17/70 In appearance and rhetoric he was old-fashioned, but in imagination and knowledge and resource he was as young as the latest statute. His first prominence had come when he broke the Shardwell will.* His fee for this one act was five hundred thousand dollars. From then on he had risen like a rocket. He was often called the greatest lawyer in the country--corporation lawyer, of course; and no classification of the three greatest lawyers in the United States could have excluded him. With the accumulation of vast fortunes, the problem of disposing of these fortunes after death was a vexing one to the accumulators. |