DLA Piper LLP
01 October 2006
DLA Piper LLP earns its place among the top firms in Illinois – we include 22 of its Chicago partners. The research reveals a firm that excels in specialist areas of the law. Partners appear in a relatively small number of practice areas – seven in total - and this focus allows them to be counted as “undoubtedly the best in town” for certain work.
DLA Piper LLP in Who's Who Legal: Illinois
Today, DLA Piper LLP is an “international success story”, with more than 3,100 lawyers in 59 offices and 22 countries. However, the firm does have history in Illinois, dating back to the 1999 merger between Baltimore’s Piper & Marbury and Chicago’s Rudnick & Wolfe. The resulting firm has since pursued successful mergers with Gray Cary Ware & Freidenrich and Europe’s DLA, and can now boast an astonishing global revenue of US$1.5 billion for 2005.
DLA Piper is internationally recognised for the strength of its franchise and real estate practices (the firm won Who’s Who Legal’s international law firm of the year award for both areas in 2006), practices that were among the traditional strengths of Rudnick & Wolfe. That expertise remains to this day, as our research identified the firm as the “best in town” in both franchise and real estate matters.
The firm has seven lawyers listed for Franchise, led by the most highly nominated individual in the research, Lewis Rudnick. He is recognised both domestically and overseas as a leader in the field, and acts as counsel to the International Franchise Association. Alongside him comes a team of “international superstars”, including Michael Brennan and co-chair of the firm’s practice Dennis Wieczorek, the current chairman of the American Bar Association Forum on Franchising.
The firm also fields more real estate experts than any other in this publication, and can call on a “wealth of knowledge” from senior counsels Portia Owen Morrison and Charles Edwards, as well as Howard Kane, “one of the deans of the Chicago real estate bar”, and two other highly rated partners. Furthermore, no other firm beats DLA Piper’s contingent of four in the construction chapter. Interviewees were “uniformly impressed” with the quality of these attorneys, and singled out the “excellent” Ty Laurie and Ross Altman for special praise. Also represented in the trademarks, insolvency and restructuring, environment, and insurance chapters, the firm undeniably “sits at the top table” in the Chicago legal market.
To see more profiled firms from Illinois, vist the Firm Profiles page in the Illinois Special Report