Marc Stuart Dreier - Early Life, Education, and Career Milestones

Early Life, Education, and Career Milestones

Marc Dreier grew up on the south shore of Long Island in an affluent area known as the Five Towns. His father, a Jewish immigrant from Poland, owned a chain of movie theaters. Dreier presided over the Lawrence High School student council, and graduated "most likely to succeed". He graduated from Yale University in 1972 with a Bachelor of Arts and earned a Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School in 1975. He began his career as a "shining star" in the late 1970s at Rosenman & Colin, Freund, Lewis & Cohen, then a 90-lawyer litigation firm, and was well regarded. "He was a very smart, hard-working guy....Funny, personable -- part of the social mix," but what most distinguished him was his ability to think on his feet. "He's very quick. Very smart."

In the early 1980s, Dreier was named a partner at Rosenman. In 1987, he married a Rosenman associate named Elisa Peters. He and his wife separated in 2000, around the time that Dreier broke with a partner and started his own firm.

Dreier's son, Spencer, attended Union College for part of his freshman year, but later transferred to another school. On May 29, 2009, he filed a defamation lawsuit against his former roommate, Ben Clorite, for one million dollars. The lawsuit claims that Clorite assaulted him and defamed him on the Wall Street Journal's Law Blog.

In 1989, he joined the New York office of Fulbright & Jaworski. Dreier would become co-head of litigation in New York, but when Dreier left Fulbright in March 1995, there were only ten New York litigators. He then worked for Duker & Barrett for less than a year. Its founding partner, William Duker, would later plead guilty to four counts of fraud called "one of the most serious cases of legal fraud" ever prosecuted.

In 1996, he teamed with a Florida lawyer named Neil Baritz, who had a small corporate and securities practice, to found a firm called Dreier & Baritz. Though he was able to found the firm, a precursor to Dreier LLP, he struggled to distinguish his practice.

From 1999 to 2002, Dreier, Baritz, & Federman was formed with offices in New York and Boca Raton with most associates in Oklahoma. Dreier ran the new firm's already leased Park Avenue office. He favored plaintiff class-action lawsuits, which brought in large revenue. Federman had problems with Dreier's spending, managerial style, and secrecy, which culminated in a lawsuit.

Dreier, pushing to impress, acquired expensive trappings, buying a house in Westhampton. He bought a place in Quogue, then he bought the house next door. He purchased the $18 million 121-foot (37 m) yacht Seascape, which included a crew of 10 and a Jacuzzi, and docked it in New York and St. Martin. Dreier owned a waterfront home in the Hamptons, a Manhattan triplex, and a penthouse on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica, California, which he leased out. He drove a Mercedes 500 in New York and an Aston Martin in California. He was considered a "bon vivant" because he dated beautiful women, was a member of the Harmonie Club, and maintained a high profile at charity events.