The Cravath System is a set of business management principles first developed at Cravath, Swaine & Moore. John Oller, author of White Shoe, credits Paul Drennan Cravath with creating the model in the early 20th century, which was adopted by virtually all white-shoe law firms, fifty years before the phrase white shoe came into popular use. The Cravath System has been adopted by many leading law firms, management consulting firms, and investment banks in the United States.

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Paul Cravath built a reputation handling complex lawsuits for the new electrical industry. Devising the Cravath System, he enlarged the law office and professionalised it by establishing full-time librarians, a recruiting system focused solely on the highest-ranked law schools, and partners who specialized. Robert Swaine describes the fundamentals of the Cravath System in the beginning of Volume 2 of the history of the Cravath firm. These include: