Arnold & Porter

Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP, operating as Arnold & Porter, is a white-shoe international law firm.[2] It is among the most prestigious and largest law firms in the world, by both revenue and by its number of lawyers.[3][4]

Arnold & Porter
No. of offices14
No. of attorneys1000+[1]
Major practice areasGeneral practice
Date founded1946 (Arnold & Fortas) & 1917 (Kaye Scholer)
Company typeLLP
Websiteapks.com

History

Arnold & Porter was founded in 1946 by New Deal veterans Thurman Arnold, a former Yale Law School professor and U.S. Court of Appeals Judge on the D.C. Circuit, and Abe Fortas, another former Yale Law School professor who later became a Supreme Court Justice.[5] In 1947, Paul A. Porter, a former Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission joined the firm and it was renamed Arnold, Fortas & Porter. In 1965, Abe Fortas' name was dropped from the firm's moniker after his ascension to the Supreme Court.

In November 2016, Arnold & Porter announced that it would be merging with New York-based firm Kaye Scholer to form Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP, with approximately 1000 attorneys across ten domestic and four international offices. The merger took effect on January 1, 2017.[6] In February 2018, The National Law Journal reported that the newly combined "firm has quietly reversed its post-merger branding efforts" and "scrubbed nearly all mention of 'Kaye Scholer' from its public image, changing its brand name, email addresses and web domain", while retaining the legal entity name in full.[7]

Clients

Arnold & Porter served as counsel to Clarence Earl Gideon in the landmark case of Gideon v. Wainwright, subject of the Edgar Award-winning book Gideon's Trumpet by Anthony Lewis. The firm also represented the survivors of the Buffalo Creek Flood, which was the subject of the book Buffalo Creek Disaster, by Gerald M. Stern (required reading in many law schools). Arnold & Porter was the only BigLaw firm to represent the victims of Joseph McCarthy, and the "loyalty review boards". All three founders of the firm were so disturbed by the use of secret evidence that, at one point, the firm's lawyers were spending half of their time fighting these cases.

Arnold & Porter successfully defended Random House from a claim of copyright infringement against The Da Vinci Code, written by Dan Brown. The firm also served as outside counsel to the Independent Review Committee during its examination of Smithsonian Institution Secretary Lawrence Small's management. The firm was also counsel to Philip Morris for its mass tort litigation of the 1990s; WorldCom executive Scott Sullivan; Martha Stewart; and CBS, in its litigation against Howard Stern.

The firm successfully represented the government of Venezuela in its case against the United States' Clean Air Act, on the grounds that the CAA violated World Trade Organization agreements.

Arnold & Porter represented US Airways in its merger with America West. Arnold & Porter also assisted SBC Communications Inc. in its acquisition of AT&T Corp., forming the new AT&T Inc.

The firm is also noted for its pro bono work, including assisting the family of Lt. Henry Ossian Flipper in obtaining the first posthumous Presidential pardon in U.S. history, and representation of Ukrainian mail order bride Nataliya Fox against international marriage broker Encounters International in a landmark case that helped to establish the rights of such women.[8] The firm is co-counsel with the DC Prisoners' Project of the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, which represents prisoners at ADX Florence who allege deficiencies in psychiatric evaluation and care in Cunningham v. Federal Bureau of Prisons.[9]

Offices

Thurman Arnold Building is the former location of Arnold & Porter's offices in Washington, D.C. The firm relocated to 601 Mass. Ave NW in 2015.

Notable alumni

References

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