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— Dealmakers —
Law was virtually a genetic predisposition. The elder Curtin, also named William, served as chairman of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP in Washington at various turns. Curtin is the third of four children, each of whom went to law school. At 18, he spent a summer in France on an internship at Walt Disney Co.'s offices outside Paris, helping to prepare contracts. It was challenging work for a teenager. "Pretty gutsy," he says.
Easygoing, garrulous but fiercely ambitious, Curtin has been cultivating business acquaintances since, throughout his undergrad years as a French major at Duke University and as a law student at University of Virginia School of Law. Unlike his siblings, who were products of Georgetown University's law school, Curtin preferred the collegiality of Virginia. "It's not enough to be a great technician; the interpersonal ability to connect is very significant to be successful," he says. Besides a "strong grasp of the law," he believes that success comes from the ability "to fully connect with a client." That mantra has served him well. Joining Hogan right after law school in 1996, Curtin began working on major European transactions by his second year. He moved to Paris to expand his firm's M&A footprint well beyond the D.C. firm's historic focus on regulatory issues -- a work in progress. Last year, marshaling his people skills, Curtin persuaded client Ford Motor Co. to give his firm a shot at the $2.3 billion sale of Jaguar and Land Rover to India's Tata Motors Ltd. It took 15 months to complete what has been his most complex transaction. "Lawyers can sometimes get overly tied up in considerable back-and-forth trying to prove who's smarter, but Bill is very focused and effective, operating in a non-American setting," says one principal whom he advised in the $1.2 billion merger between smart-card makers Gemplus International SA of Luxembourg and France's Axalto Holding NV. A bachelor who just turned 40, Curtin revels in his peripatetic lifestyle, keeping offices in New York, London and Paris. He's an avid tennis player -- he plays with some of the same people who turn up on opposite sides of a deal. On one occasion, while handling a transaction in Munich, he recalls, "[a] victory on the tennis court over opposing counsel was replayed, advantageously, many times at the negotiating table." Comments |
William Curtin's trajectory at Hogan & Hartson LLP was predetermined by two things. First, he came from a family of lawyers. Second, when his middle school foisted a foreign language requirement on him, he picked French, a less popular choice than Spanish or German. At once a contrarian and a team player, Curtin marked himself for an international career as a corporate finance lawyer, something that might account for his rapid ascent at Hogan, which made him head of its European corporate practice last year. 
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sounds like a douchebag