In this unprecedented look at the culture of American lawyering, Lincoln Caplan shows us Skadden's origins in the white-shoe postwar legal world and its rise to preeminence in the era of Drexel Burnham Lambert - the firm's largest client in the eighties. Skadden is revealed as a place that prizes opportunists but which also created a $10 million program to support public-interest lawyers. In Caplan's probing and even-handed account, the story of Joe Flom's firm illuminates an era in America business and society.