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No. of offices | 15 |
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No. of attorneys | 1000+ [1] |
Major practice areas | General corporate practice, litigation, regulatory |
Date founded | 1946 (Arnold & Fortas) 1917 (Kaye Scholer) |
Company type | Limited liability partnership |
Website | arnoldporter |
Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP, doing business as Arnold & Porter, is an American multinational law firm. [2] It is a white-shoe firm [3] and among the largest law firms in the world, both by revenue and by number of lawyers. [4] [5]
The original firm was founded as Arnold & Fortas 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. [6] In 1947, Paul A. Porter, a former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, joined the firm and it was renamed as 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 (founded in 1917) to form Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP, with approximately 1,000 attorneys across ten domestic and four international offices. The merger took effect on January 1, 2017. [7]
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. [8] In September 2020, Arnold & Porter announced that it will shut down its Frankfurt office by the end of March 2021. [9]
In 2022, Arnold & Porter was a founding member of the Legal Alliance for Reproductive Rights, a coalition of United States law firms offering free legal services to people seeking and providing abortions in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization , which overruled Roe v. Wade . [10]
In 2020, Arnold & Porter attorneys helped secure a $14 million judgment for 12 Black Lives Matter protesters who were victims of police brutality in Colorado. [11] The matter took 18 months to settle and required 14,000-plus lawyer hours. [12]
Attorneys with the firm assisted the family of Lt. Henry Ossian Flipper in obtaining the first posthumous presidential pardon in U.S. history, and represented 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. [13]
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 . [14]