Cooley‘s financials for 2015 show revenue has risen 14% to $912m, while profit per equity partner increased by 9% to $1.9m, off the back of the firm’s London office launch in January last year.
Revenue per lawyer rose by 7.5% to $1.14m while the firm’s headcount is also up, with a 6.1% increase in lawyers to 801. The firm made 30 lateral hires in 2015, including 19 partners for its London launch. The firm has not yet disclosed the financials for its new City office.
The result is another strong financial year for the Palo Alto-headquartered firm which saw its revenue surge 19% in 2014 to $802m – thanks in part to its takeover of Washington DC firm Dow Lohnes– and profits per partner rising 11% to $1.74m.
Although relatively late to the game, Cooley made a dramatic entrance to the London market in January 2015 with teams from Edwards Wildman and Morrison & Foerster, creating a 55-lawyer office and taking on the 23,000 sq ft offices Edwards Wildman was occupying at 69 Old Broad Street.
With a mandate to generate London revenues upwards of $40m, the firm made multiple hires in the last twelve months and kicked off 2016 by adding prominent Sullivan & Cromwell litigator Louise Delahunty.
Major mandates for the firm last year included advising Auspex Pharmaceuticals’ $3.5bn sale to Teva and Horizon Pharma’s $1.1.bn acquisition of Hyperion Therapeutics; as well as acting for Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg on the fund formation of Zuckerberg Education Ventures. Disputes wise, it secured multiple privacy class action wins for Facebook last year including more than 10 patent litigation wins.
This week US firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld posted revenues up by 7% to $930m in 2015, with London contributing $91m following the acquisition of Bingham McCutchen’s London office at the end of 2014. The City revenue figure is up more than two and half times what the firm posted the year prior.
sarah.downey@legalease.co.uk