Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP

One.

And that was actually Conrad Harper, who went on to become the first Black partner at Simpson Thatcher, legal advisor to the State Department, but he was the last Bla- the last class at Harvard ever to have only one Black student.

In nineteen sixty-five, Harvard invited-- went to historically Black colleges, uh, and universities and basically said to their deans of students, "Give us your smartest Black students who are interested in law." They brought them all to Harvard, about fifty of them, and created the first class really designed to introduce Black students to law and legal education.

As it turns out that the people who came were truly extraordinary and exceeded not just beyond the imagination of the people who created the programs, but became some of the greatest leaders of our profession.

Yeah, let me bring you up to date in case you have missed this because it's been quite astonishing.

So the pub quiz question is, what do Gibson Dunn Sidley, Simpson, Thatcher, and Latham & Watkins all have in common now that they didn't a year ago? And the answer is, yeah, they've all hired partners from Wachtel.

And as you say, Kat, Wachtel used to be the fortress, a single-site fortress.

Goliath of the M&A world, even if it was perfectly formed and small.

All of those went to Latham and Watkins.

That was astonishing on its own.

But we had M&A's partner Alison Priest joining Simpson Thatcher earlier this year.

And just this week, we had Sidley hiring Deborah Paul as the co-head of its tax practice.

Yeah, there is hope.

And another question I had on that is like for a lot of students, obviously, it's ideal if you have a training contract or people that are lined up.

sponsoring you.

But for those that perhaps don't have that training contract lying up and sponsoring themselves through it, do you think it's possible to balance part-time work with the full-time PGDL?

Yeah, absolutely.

I think it is possible.