw, Contests, Politics, Reader Polls

Above The Law's 2016 Lawyer Of The Year Contest: The Winner!

Election 2016 repeats itself, as the Establishment suffers a surprising defeat.

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Donald F. McGahn II (via YouTube)

Donald F. McGahn II (via YouTube)

The competition for 2016 Lawyer of the Year (“LOTY”) honors unfolded just like Election 2016. An elite leader of the Establishment led for most of the contest, but suffered a surprise upset at the hands of an outsider.

For most of the race, C. Allen Parker — the former presiding partner of Cravath Swaine & Moore, and the man widely credited with taking New York (and most of Biglaw) to a new $180K pay scale — enjoyed a healthy lead in the polls. But that lead eroded in the home stretch, and victory went to a relative outsider: Jones Day partner Donald F. McGahn II, who served as general counsel to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, and who will serve as President Trump’s White House counsel.

Note the reference to McGahn as a relative outsider. It would be hard to regard a D.C. power broker, current Biglaw partner, and former chairman of the Federal Election Commission as a true outsider. (McGahn’s best claim to non-elite status: graduating from Widener Law.) But by the same token, McGahn’s boss — billionaire businessman, longtime celebrity, son of a real estate tycoon, graduate of Wharton — is no stranger to power and privilege, yet sailed on to victory as an anti-Establishment figure.

McGahn prevailed with 41 percent of the vote. Honorable mentions go to Parker, with 34 percent, and Hillary Clinton, with 11 percent. If there were an “electoral college” made up of Above the Law editors, we might have given the win to Parker, partly out of gratitude for the excitement — and website traffic — generated by the Great Pay Raise of 2016. But our editorial discretion ends after we’ve selected the finalists; from that point forward, the popular vote controls.

And, in fairness to Don McGahn, there’s a strong case to be made that he was the most consequential counselor of 2016. If not for McGahn’s expert legal work — defeating challenges that would have kept Trump off the ballot in early primary states, avoiding a contested convention (with the help of fellow JD partner Bill McGinley), and keeping the Trump campaign on the right side of the FEC and the law — Donald Trump might not be our president-elect. Few lawyers can plausibly claim that they made such a difference in national and world history.

Now what about the third-place finisher, Hillary Clinton? One could argue that her mistakes paved the way for President Trump. But we’re focusing here on Lawyer of the Year, and Clinton’s missteps were more political than legal in nature; even the email scandal was more of a political than legal problem (since fellow LOTY finalists Jim Comey and Loretta Lynch never indicted HRC). And it’s also hard to say how much blame belongs to Clinton personally and how much must be shared with her campaign.

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Here are Don McGahn’s august predecessors as Lawyers of the Year:

This is probably one of the few times that McGahn doesn’t mind being in the company of Barack Obama. Congratulations to Donald F. McGahn II, our nation’s 2016 Lawyer of the Year!

P.S. You know what would be a fantastic demonstration of Don McGahn’s power within the Trump Administration? If we could get a Twitter shout-out from @RealDonaldTrump himself, congratulating his top lawyer on being named Lawyer of the Year — and sending his 19.2 million followers to this post. That would be, as DJT might say, “Very nice!”

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DBL square headshotDavid Lat is the founder and managing editor of Above the Law and the author of Supreme Ambitions: A Novel. He previously worked as a federal prosecutor in Newark, New Jersey; a litigation associate at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; and a law clerk to Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. You can connect with David on Twitter (@DavidLat), LinkedIn, and Facebook, and you can reach him by email at dlat@abovethelaw.com.

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