Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft

Overview

For 234 years, Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft never merged with anyone — a point its managing partner made explicitly in 1998: “We’ve never merged with a firm, and I don’t see it happening within the foreseeable future” (Company-Histories.com). The foreseeable future lasted 28 years. On April 15, 2026, the partnerships of Hogan Lovells and Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft approved their merger plan; on July 1, 2026, Hogan Lovells Cadwalader went live with about 3,100 lawyers in 18 countries and more than $3.6 billion in gross revenue (ABA Journal). The firm the ABA Journal called “the oldest firm on Wall Street” — founded in 1792, when New York had about 33,000 residents — ended its independence as the finance and structured-products specialist inside what the firms billed as the largest law firm merger in history (Company-Histories.com; ABA Journal).

That ending is the reason this profile exists in its present form — and the angle most reference summaries miss, since they still describe the firm in the present tense. What follows is the story of the standalone firm: two centuries of Wall Street lawyering, the practice areas that made it an acquisition target, and the partner — Todd Blanche, now the 88th U.S. Attorney General — who carried its white-collar pedigree into Donald Trump’s defense team (U.S. Department of Justice).

The end of independence

The merger had been proposed at the end of 2025 and approved by both partnerships’ votes in April 2026 (ABA Journal). The firms’ stated rationale was complementary: Hogan Lovells brought leadership in highly regulated sectors — corporate and M&A, regulatory, intellectual property, and litigation — while Cadwalader contributed what the announcement called its “market-leading finance, structured products and capital markets capabilities” (ABA Journal). The combined firm would have ranked sixth by revenue in the current Am Law 100, with five primary “growth engines”: New York, London, Washington D.C., Germany, and the France-Italy-Spain region (ABA Journal).

Leadership reflected the balance of power. Hogan Lovells CEO Miguel Zaldivar became CEO of the combined firm; Cadwalader’s co-managing partner Patrick Quinn became global managing partner for client and practice integration, and its other co-managing partner, Wesley Misson, became global managing partner for the finance practice (ABA Journal). The London legal press greeted the news with characteristic dryness — one outlet predicted the firm would be shortened to “HogLovesCads” and fretted over house-style spelling and associate pay gaps — but the strategic logic was clear: by the firms’ own account, the combined entity would be the second-largest firm in Washington D.C., one of the top ten in London, and one of the top 25 in New York (Hogan Lovells and Cadwalader).

Two centuries on Wall Street

The firm traces itself to 1792, when the New York Supreme Court admitted 22-year-old John Wells — a Princeton graduate — as an attorney in a city of about 33,000 people (Company-Histories.com). In 1818 Wells organized a partnership with Yale graduate George Washington Strong, a commercial and maritime lawyer who handled at least 100 cases a year, counted the Vanderbilts and John Jacob Astor among his clients, and helped found the Bank for Savings in the City of New York (Company-Histories.com). The partnership moved to Wall Street in 1830 and stayed there until 1985 (Company-Histories.com).

The name that survived into the 21st century was assembled in two steps. In 1878 the firm hired John L. Cadwalader — a Princeton and Harvard Law graduate who had served as the nation’s Assistant Secretary of State — and adopted the Cravath system of hiring top law-school graduates as paid associates instead of training unpaid law clerks (Company-Histories.com; Vault). Vault calls Cadwalader’s arrival “the real catalyst of the firm’s growth and increased financial stability,” as he brought major corporate connections with him (Vault). Then, in 1914, George Wickersham and Henry W. Taft joined, and the firm took its permanent name (Company-Histories.com). Wickersham was President Taft’s former attorney general, later chaired President Hoover’s commission on law enforcement and the Council on Foreign Relations; Henry W. Taft was an antitrust specialist who represented several railroads (Company-Histories.com).

The firm’s history reads like a cross-section of American legal milestones. During the Depression it represented a Vanderbilt in the famous custody battle over Gloria Vanderbilt and helped Margaret Mitchell defend Gone with the Wind against a landmark plagiarism suit (Vault). In 1942 it made Catherine Noyes Lee a partner — “the first woman to hold such a position in a major Wall Street law firm,” according to the firm’s own history (Company-Histories.com). Later decades brought the Tavoulareas defamation suit against The Washington Post, the Agent Orange class action defense of Diamond Shamrock, the $2.5 billion Dalkon Shield settlement for 300,000 women, and major financial litigation from the Hunt brothers’ silver scheme to Ivan Boesky and Drexel Burnham (Vault; Company-Histories.com).

The finance and litigation powerhouse

By the 21st century, Cadwalader had sharpened itself into what Vault describes as a firm with a “stellar reputation for its capital markets and securities work” and “one of the best” regulatory reputations in the industry (Vault). The finance practice was the crown jewel: the firm was named CMBS Law Firm of the Year at the 2025 U.S. Securitization Awards, Best Lawyers’ 2025 Law Firm of the Year in Derivatives and Futures Law, and earned Band 1 rankings from Chambers in capital markets, CLOs and structured products (Vault).

Two engagements capture the firm’s market position. In 2018 the Federal Reserve’s Alternative Reference Rates Committee selected Cadwalader to develop best practices for cash products in the post-LIBOR world — a $200 trillion market — and the firm went on to draft the New York State legislation addressing legacy contracts (Vault). In 2021 it advised on the $3 billion commercial mortgage-backed securities refinancing of One Vanderbilt, the second-tallest building in Manhattan — the largest-ever fixed-rate CMBS financing secured by a single asset (Vault). It was precisely this finance, structured-products and capital-markets engine that Hogan Lovells was buying in 2026 (ABA Journal).

Todd Blanche and the Trump connection

The firm’s most politically consequential alumnus is Todd Blanche, the 88th U.S. Attorney General. The Justice Department’s own biography confirms that Blanche “worked as a partner at firms, including WilmerHale and Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft,” after eight years as a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, where he co-led the Violent Crimes Unit and the White Plains Division (U.S. Department of Justice). He left the firm in 2023 to found Blanche Law and lead Donald Trump’s defense in the New York hush-money case, later defending him in the federal classified-documents and election cases, before Trump nominated him for deputy attorney general — a post he held until his August 8, 2026 confirmation as Attorney General (U.S. Department of Justice).

Blanche’s path through Cadwalader’s white-collar defense practice into the Justice Department’s top office is part of why this firm profile sits in a Trump-series queue: the institution that spent 234 years as Wall Street’s oldest independent firm also served as the professional home of the lawyer who became Trump’s attorney general.

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not state exact revenue or profits-per-partner figures for the firm’s final years — those numbers circulate in legal-press rankings but were not verified in a source read in full for this profile. It does not give Blanche’s exact years as a Cadwalader partner or his client roster there, which no read source confirmed. It treats the “largest law firm merger in history” description as the firms’ own characterization, stated in their joint announcement and reported by the ABA Journal, not an independently audited ranking. It does not cover the combined Hogan Lovells Cadwalader’s performance after the July 1, 2026 launch — that is a new entity beyond this profile’s scope. And it presents the firm’s early history through a reference-work account that leans on the firm’s own bicentennial history for some details, as noted in that source.