JD Journal » howard rice

Arnold & Porter Set to Tie the Knot with SF’s Howard Rice

chelsei — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 20:01:53 +0000

Arnold & Porter LLP will merge their company with San Francisco’s Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin PC on January 1, creating a new firm of more than 800 lawyers and boosting Arnold & Porter’s California presence, the firms announced on Tuesday.

The new, combined firm, which will remain named Arnold & Porter, will have more than 160 lawyers in three different California offices: San Francisco, Los Angeles and Silicon Valley. Arnold & Porter currently have 19 lawyers that are based in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, and the additional o Howard Rice’s 82 attorneys will nearly quadruple the number of boots the firm has on the ground of North California.

Arnold & Porter’s partner Trent Norris, who heads the offices of the firms in San Francisco and Silicone Valley, said that the addition of Howard Rice would allow the firm to pursue major transactional work in the tech-happy Northern California for the first time.

”It’s an opportunity we’ve missed, and we’re eager to pursue it alongside Howard Rice,” Norris told Law 360 on Tuesday of this week. ”It was a recognition on our part that this was a need for our clients.”

Howard Rice has been an independent firm since it was founded back in 1954. But as the landscape of legal work has shifted, said managing partner Doug Winthrop, the opportunity to hook up with Arnold & Porter–which has offices throughout the US and in Europe–was much too good to pass up.

”We realized we could be doing a lot more for our clients if we had a deeper bench, a broader reach and increased geographic reach,” Winthrop told Law360. ”We’ve watched our clients’ needs change; our clients absolutely have needs beyond the San Francisco Bay area, beyond the US even.”

Winthrop has said that Howard Rice’s transactional work dovetails with Arnold & Porter’s antitrust practice, and its financial services practice will be boosted by Arnold & Porter’s banking and regulatory work in Washington.

”Our bread-and-butter is high-stakes commercial litigation, and Arnold & Porter is one of the premier litigation firms in the country,” Winthrop, who will have a seat on the Arnold & Porter’s policy committee, said.

The tie-up between Arnold & Porter and Howard Rice was the second law firm merger that was announced on Tuesday. The St. Louis-based Bryan Cave LLP and Denver-based Holme Roberts & Owen LLP also announced that they were joining forces, a week after rumors of a possible merger first surfaced.

This merger will make Bryan Cave one of the 25 largest firms in the world, with 1,100 attorneys in over 30 different offices around the globe.

According to legal management firm Altman Weil Inc, there have been 55 law firm mergers in 2011, compared with just 39 in 2010.

Sidley Austin Opens in Silicon Valley

joshua — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 16:07:15 +0000

Sidley Austin is opening an office in Silicon Valley and picking up four laterals in the process. Thomas DeFilipps is joining the firm from Wilson Sonsini and will be the managing partner. Three attorneys are moving from Howard Rice. They will be joined by eight more from Sidley Austin’s San Francisco office. The firm is expecting the office to grow to 15 soon, with three more laterals expected, but the details are being kept quiet for the moment.

Sidley Austin is one of the countries oldest law firms and includes Mary Todd Lincoln among its list of early clients. Formed in 1866 in Chicago, its practice groups cover a broad range of areas and it has a long history with transactional matters and litigation.

Morning Roundup

joshua — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 17:35:01 +0000

Good morning everyone! It’s Wednesday, November 25 and here’s a snapshot of yesterday’s news.

Howard Rice is losing four partners in its business division…

South Carolina has hired a lawyer to represent the office of the Governor during the upcoming impeachment hearings…

California’s Governor Schwazenegger seems to share his wife’s disdain for traffic laws…

Bowman & Brooke opens its seventh office in Colombia, South Carolina…

and Orrick has signed a very broad alternative fee agreement with Levi Strauss…

Howard Rice Loses Four Partners

joshua — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 01:02:59 +0000

Four partners from Howard Rice‘s business department have left or are leaving the firm. The chair of the department, Deborah Marshall left last week for Sidley Austin and the vice chair, Michael Sullivan returned to Pillsbury Winthrop, where he had practiced in the 80′s and 90′s. Marshall will be joined at Sidley by partners Hank Barry and Stephen Fronk.

Gary Kaplan and Ellen Fleishhacker have been appointed chair and vice-chair of the buisness department at Howard Rice.

Founded in 1954, San Francisco’s Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin employs almost 100 lawyers.