Gunnercooke has hired a five-partner team from FisherBroyles to open an office in Chicago, the second for the UK-headquartered platform firm after the New York base it opened in 2022.
The incoming team is expected to boost gunnercooke’s corporate, private equity, funds, finance and transactional capabilities, the firm said. It includes Andrew Geier, Nicholas Isaacson, Kelley Smith, Randall Schwartz and Shannon Geier.
Gunnercooke’s US chair, Noreen Weiss, said the team “join our growing firm as natural extensions of our corporate and transactional practice areas. I am confident that they will provide outstanding service to our clients by leveraging gunnercooke’s model. Our mission is to enable lawyers to practise at the highest level on their terms.”
Since it was founded in 2010 as a challenger firm by Darryl Cooke, former head of corporate at Hill Dickinson, and in-house veteran Sarah Goulbourne, gunnercooke has grown to become an established corporate and commercial firm of more than 500 lawyers, including 400 partners.
The firm says its partners are required to have at least 10,000 hours of practising experience, while its lawyers work on a fixed-fee basis, meaning work is scoped from the outset and cost certainty is guaranteed.
The incoming team brings the firm’s US partner count to 20. Cooke said the group’s hire “speaks to our commitment to providing best-in-class transactional support to our clients and reflects the investments we’ve made to establish the firm in the US”.
The firm has increased revenue by around 14% year-on-year to £67.6m in 2023. The Chicago office will be its 15th globally and follows the firm marking its first international expansion in 2020 when it added DWF executive partner Wolfgang Richter to open an office in Berlin. Since then the firm has opened four more bases in Germany as well as in Vienna, Tirol and New York.
Gunnercooke is ranked in the UK by legal rankings guide The Legal 500 in areas including commercial litigation, trade finance, pensions, property finance and insurance litigation and counts BAE Systems, Google and Santander among its more than 40,000 clients.
The firm’s Chicago launch comes against the background of traditional UK-founded law firms making a concerted effort to push into the lucrative US market. Just yesterday Freshfields announced it was opening its fourth US office in Boston, hiring a senior M&A partner from Latham & Watkins to spearhead the launch.
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