business, I had to do it myself.” He did. On Martin Luther King Day in 1997, McMillan, then 30, opened his own firm. “What greater day for me to launch a dream?” he asks.
“Setting up your own law firm, particularly as a relatively young lawyer, is extraordinarily difficult,” says Steve Davis, chairman at LeBoeuf, who was instrumental in luring McMillan back. “Just the fact he was willing to try I took as an incredibly powerful statement of his character.”
McMillan started representing institutional clients, such as TIAA-CREF, CWCapital, The New York Times and Mercedes-Benz. Corporate work became a quarter of his practice. Not long before he returned to LeBoeuf, he began to represent Michael Jackson, helping defend him in a million claim. The stakes were huge-Jackson could have lost ownership of the Beatles catalog. To the pop icon’s relief, the “case