Cravath Welcomes New Strategy Director, Sort Of

Cravath, Swaine & Moore has hired a director of strategic planning.

He’s William Johnston, who formerly worked at Hildebrandt International for 11 years as a vice president and director, the AmLaw Daily reports.

Despite the impressive resume, presiding partner Evan Chesler couldn’t remember Johnston’s new title when AmLaw contacted him and wondered why the publication was interested in the firm’s “administrative people.”

Chesler told AmLaw that a group of nine Cravath partners, which he chairs, will continue to formulate firm strategy. "This is just a support job to help us out in our work," he said. Cravath’s strategy will be the same, he said: to remain as the country’s top law firm.

Johnston will be "gathering information, doing the staff work, the kind of stuff that any committee would have a person doing the staff work for," Chesler told the publication. "We have a very busy administrative staff [and] people were simply overburdened by trying to do that in their spare time."