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Who

A leading mergers and acquisitions attorney, Beattie is chairman of Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett, and the firm's senior statesman.

Backstory

Beattie spent four years as a fighter pilot in the Marines before attending Penn Law and joining Simpson Thacher as an associate in 1968. It wasn't long after he arrived at the white-shoe firm that he started making a name for himself: One of the few attorneys to pay attention to the then-nascent leveraged buyout industry, Beattie was a 33-year-old associate in 1972 when he started working with Henry Kravis, Jerome Kohlberg, Jr., and George Roberts on "bootstrap acquisitions" (the term for LBOs back then) at Bear Stearns, four years before they went off on their own to found KKR.

Beattie stepped away from Simpson Thacher in the late 1970s to work for the Carter administration, where he served as general counsel in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. He returned to the firm a couple of years later, resuming his role as the lawyer of choice for private equity hotshots. In 1985, he was tapped by Pete Peterson and Steve Schwarzman, shortly after they formed the Blackstone Group. (Simpson Thacher has worked for Blackstone ever since.) His most high-profile deal came four years later when he represented KKR in its $31 billion takeover of Nabisco, a role that later earned him ink in the bestselling book Barbarians at the Gate.

The 1989 Nabisco deal remains Beattie's most famous transaction to date—it generated a then-unheard of $20 million fee for the firm. But he's worked on plenty of other seminal deals since, including the merger of AOL and Time Warner, and that of J.P. Morgan and Bank One in 2004. He's kept his hand in political affairs as well: In the '90s, Bill Clinton appointed Beattie as his special envoy to Cyprus.

On the job

Beattie is expected to step down as chairman in the next few years, but his contribution to the firm will carry on after his departure: Simpson Thacher's private equity work, a business practice that Beattie built over up over three decades, now accounts for 20 percent of the firm's annual revenue. Of course, as chairman, Beattie oversees an extraordinary team across a number of practice groups. Barry Ostrager, who most recently represented Swiss Re in its epic battle with Larry Silverstein over the World Trade Center disaster, heads up the firm's top-tier litigation department. Other senior members of the firm include Charles "Casey" Cogut, who heads up the global M&A group; hedge fund expert Thomas Bell; real estate group head Gregory Ressa; private equity pro Wilson Neely, who now manages the firm's relationship with Blackstone; and Pete Ruegger, a veteran M&A lawyer and the chair of the firm's executive committee.

Board game

Beattie is vice chairman of the board of Memorial Sloan-Kettering; other board members include Louis Gerstner, Stanley Druckenmiller, Bruce Ratner, David Koch, Mort Zuckerman, and Sandy Weill. He also chairs New Visions for Public Schools, which works to improve public education in New York City.

Personal

He and his wife Diana have two daughters, Nina and Lisa, both of whom are attorneys. They live in Washington, Conn.