After a career practicing in large Indianapolis law firms, intellectual property attorney Amie Peele has broken the “unspoken rule” that partners must retire from big law and instead decided to start her own firm.
While predictions early in the pandemic of law firms closing and lawyers standing in unemployment lines have been replaced by a budding confidence, the global public health crisis did remind the legal profession that a central tenet of their job remained unchanged: They must stay focused on the needs of their clients.
COVID may have seemed like the only thing that happened in 2020, but for Indiana’s legal community, the past year brought watershed developments that will be with us for years to come, many of which were touched directly by the pandemic. Here are the Top 10 non-coronavirus Indiana legal news stories as determined by consensus of the Indiana Lawyer editorial staff.
Dentons’ Project Golden Spike initiative launched by the combination with the former Bingham Greenebaum Doll is preparing to roll through Alabama with plans to combine with Sirote & Permutt, a law firm with five locations in the state and 86 attorneys.
Dentons is continuing its Project Golden Spike, an initiative to create a national U.S. law firm, by announcing Tuesday a combination with Davis Brown, one of the largest law firms in Iowa.
The IndyBar Government Practice Section is pleased to offer two tickets to Bingham Greenebaum Doll’s 29th annual Legislative Conference (LegCon) to section members. LegCon will be completely virtual this year and will take place on Thursday, Dec. 17. Registration, as well as the agenda and speaker lineup, will be available soon.
Merger activity among law firms increased in the third quarter, according to a report by Altman Weil, but with just 44 deals announced so far this year, 2020 is mirroring the Great Recession rather than the explosive growth experienced in recent years.
Hanging a shingle is always risky. Add a pandemic to the mix and you’ve got a recipe for stress. Most lawyers across Indiana felt the pinch of the COVID-19-induced economic downturn in some fashion. But those who made career moves in the months before the pandemic say the recession has put their business acumen to the test.
Dentons has announced a future combination with Salt Lake City-based Durham Jones & Pinegar, which is being billed as the largest law firm combination announced since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. The global legal giant announced the combination Tuesday as part of its strategy that also included its combination finalized earlier this year with the former Bingham Greenebaum Doll.
It is easy to understand why Meg Christensen’s favorite word these days is “nimble.” The 38-year-old attorney became the managing partner of Dentons Bingham Greenebaum’s Indianapolis office during unprecedented challenges and about six months after the merger with global giant Dentons launched a new law firm business model.
Although the pandemic has thrown ice water on the red-hot law firm merger market, combinations are still happening and Indiana, a state often absent from the list of merger activity, recorded two separate combinations just as the COVID-19 crisis was taking hold.
Indiana law firms are included among the thousands of Hoosier businesses and nonprofits that have received money through the federal Paycheck Protection Program according to data released Monday by the U.S. Small Business Administration. We have the recipients in a searchable database.
Law firms have been pivoting to marshal the resources needed to answer the questions clients and nonclients have about the coronavirus emergency through websites, emails, podcasts, webinars and more. The topics covered range from government initiatives such as the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act and the Federal Reserve’s business loan program to unemployment benefits, force majeure clauses and cybersecurity.
Law firms with offices and law schools with programs in China have been proactive in response to the deadly coronavirus outbreak. For example, Dentons has temporarily closed its office in Wuhan and Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP told Indiana Lawyer it has closed some offices in China. Law schools in the state have suspended all staff and faculty travel to China.
The Baker & Daniels name which has been listed among Indiana law firms since 1889 was erased Feb. 1, 2020, as the historic legal entity transformed into Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath and is now one of the 50 largest firms in the country.
The world’s largest law firm now has an Indiana address as the combination between Dentons and Bingham Greenebaum Doll launched Monday as part of the global firm’s first step to creating a national law firm in the United States.
The year 2020 will go down in the Indiana legal history books as the time when big law came to the Hoosier state. Firm leaders say the growth is driven primarily by client demands for varied legal services.
The year 2019 broke the record for U.S. law firm mergers and acquisitions with 115 combinations announced, including Indianapolis offices in some of the biggest deals unveiled.
Among the circuit courts of appeal, there is an even split between the 1st, 2nd, 8th, 9th, 10th and Washington, D.C., circuits and the 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th and 11th over whether the Lanham Act requires “willful” infringement before a plaintiff can recover profits. The United States Supreme Court is set to bring clarity to the circuit split when it hears arguments in Romag Fasteners Inc. v. Fossil Inc., 18-1233, next month.
The first steps that led to the combination of Bingham Greenebaum Doll with international giant Dentons were taken in the late spring of 2018, when Bingham leaders W. Tobin McClamroch and Keith Bice fielded a proposal from a friend. In the conference room of Bingham’s Indianapolis office, Joe Andrew, Dentons global chairman and former partner at Bingham Summers Welsh & Spilman, told the partners about the need he saw for a national law firm with offices across the country. No firm currently has an office in the top 20 markets even though, he said, clients are everywhere.