This superbly researched and splendidly written book is at once a fascinating family drama, a compelling company history, and a moving appreciation of constant values against a background of changing times, fashions, and challenges. It is also a revealing portrayal of the evolution of the American legal profession as reflected in one of its most prominent and prestigious firms.

In many ways, Coudert Brothers is a strikingly emblematic embodiment of the American dream itself. The father of the trio of brothers who founded the firm was a refugee from the political oppression of the Old World who came to early nineteenth-century New York seeking the freedom and opportunity promised by the New. His three sons would realize this promise beyond his highest hopes.

And in a triumph spiced by a certain irony, they would extend the legal empire they founded back to the France their father had fled.

The story of Coudert Brothers and the men who gave the firm its name and its greatness spans an eventful century from the golden age of courtroom oratory in the mid-nineteenth century to the era of multinational corporations and global outreach of today.

It features not only three generations of an extraordinarily gifted family dynasty but the brilliant legal minds drawn to and recruited by a firm whose credo was excellence and whose culture often ranked pleasure in the practice of the legal profession above financial profit. It is the story as well of clients who included presidents, legendary tycoons, foreign heads of states, ward bosses, merger specialists, international wheeler-dealers.

Set against an unfolding background of Civil War America, the Gilded Age, World War I, the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, World War II, the Eisenhower fifties and the Vietnam sixties, the oil shock of the seventies and the extravagantly expansive eighties, it is the story of how this firm and its leaders set their sails to meet the ever-shifting winds of often stormy change without abandoning their fixed compass points of probity and pride.

Filled with fascinating personalities, touching virtually every area of the law, and highlighting the growing importance of international vision in a shrinking world, Coudert Brothers: A Legacy in Law is enthralling and enriching reading, not only for those within the entire spectrum of the legal profession, but also for those who relish a saga of ambition passed down from one generation to the next and what it took to make that dream of success keep on coming true.