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Who

Roth is one of the founding partners of the law firm Schulte Roth & Zabel, and the go-to lawyer for hedge funders.

Backstory

Roth went to Harvard, re-upped for law school, and then headed to the Netherlands on a Fulbright. He got his feet wet in the hedge fund business as an associate at Cleary Gottleib, where he helped his brother-in-law, Howard Berkowitz, set up Steinhardt, Fine, Berkowitz & Co. with partners Michael Steinhardt and Jerrold Fine in 1967. Two years later, Roth teamed up with fellow Cleary associates Stephen Schulte and William Zabel to found Schulte Roth & Zabel. Although Schulte was a relatively small operation at first—and hardly competed with powerhouses like Cravath or Simpson Thacher—they soon started to attract an impressive roster of clients such as the Rockefeller and Lehman families, primarily because they wisely decided to focus on areas that larger firms were neglecting, like trusts and estates and hedge fund law, which was barely a blip on the radar three decades ago. Today, the firm has some 450 attorneys in its New York and London offices, including 80 lawyers working with Roth to service prickly hedge fund managers.

Of note

Roth is the undisputed expert on hedge fund formation. ("Paul Roth is to the hedge-fund industry what Martin Lipton is to the M&A business," attorney Ted Wells once said.) An astounding one-third of all hedge funds nationwide work with SRZ, including Cerberus (Steve Feinberg), Carl Icahn, Eton Park (Eric Mindich), Millennium (Israel Englander), SAC Capital (Steve Cohen), and Ospraie (Dwight Anderson). SRZ's ties to Cerberus run particularly deep. Roth started working with the firm in the early '90s when it was a tiny $15 million fund, and today Cerberus's COO is Mark Neporent, a former SRZ bankruptcy partner. Feinberg's fund is now SRZ's largest client, and the firm repped Feinberg's financial powerhouse in its 2007 acquisition of Chrysler. More than 24 SRZ lawyers labored on the deal.

For the record

SRZ's William Zabel still maintains one of the most prestigious trusts and estates practices. George Soros, Howard Stern, and Greg Norman are all clients. Soros also retained SRZ to negotiate his divorce from his second wife, Susan Soros.

Personal

Roth's wife is Ellen Roth, a psychotherapist. They have a grown daughter, Stefanie, who's also a Harvard Law grad. The Roths live in a co-op on East 88th Street and have a weekend home in Pound Ridge.