On April 7, 2009, a cool and windy spring day, a white van pulled up outside the downtown DC offices of Williams & Connolly.

A slight man with dark glasses and white hair jumped out and slid open the van’s middle door. Out came newly exonerated Alaska senator Ted Stevens, wife Catherine, their two daughters, and several attorneys toting thick briefcases and big smiles. All looked happy except for Stevens’s principal attorney, who stood by the door he had just opened, a scowl on his face. He was, in his own words, in “a silent rage” about how prosecutorial misconduct had delayed this day.

Brendan V. Sullivan Jr., who had turned 67 three weeks earlier on March 11, had never been a young-looking man. His high-school classmates back at Providence Country Day School used the word “fearsome” to describe him. Their nickname for him was George Sully—George in honor of the country’s first President, also known for his stony countenance and leadership skills.

For the last 35 years, only one of Sullivan’s clients, Walter Forbes of Cendant Corporation, had received a guilty verdict the lawyer hadn’t been able to undo or finesse (though it took three trials for Sullivan to be bested). In all that time, only one had ever seen the inside of a prison, despite the fact that, by Sullivan’s own admission, “by the time someone comes to me, they are pretty far up the creek.”

Even after Stevens had been found guilty of multiple felonies by a federal jury in October 2008, Sullivan had never doubted that the conviction would be overturned and Stevens wouldn’t spend a day in jail. Admittedly disappointed by the guilty verdict, Sullivan assured Stevens it was only a question of when and how it would be overturned. As it happened, by the molasses-like measures of criminal justice, the reversal took a remarkably short time—just over five months. Even so, Sullivan wasn’t the type to dance in the end zone. “I don’t do high fives,” he would say.

After attorney general Eric Holder announced on April 1, 2009, that the Department of Justice could no longer go forward with the prosecution of Stevens, it had been a foregone conclusion that Judge Emmet Sullivan (no relation to Brendan) would dismiss the case and effectively void the jury’s unanimous verdict. Not only did Sullivan win dismissal of the case against his client, but it happened in a way the government couldn’t appeal. It was one of the most decisive victories in Sullivan’s career. Even so, he couldn’t hide his distaste for how the trial had been handled by the government.

For years there had been a myth about Brendan Sullivan. It went like this: In any case he tries, there’s a greater chance the federal or state prosecutor will go to jail than his client will. On the surface, such a notion seems a lawyerly exaggeration. Yet in this case, the myth hit 100 on the truth-o-meter. While Ted Stevens was going free, the prosecutors on the team that had brought the massive resources of the federal government against the wily 40-year Senate veteran—apparently for not revealing that he had been given a chair, a barbecue grill, some Christmas lights, and home repairs as gifts—were themselves headed for an investigation into allegedly “unethical” prosecutorial conduct.

As Sullivan stepped onto the sidewalk outside the firm’s offices at 12th and G streets, Northwest, he pondered one of his most satisfying courthouse victories. For Williams & Connolly, the firm with which he had been associated for more than 40 years, it was simply an ordinary day in the life of Washington’s most powerful and influential partnership. Sullivan wouldn’t say it, but years earlier, after winning a not-guilty verdict for the man who shot President Reagan in front of a national TV audience, one of Sullivan’s partners had crowed, “Another day, another dollar.” It was an unofficial firm motto that the more discreet Sullivan preferred not to echo.

Many American cities are defined by the names on their tallest buildings: the banks of Charlotte, the insurance companies of Hartford, the retail centers of Chicago. In Washington, there are just squat buildings. In the 1890s, Congress passed the Height of Buildings Act, which effectively mandated that no DC structure could be higher than the US Capitol dome. The bottom line is that DC is not a city of skyscrapers.

If you walk around Williams & Connolly’s world in downtown DC, you’ll notice that the names on the most substantial buildings are Venable, DLA Piper, Winston & Strawn, O’Melveny & Myers, Hogan Lovells (until recently Hogan & Hartson). Each is the name of a large firm with hundreds, even thousands, of lawyers. Very few are doing anything as interesting as what you see on television dramas—flamboyant personalities are frowned upon. One of the truths about Washington-style law is that attorneys largely believe that once you’ve gone to court, you and your client have already lost. Former Secretary of Labor Raymond Donovan once asked after his acquittal on fraud charges, “Which office do I go to to get my reputation back?”