Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, LLP

Type	Limited Liability Partnership
Founded	Boston, Massachusetts (1918); Washington, D.C. (1962)
Headquarters	Washington, D.C. and Boston, Massachusetts, with 11 other offices worldwide
Key people	William F. Lee, William J. Perlstein
Industry	Law
Products	Legal Advice
Revenue	$900 million USD (2005)
Employees	2,500
Website	www.wilmerhale.com

Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, LLP, which also goes by the shorter market name WilmerHale, is a leading American law firm with major offices in Washington, Boston and New York and smaller offices in Palo Alto, Baltimore, London, Oxford, Brussels, Beijing, Berlin, Munich, Northern Virginia and Waltham, Massachusetts. It was created in 2004 through the merger of the Boston-based firm Hale and Dorr and the Washington-based firm Wilmer Cutler & Pickering, and employs more than 1,000 attorneys worldwide.

1 History
2 Rankings
3 Clients
- 3.1 Large Clients
- 3.2 Notable and Controversial Clients
4 Pro Bono
5 Attorneys
6 External links

[edit] History

Hale and Dorr was founded in Boston in 1918. Reginald Heber Smith, author of the seminal work Justice and the Poor and a pioneer in the American legal aid movement, joined the firm in 1919 and served as managing partner for thirty years. Hale and Dorr gained national recognition in 1954 when partner Joseph Welch, assisted by associate James St. Clair, represented the U.S. Army on a pro bono basis during the historic Army-McCarthy hearings. In 1988, partner Paul Brountas chaired the presidential campaign of Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, and in 1990, senior partner William Weld was elected governor. The firm has had a long and mutually profitable relationship with nearby Harvard Law School, alma mater of more than a fifth of WilmerHale's current lawyers, and home of the Hale and Dorr Legal Services Center. [1]

Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering was founded in Washington in 1962 by former Cravath attorneys Lloyd Cutler and John Pickering, along with an older lawyer, Richard Wilmer. Cutler, who later served as White House Counsel to Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, founded the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law in 1962, and served on its executive committee until 1987. In the 1980s, Cutler led the founding of the Southern Africa Legal Services and Legal Education Project, to aid South African lawyers who fought to implement the rule of law during apartheid. From 1981 to 1993, partner C. Boyden Gray left the firm to serve as White House Counsel to Vice President and President George H.W. Bush. In 2003, partner Jamie Gorelick began serving as a member of the 9/11 Commission.

The two firms merged to form Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr in 2004. [2]

[edit] Rankings

WilmerHale is generally considered one of the twenty leading law firms in the United States.

The firm is currently ranked 14th in the popular Vault "prestige" ranking of the top hundred American law firms (including second in Boston and third in Washington, DC), and 12th on the American Lawyer "A-List" of the nation's twenty leading law firms based on revenue per lawyer, pro bono work, associate satisfaction, and diversity. [3] It is ranked 16th nationally by the AveryIndex, which considers both firm prestige and associate satisfaction. [4]

[edit] Clients

[edit] Large Clients

Among the major companies that have recently been represented by WilmerHale attorneys include Bayer, Bear Stearns, Boeing, Bose, Boston Scientific, Citigroup, Credit Suisse First Boston, DaimlerChrysler, Deutsche Bank, Educational Testing Service, Fannie Mae, General Electric, John Hancock, JPMorgan Chase, Lehman Brothers, Lufthansa, Morgan Stanley, Novartis, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, Prudential, Red Hat, Sepracor, Staples, UBS, Verizon and The Washington Post. [5]

[edit] Notable and Controversial Clients

In 1986, Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering represented corporate raider Ivan Boesky in high-profile Department of Justice and Securities & Exchange Commission proceedings, as well as multiple class actions based on his alleged participation in insider trading violations.

In the late 1980s, Hale and Dorr partner Jerome Facher successfully represented Beatrice Foods in a suit by eight families from Woburn, Massachusetts who claimed that Beatrice, along with W.R. Grace, had polluted the town's water supply, resulting in an elevated number of leukemia cases and immune-system disorders. The case was memorialized the controversial book A Civil Action, by Jonathan Harr, and in a movie of the same name starring Robert Duvall as Facher and John Travolta as plaintiffs' lawyer Jan Schlichtmann. [6]

Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering represented Swiss banks accused of profiting from the Holocaust in their settlement negotiations with plaintiffs. The firm also represented Siemens AG, Krupp AG, and other German companies accused of exploiting foced laborers during the Nazi era. [7]

Since 2005, WilmerHale has represented Senator William Frist with regards to an SEC insider trading investigation. [8]

A team of WilmerHale attorneys currently represent the “Algerian Six”, a group of men who fell under suspicion of planning to attack the US embassy in Bosnia and who are currently held in the Guantanamo Bay detainment camp. [9]

[edit] Pro Bono

Both Hale and Dorr and Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering have a long history of involvement in pro bono work. WilmerHale has ranked at or near the top of The American Lawyer pro bono ranking since the merger. In recent years, the firm has been involved in several high-profile cases. Among other things, it has:

Successfully contended that the Eighth Amendment forbids the death penalty for persons under the age of eighteen in the United States Supreme Court case of Roper v. Simmons.

Helped persuade the Supreme Court to uphold the constitutionality of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform legislation.

Filed a habeas corpus petition and briefed an appeal to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals on behalf of six Algerian men seized in Bosnia in January, 2002 and thereafter held at Guantanamo Bay.