Arnold & Porter and Kaye Scholer announce merger

Law firms Arnold & Porter and Kaye Scholer announced yesterday that they will combine their firms.

Both firms announced the deal ( here and here). The new firm will be known as Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer and will have approximately 1,000 lawyers across nine US and four international offices.

The merger is effective on January 1, 2017.

The strategic combination brings together regulatory expertise, litigation and transactional practitioners and multi-disciplinary practices in the life sciences and financial services industries.

There will be approximately 400 lawyers in the Washington, DC office, New York is expected to have 325 lawyers and the three California offices will have 175 lawyers. There will be 60 lawyers based in London.

Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer will also have lawyers in offices such as Chicago, Houston, Denver and West Palm Beach, as well as Brussels, Frankfurt and Shanghai.

The combined firm will focus its practices on intellectual property, litigation, finance and corporate.

Michael 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.”

Richard Alexander, current chair of Arnold & Porter, and 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.”

Tim Frazer, partner and head of Arnold & Porter's London office, told WIPR: "We're very excited about the merger. We think it's an excellent combination ... there are lots of opportunities, particularly in IP, for some important synergies between the two legacy firms."

Richard Dickinson, partner at Arnold & Porter, added: "For the IP group specifically, I think the really exciting possibility is Kaye Scholer in the US, where they have a patents practice more generally."

He continued: "Not only do they complement what we already have in the IP space, but they also augment our work in a number of interesting fields."