Paul Drennan Cravath

Paul Drennan Cravath (1861 to 1940) was an American corporate lawyer and presiding partner of the New York law firm now known as Cravath, Swaine & Moore. Born in Berlin Heights, Ohio, the son of the Congregationalist minister and abolitionist Erastus Milo Cravath, he graduated from Oberlin College in 1882 and from Columbia Law School in 1886 and was admitted to the New York bar that year. One of his first clients was George Westinghouse, whom he defended against hundreds of patent infringement claims in the commercial dispute with Thomas Edison over electrical power transmission. He became a named partner in the firm that became Guthrie, Cravath and Henderson in 1901 and was its authoritative head from 1906 until his death in 1940. He devised the Cravath System, the structure and practice that most large American law firms adopted, and he was a founding member and director of the Council on Foreign Relations.