Forty-seven years on LaSalle Street.

Meridian & Cole opened in 1979 with four lawyers and one client. The client is still with the firm.

What the firm is for

Meridian & Cole is a corporate law firm. We are retained by boards, general counsel and founders at the point where a decision has become irreversible: a signed letter of intent, a subpoena, a restatement, a death in a founding family.

The firm was founded by Arthur Meridian and Douglas Cole, two litigators who had spent the 1970s watching transactional lawyers hand their clients agreements that could not survive a dispute. Their proposition was that the people who write the contract should be the people who would have to defend it. Forty-seven years later that is still how the firm is organised: our transactional partners sit with our litigators, and every purchase agreement we draft is read by somebody who has tried a case about one.

We practise in four areas and decline work outside them. That is not modesty. It is the reason a partner can read every page.

Four things we hold to.

Partners do the work.
The partner who takes your first call is the partner who negotiates the agreement or argues the motion. Associates support that person; they do not replace them. Any change to the named team is disclosed to you before it happens.
Bad news arrives early.
A finding that reduces value, a filing that will not be ready, a position we no longer think is winnable. You hear it the day we know, in writing, with a recommendation attached. Nobody at this firm is rewarded for optimism.
The budget is a promise.
Every matter has a budget by phase, agreed before work begins. If the shape of the matter changes, we revise the budget with you in advance. We have never issued an invoice that surprised a client, and we intend to keep it that way.
We take fewer matters than we could.
Forty partners and 118 lawyers is a deliberate size. It is large enough to run a second request or a multi-jurisdiction investigation, and small enough that every partner knows what the others are carrying.

The Chicago skyline at dusk seen from across the lake.

Chicago, and only Chicago.

One office, on the forty-first floor at 181 West Madison Street. We appear in courts across the Midwest, in New York and in the District of Columbia, and roughly half our transactional work involves parties outside Illinois. But there is one place where the files are and one place where the partners are, and that is not going to change.

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