Simpson Thacher & Bartlett


Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP is an international law firm headquartered in New York City, employing over 900 attorneys in eleven offices worldwide. The firm specializes in a variety of areas in both litigation and corporate practices, with a focus on mergers and acquisitions.

History

, Thomas Thacher and William M. Barnum organized the firm as "Simpson, Thacher & Barnum" on January 1, 1884, with offices at 9 Pine Street. The three were formerly law clerks at the old-line firm Alexander & Green. The first associate salary was ten dollars, and the first retainer fee was fifty dollars. In 1889, the name was changed to "Reed Simpson Thacher & Barnum" when former U.S. House Speaker Thomas Brackett Reed joined the firm. Reed died in 1902, and the name was soon changed to Simpson Thacher Barnum & Bartlett. The final change came in 1904 when it was amended to its current name of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett.
From its original location at 9 Pine Street, the firm has operated at many offices throughout New York City until finally settling at its present location at 425 Lexington Avenue opposite Grand Central Terminal. The firm opened its Los Angeles office in 1996, Palo Alto in 1999 and in Washington, D.C. in 2005. Simpson Thacher began its international expansion in the late 70s, beginning with its London office in 1978. Since then, Simpson Thacher has expanded to Tokyo, Hong Kong, Beijing, São Paulo, and Seoul.
In 1988, Simpson Thacher, led by longtime chairman Richard Beattie, advised KKR's $25.1 billion acquisition of RJR Nabisco. It was, at the time, the largest-ever private-equity purchase in history, the details of which are memorialized in the book "
Since opening in 1999, the Palo Alto office has experienced remarkable growth in both size and prominence. The Palo Alto branch is now the firm's second largest office and has come to represent some of Silicon Valley's most distinguished tech titans and private equity firms, playing a hand in a string of record breaking transactions.
Simpson Thacher lawyers have included U.S. Senators, Solicitors General, a Speaker of the House of Representatives, a Secretary of State, a Secretary of the Army, Ambassadors, Judges on U.S. Circuit and District Courts and the New York State Court of Appeals, presidents of the American Bar Association, and presidents of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York.
Judiciary
Government
Business
Academia
Others
In 2007, Simpson Thacher led the market by raising the base salary for first-year associates to $160,000 per year. In the process, it established the market salary for all of its peer firms in New York City. Simpson Thacher again led the market in 2014 when it raised associate bonuses by as much as $40,000, matched within hours by other New York elite firms Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison and Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton.
In 2016, law firm Cravath, Swaine and Moore LLP beat the "Simpson salary scale" for the first time in nearly a decade with a 12.5% increase in associate base salary, a move that was promptly matched by Simpson Thacher and other large law firms. As of June 6, 2018, the base salary for first-year Simpson Thacher associates begin at $190,000.

Rankings and awards

Simpson Thacher is consistently among the most profitable large law firms in the world on a per-partner basis according to the American Lawyer’s annual AmLaw 100 Survey. The firm is also recognized in various other surveys, including Vault.com’s 2010 review of the 20 Best Law Firms to Work For.
It is among the most profitable large law firms in the world on a per-partner basis according to the American Lawyer’s annual AmLaw 100 Survey. Simpson Thacher had a gross revenue of approximately $1.4 billion in 2017 with an estimated profits per partner of $3,485,000.
The firm has relationships with private equity firms Blackstone Group, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, Hellman & Friedman and Silver Lake Partners, and it has longstanding ties to JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and the United States Department of the Treasury. Other notable clients include the Alibaba Group, Goldman Sachs, Toronto-Dominion Bank, Microsoft, Tesla Motors, Sirius Satellite Radio, Google and Facebook. The firm has represented the buyer in the five largest completed buyouts in history.
The firm is also consistently deemed by a number of rankings and surveys as one of the most prestigious law firms in the nation, including AboveTheLaw, Vault 100, and Forbes.