Arnold & Porter and Kaye Scholer to merge
US-headquartered law firms Arnold & Porter and Kaye Scholer announced their combination to become Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP as of January 1, 2017.
Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP will have approximately 1,000 lawyers across nine offices in the US and four abroad. Neither legacy law firm has offices in Latin America or the Iberian peninsula.
Founded in Washington, DC in 1946, Arnold & Porter is home to over 700 lawyers in Brussels, Denver, Houston, London, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and DC. The firm maintains more than 30 practice areas with a primary focus on litigation, transactional matters, and regulatory issues. In Latin America, the firm is best known for its work in banking, capital markets, fraud and corporate investigations and international arbitration. In September 2016, Arnold & Porter recently obtained an ICSID victory for Chile in one the longest-running arbitration cases in the history of the institution: Victor Pey Casado and President Allende Foundation v. Republic of Chile. Earlier in the year the firm achieved separate victories for the Dominican Republic and Panama in ICSID cases.
Kaye Scholer was founded in New York in 1917 and its 375 lawyers practice in Frankfurt, London, Shanghai, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Silicon Valley, Washington, DC, and West Palm Beach. The firm focuses on two key sectors – life sciences and financial services – with strengths in bankruptcy, corporate, finance, intellectual property, litigation, real estate, and tax.
Michael B. Solow, Managing Partner at Kaye Scholer, said: “This combination enhances our ability to anticipate and address our clients’ most significant and complex legal matters and will result in service offerings that are among the broadest and deepest in the two key US legal markets—New York and Washington, DC. The combination will also maximize our collective ability throughout our platform to provide sophisticated legal counsel and strategic guidance to public and private entities on litigation, transactional, and corporate governance matters.”
Richard M. Alexander, the current Chair of Arnold & Porter, who will also serve as Chair of the combined firm, said: “The collective talents and financial resources of the new firm will allow us to continue to deliver to clients the sophisticated counsel and service that they expect, while creating substantial economies of scale that will accelerate our investments in talent and technologies and enable us to pursue innovation in the efficient delivery of legal services.”
