Firm Profiles

It may not be wise to compare a firm with deep roots in Boston to New York Yankee great Joe DiMaggio, but both enjoyed memorable streaks: DiMaggio, 56 straight games with a hit; Bingham McCutchen, 15 straight years of rising revenues. Indeed, Bingham’s streak continued through the worst of the global financial crisis, ending only in 2011.

The baseball analogy is doubly fitting, since one needs a scorecard to follow Bingham’s growth. The firm is the result of a string of mergers, beginning in 2001, when Boston’s Bingham Dana merged with Richards & O’Neill, a 55–lawyer New York firm known for its litigation and corporate groups. The following year, Bingham merged with San Francisco’s McCutchen, Doyle, Brown & Enersen, adding five offices and boosting its intellectual property practice. A few smaller mergers followed, and then in 2009, Bingham acquired McKee Nelson, an Am Law 200 firm that specialized in tax and structured finance.

Despite Bingham’s above–average showing during the downturn—it placed fifth of 84 firms on The American Lawyer’s Recession Performance Index—it laid off a few dozen lawyers and staff in 2009 and instituted a salary freeze for that year. Not incidentally, perhaps, subsequent associate satisfaction scores were less than stellar, with the firm placing 105th of 137 firms in our 2010 Midlevel Associates Survey and eighty–third of 126 firms on the 2011 tally. Summer associates, on the other hand, saw things quite differently, with the firm ranking second on the magazine’s 2010 survey and third in 2011.

Bingham—which has a sizable presence in Washington, D.C., thanks to a 2006 merger with 175–lawyer Swidler Berlin Shereff Friedman—has branched out into lobbying work. A fully owned subsidiary, Bingham Consulting, assists clients with matters that mix business, policy, and politics. Chris Cox, a former California Congressman and SEC chair, heads BC. The firm has also joined many of its peers in looking toward Asia for future growth. It opened Hong Kong and Tokyo offices in 2007, followed by a Beijing office in 2011.

Indeed, China’s growing importance is such, says firm chair Jay Zimmerman, that “we can’t afford not to be there in the long term.”

—Updated as of 1/1/12