By Miriam Gottfried

Behind every private-equity buyout is a cadre of lawyers. Behind some of the biggest buyouts was Dick Beattie.

Beattie, who ended his career as senior chairman of law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, was among the first attorneys to recognize private equity's potential. He rode the industry's explosive growth, becoming one of the country's top mergers-and-acquisitions lawyers and shaping Simpson Thacher into a private-equity powerhouse.

He died Friday at the age of 86, the firm confirmed.

Beattie represented private-equity pioneer KKR in a string of its early deals, including its $25 billion takeover of RJR Nabisco, announced in 1988. That deal, immortalized in the book "Barbarians at the Gate," remained the biggest leveraged buyout for years.

Beattie worked around the clock to help KKR win the deal, falling asleep next to colleagues on the floor of a Midtown Manhattan conference room after a more than 48-hour stretch, The Wall Street Journal wrote at the time.

Beattie earned his clients' trust by being more than their lawyer. KKR co-founder Henry Kravis first met Beattie while working at Bear Stearns, and the two became friends. Beattie's daughters, Lisa and Nina, babysat for Kravis's three children. Over the years, the two men would go fly fishing in Alaska and horseback riding at Kravis's Colorado ranch.

When Kravis's eldest son, Harrison, was killed in a car accident in Colorado in 1991, Beattie was the first person he called. Instead of merely offering condolences, Beattie said, "I'm going with you," Kravis recalled.

"He was a person I trusted 1,000%," Kravis said in an interview with the Journal. "He could read people and feel what was needed for them."

Beattie's relationships led him to work on some of the biggest corporate deals of his day. He represented AOL in its 2001 megamerger with Time Warner and JPMorgan in its 2004 deal with Bank One. Beattie also represented the independent directors of Journal publisher Dow Jones in its sale to News Corp.

But it was his early recognition of the opportunity in private equity that helped make Simpson Thacher into one of the top firms serving the industry.

"He got us in the door very early on and helped three generations of lawyers develop the relationships he had started in the 1980s," said Alden Millard, chair of Simpson Thacher's executive committee.

Richard I. Beattie was born on March 24, 1939. He grew up in Rye, N.Y., the son of a commercial photographer. After graduating from Dartmouth College, he spent four years as a jet pilot in the Marines where his skill in landing A-4 Skyhawks on aircraft carriers in the Pacific earned him the nickname "night fighter."

Beattie went to law school at the University of Pennsylvania and started at Simpson Thacher after graduating in 1968. He rose quickly through the ranks, becoming a favorite adviser to New York's power elite.

An avid outdoorsman, he often spent weekends hiking with his family or fly fishing at the vacation home in Montana he shared with Diana, his wife of more than 61 years. Beattie is survived by his wife, daughters, sister Evelyn Lewis, and six grandchildren.

He left Simpson Thacher for a stint to join the Carter administration as general counsel of what was then the Department of Health, Education and Welfare and was instrumental in developing the current Education Department. Beattie was also an author of Title IX, the landmark law barring sex discrimination by educational institutions that receive federal funds.

He served on the New York City Board of Education and led Simpson Thacher in litigation that won funding parity for underserved children in the city. Beattie was founder and chairman of the nonprofit New Visions for Public Schools, dedicated to improving the city's public schools.

Beattie also served as special envoy to Cyprus under former President Clinton and was a member of numerous other corporate and nonprofit boards.

Roger Altman, senior chairman of Evercore, called Beattie an "unofficial founder" of the investment bank, which Altman ran out of a Simpson Thacher conference room for the first several months of its existence.

"I never met anybody who had more true friends than Dick Beattie did, and that's because I never met anybody who helped more people hands-on than Dick did over so many years," Altman said in an interview with the Journal. "In New York City, for like 30 years, if there was a tough problem, really a jam, he was the one you called."

Write to Miriam Gottfried at Miriam.Gottfried@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

June 08, 2025 17:13 ET (21:13 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.