In 1975, the National Student Marketing battle with the SEC was still ongoing, and it was uncertain what effect this would ultimately have on the Firm’s business, especially on deals that required interaction with the SEC. Hurlock was convinced that clients expanding globally would welcome White & Case’s on-site presence wherever they needed legal help, most of which would not be SEC-related. In addition, although White & Case was well known for its representation of banks and industrial corporations, it did not then have any major investment banking clients. “In the 1960s, Larry Morris, who was tremendously popular and extremely vocal in his views, used to run up and down the halls saying, ‘We’re going to get Morgan Stanley next week, we’re going to get Goldman Sachs,’ ” Hurlock recalled. “And we never did. I decided we could not replace at that time the major New York firms that were acting as the principal outside counsel for a Morgan Stanley, a Goldman Sachs or another major investment banking firm.” Globalization, he believed, offered a way to “outflank” other law firms and make inroads into core markets by focusing on the cross-border activity in those markets. Instead of taking on other Wall Street law firms on their own turf, White & Case would beat them overseas and might also chip away at entrenched relationships between clients and law firms as corporations and financial institutions sought a U.S. law firm to assist them with their international requirements. “All the investment banks were establishing a business presence outside the United States, but the U.S. law firms were not,” Hurlock reflected.

Of the four offices the Firm had outside the United States at the time he became Chair, Hurlock had spent time in Paris and Brussels, opened London and pushed hard for the opening of Hong Kong as a base from which to handle the Firm’s work for Indonesia. Through the 1980s, the international expansion proceeded apace, with offices opened in Singapore and Stockholm in 1983, Ankara and Istanbul in 1985, and Los Angeles, Miami and Tokyo in 1987. There were sound reasons for wanting operations in each of these locations. The Singapore office was opened in part to handle the Firm’s work for the Indonesian government and for clients with business interests in Indonesia and in part to serve as one of the hubs of the Firm’s practice in Southeast Asia. The Firm opened its offices in Ankara and Istanbul at the suggestion—some say requirement—of Turkey’s prime minister, Turgut Özal, and to serve clients in Turkey and the surrounding countries. Los Angeles was opened primarily to work with the Firm’s New York bank clients who established leveraged buyout (LBO) teams in Los Angeles in the 1980s to handle LBO deals originating on the West Coast. Miami was opened to serve as the base from which the Firm would do much of its Latin American work and to give the Firm a presence in the southeastern region of the United States. Tokyo was opened in line with the Firm’s objective of having an office in all the world’s major financial centers, where many of the Firm’s financial institution clients also had offices. The Tokyo office received a boost when, in 1992, the Firm attracted as lateral recruits three former Baker & McKenzie partners, including Bob Grondine, who provided credibility in a challenging local market.

Meanwhile, the London office was also picking up speed after a difficult period in the early 1970s. As Gene Goodwillie, who took over as head of the office from Hurlock in 1975, recollects: “The decade was dominated by the miners’ strike and the economic fallout from that. It was a widely held view in New York that the UK was slipping gradually into the North Sea. That had an impact, of course, on our work. Duane [Wall] and I soldiered on, but it was not until the late 1970s that the London market really picked up. The election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 confirmed the positive direction and expansion of the London legal market.” The Thatcher government abolished exchange controls, which freed up the international movement of capital and broke down restrictive practices in the City of London. The London office’s work increased exponentially in the early 1980s as the lawyers there advised longstanding client General Electric Capital Corporation (GECC) on a succession of Eurobond issues and helped banking and investment banking clients develop increasingly sophisticated instruments. In 1982, the Firm advised the U.S. insurance company Aetna Life and Casualty Company on its acquisition of 50 percent of the British merchant bank Samuel Montagu & Company, and later advised it on a succession of acquisitions of UK life insurance companies. “For the first five years of the 1980s, we were flat out,” recalls Francis Fitzherbert-Brockholes, an English barrister and New York law-qualified lawyer who joined the Firm in 1978. “I was so engrossed in all the matters we were handling in a small office that I wasn’t even aware I was being put up for partnership.”

Expansion of geographic reach

Meanwhile, Goodwillie also began to advise banking clients on a new form of finance that would later become one of the Firm’s major practice areas: project finance. Then, in 1990, the UK Parliament passed the Courts and Legal Services Act (CLSA) to liberalize the legal profession and allow UK solicitors to be partners with non-UK lawyers. It took the Law Society three years to produce the regulations required to implement the CLSA and, as soon as the regulations became effective, the Firm brought in John Bellhouse as its first solicitor. From that day on, the Firm began to compete more aggressively and successfully against the magic circle and other UK firms. By 2016, the Firm had grown the London office to more than 350 lawyers, about the same size as the New York office, giving the Firm the strongest combination of New York and London offices of any law firm. According to magazine, White & Case’s London office was the largest non-UK law firm in the country in 2015 by revenue. The growth in London was achieved by successful lateral hiring and the promotion to associate status of participants in the London office trainee program, the first ever established by a non-UK law firm. London was always a critical part of the Firm’s global strategy because of the volume of cross-border business generated in the London market. An equally vital component was building an English law capability to serve clients not only in London but also in the other countries around the world that preferred English law to New York law. To help achieve this objective, as the Firm expanded its global reach, it began to assign lawyers from its London office as well as its New York office to other offices around the globe where its clients needed sophisticated advice on English, New York and local law.

In 1983, White & Case opened its office in Stockholm under the leadership of Gillis Wetter, a Swedish lawyer with an outstanding reputation in international arbitration. At that time, Soviet enterprises tended to have their contracts with companies outside the USSR governed by Swedish law with a Swedish arbitration clause. Both Wetter and the Firm expected that this would eventually result in an increasing number of Swedish arbitrations involving Soviet enterprises in which the Firm could become involved. When this arbitration explosion did not occur, the Firm intensified its efforts to represent Swedish financial institutions and corporations with international aspirations, and this change in focus led to the development of a strong, diversified practice, aided by the fact that the Firm’s office was opened eight years before that of the next non-Swedish firm. Two of the key players in this change of focus in Stockholm were Claes Zettermarck and Göran Åseborn, both of whom joined the Firm in 1983, shortly after Wetter. The story of the opening of the Helsinki office is a little more unusual. While on business in Helsinki in the early 1990s, Goodwillie met a Finnish lawyer, Petri Haussila. Haussila was then an associate with Shearman & Sterling in New York and bemoaned to Goodwillie that it did not appear that Shearman & Sterling was willing to find a way to enable him and his wife to return to Finland. Goodwillie suggested to Haussila that White & Case might be able to accommodate his aspiration, especially since the Firm already had an office in Stockholm and was committed to growing its Scandinavian practice. Upon his return to New York, Goodwillie discussed Haussila with Hurlock, who responded favorably to the initiative. Haussila joined the Firm as counsel in 1992, opened the Helsinki office that year and became a partner in 1995. It was again impeccable timing. As Finland embarked on a program of privatization and leading Finnish companies began to engage in significant U.S. financings, Haussila found himself in much demand as the only U.S.-qualified securities lawyer in the country.

Widening range of opportunities

The early days of the Moscow office proved as challenging as might be imagined. The situation was not assisted by the political crisis of 1993, which led to tanks outside the Kremlin, and the financial crisis of 1998, in which the country effectively shut down. Nevertheless, the office stayed open and, under the leadership of Doug Peel and Hugh Verrier, established itself as one of the top law firms in Russia. In 1994, the Firm opened an office in Almaty, Kazakhstan, led by Yuriy Maltsev, one of the country’s top lawyers, and the office was a significant contributor to the growth of the Firm’s Central and Eastern European practice. As Kazakhstan’s business center shifted to Astana, which replaced Almaty as the country’s capital in 1997, the Firm opened an office in Astana in 2013, eventually closing its office in Almaty in 2016. Czechoslovakia split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993. The Firm handled its work for both of these countries from its Prague office until 1999, when it opened an office in Bratislava to pursue mandates originating or centered in Slovakia. In Latin America, the Firm opened in Mexico City in 1991, again taking advantage of opportunity and professional connections. Ken Lee, an associate of the Firm who later became a partner, had been working in Mexico City for a number of years in the offices of Ritch y Rovzar, a prominent Mexico City law firm, to help the Firm originate and handle business in Mexico without having an office there. After the United States, Canada and Mexico entered into negotiations to create the North American Free Trade Agreement, which was eventually signed in 1994, Hurlock concluded that its terms would permit a non-Mexican law firm to open an office in Mexico under its own name. He instructed Lee and others to approach the minister of foreign investment in Mexico to confirm his conclusion. Lee was initially skeptical about the reception he would receive, only to be sharply told by Hurlock, “Ken, you seem to have mistaken what I just said to be a suggestion.” To the surprise of many, the minister of foreign investment provided the confirmation, and the Firm became the first non-Mexican firm to open an office in Mexico in its own name under Mexican regulations then in effect. The Firm expanded the office over the years, in part by bringing in prominent lawyers in the Mexico City market, including Alexis Rovzar, Alberto Sepúlveda-Cosío and Vicente Corta. As a further expansion of the Firm’s Latin American practice, the Firm opened an office in São Paulo six years later under the leadership of Don Baker, who relocated there from Miami as an associate and became a partner in 1999.

White & Case renewed its German initiative when the major UK law firms started to expand in Germany, joining forces with local firms, as the 1990s unfolded. Determined not to let the UK firms dominate Germany, the Firm opened a small office in Frankfurt in 1999. Then the Firm became aware that the German firm Feddersen Laule Ewerwahn Scherzberg Finkelnburg Clemm was considering the possiblility of merging with a U.S. or UK firm. This appeared to the Firm to be an attractive proposition: White & Case was keen to expand into Europe’s largest economy, while Feddersen Laule, by then Germany’s fifth-largest firm, had seen which way the market was moving—internationally. Negotiations began in earnest in late 1999. Interestingly, the first point to be agreed upon was the name, as Eberhard Meincke, one of the prime movers within Feddersen Laule and chairman of the German negotiating team, recalls: “When we merged the different firms in Germany, we left the name until last, which was a mistake, because it generated so much argument. This time, we settled on the name right at the outset after discussing how we should combine the firms’ names. We settled on a comma rather than two ampersands, much to our collective amusement.” The merger was concluded in August 2000. White & Case, Feddersen (the Firm became known in Germany simply as White & Case in 2004) added more than 180 lawyers to the Firm in Frankfurt and its new offices in Berlin, Düsseldorf, Hamburg and Dresden, which was closed in 2008. The merger was a highly successful move, and the Firm developed to such an extent that in 2011 White & Case was named Law Firm of the Year by , Germany’s most influential legal journal. The Firm opened an office in Palo Alto in 1999, on the West Coast of the United States, to serve the growing number of high-tech, software and IT companies in Silicon Valley. It opened an office in Shanghai during the first quarter of 2000 as its first office on mainland China.

As the Firm expanded its geographic reach, its client base became more global and also more diversified. The Firm began in 1901 with a financial institution client base that featured a number of leading commercial banks and over the years has added other financial institutions that include investment banks, investment advisers, broker-dealers, insurance companies, investment funds, private equity funds, hedge funds, real estate investment funds, government-owned commercial and development banks and sovereign wealth funds. Beginning in the mid-1970s, the success of the Firm’s sovereign practice has resulted in its representation of more than 60 sovereigns and their state-owned enterprises. The growth of the Firm’s corporate client base has been equally impressive over the years, and the Firm now represents top global clients across a large number of industries including oil & gas, power, mining, infrastructure and pharmaceuticals & healthcare. Reflecting the growth of the technology sector that has accelerated during the first part of this century, the Firm now represents a number of the world’s most prominent technology companies. As a result of its early globalization, the Firm also developed clients in emerging markets that have evolved into major global multinational companies. The dedication of DuPratt White and George Case to the clients of the Firm has been carried down from generation to generation, and the Firm’s clients have responded by relying increasingly on the Firm’s services and demonstrating their appreciation for its global resources. In 2015, the Firm’s top 25 clients used lawyers in an average of 16 of the Firm’s offices to work on the matters they entrusted to the Firm. By the time Hurlock stepped down as Chair of the Firm in April 2000, the Firm’s geographic reach had become truly global. The Firm had more than 1,000 lawyers in 31 offices in 24 countries, including the world’s major commercial and financial centers. It was multicultural, with lawyers of more than 60 nationalities. Most of the Firm’s offices had strong local law capability to the extent permitted by local rules. The Firm’s principal practices had all become global as the Firm’s geographic reach expanded. Many of its lawyers were recognized as being at the top of their areas of practice. The Firm’s client base reflected the breadth and variety of the Firm’s global operations. Being global is always a work in progress, but as the Firm prepared to enter its second century, the question about whether it could achieve its vision of becoming global had been answered.

Building the client base