Firm Profiles

A long list of mergers starting in the late 1970s but picking up steam in the past decade, has propelled Reed Smith into the upper echelon of law firms. A full–service firm, it is best known, perhaps, for product liability work: Reed Smith represents nearly all of the top players in the medical device and pharmaceutical industries. The firm won The American Lawyer’s Product Liability Litigation Department of the Year contest in 2010 and was a finalist in the two previous competitions in 2006 and 2008. It has also been an enthusiastic proponent of alternative fee arrangements. Founded in 1877, Reed Smith has grown in recent years due to three large mergers since 2003, each with a firm of between 130 and 250 attorneys. But the big roster has had consequences: Reed Smith regularly ranks outside top 100 firms on revenue per lawyer. However, profits per partner have typically fared better.

Reed Smith’s roots in Pittsburgh, its ancestral home, go deep. It has represented a string of hometown clients, including United States Steel Corporation and H.J. Heinz Company. In 2011, Penn State University retained the firm to advise its board of trustees in the wake of the sexual abuse scandal that rocked the school. But Reed Smith has long looked beyond the city’s—and the country’s—borders. It was an early entrant in the Middle East, establishing a foothold in the United Arab Emirates in 1978, and claims to be the only U.S. firm with an office in Greece (thanks to its 2007 merger with Richards Butler, which also expanded its reach in Europe and the Middle East). Like many of its peers, Reed Smith has made a push into China, opening a Beijing office in 2008, and a Shanghai outpost in 2011. The firm also has a sizable Hong Kong office.

In noneconomic metrics, the firm scores middle–of–the–pack numbers. It finished 106th of 200 firms on The American Lawyer’s 2011 Pro Bono Report, with attorneys averaging about 36 hours of nonpaying work. On the magazine’s 2011 Diversity Scorecard, the firm ranked sixty–second of 194 firms (nearly 15 percent of its U.S. lawyers are minorities). The news was a bit grimmer, however, on associate satisfaction: Reed Smith finished ninety–sixth of 126 firms on our 2011 survey.

—Updated 1/1/12