Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP is an American multinational law firm. A white-shoe firm, Arnold & Porter is among the largest law firms in the world, by both revenue and by its number of lawyers.
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. 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. 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. In September 2020, Arnold & Porter announced that they will shut down their Frankfurt office by the end of March 2021.
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.
Pro bono work
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. The matter took 18-months to settle and required 14,000-plus lawyer hours.
Attorneys with the firm assisted 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.
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.
Offices
Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Brussels, Belgium
Chicago, Illinois
Denver, Colorado
London, United Kingdom
Los Angeles, California
Houston, Texas
Newark, New Jersey
New York, New York
Palo Alto, California
San Francisco, California
Seoul, South Korea
Shanghai, China
Washington, D.C.