Cravath Swaine & Moore Looses Sweet to Accenture

Premier Manhattan law firm Cravath Swaine & Moore; a prominent American law firm based in New York City, with an additional office in London, has seen a rare partner loss after Julie Spellman Sweet; who was a partner in the Firm’s Corporate Department, announced she is moving in-house to Accenture.  Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company with more than 176,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries.

Sweet will join Accenture as general counsel on 22 March. She is succeeding Douglas Scrivner; present general counsel and also corporate secretary and compliance officer and is a member of Accenture’s Executive Leadership Team. Mr. Scrivner will remain with Accenture to work with William Green and will also help ensure a smooth transition for Ms. Sweet

Sweet is a corporate lawyer who has been with Cravath since 1992, being promoted to the firm’s all-equity partnership in 2000. She worked for the underwriters in the $5bn initial global offering of KKR Private Equity Investors as well as clients including Ripplewood Holdings and First Market of Euronext Brussels.

Green said: “Julie has a wide breadth of business and legal experience and is accustomed to working collaboratively and tirelessly to achieve the best outcomes. We look forward to her building on the strength of our global team of accomplished legal professionals and to benefiting from Julie’s sound judgment, proactive counsel and experience working with multinational companies on their most important issues.”

“Doug Scrivner has been a real asset to Accenture in the general counsel role. His advice, guidance and ability to execute have been invaluable. He built our legal function from the ground up and put in place an outstanding legal team whose accomplishments are widely recognized in the profession and our industry. Julie and the team will work to raise our capability even further with our relentless focus on ‘high performance’ in all we do.” 

Cravath is one of New York’s elite firms and rarely loses partners. Even so the firm, like peers such as Davis Polk & Wardwell, sometimes sees senior lawyers move to in-house positions with clients.