Bryan Cave earns star status on go-to firm list; smaller firms land five spots

Bryan Cave was one of the marquee names in trade magazine Corporate Counsel’s survey of firms that represent Fortune 100 companies, but much smaller firms also made their presence known.

With representation of four Fortune 100 companies in torts and negligence lawsuits, Bryan Cave tied with seven other firms for the fourth place spot for that practice area. Overall, the firm worked for 10 of the companies, including Walgreen Co., Kraft Foods Inc. and Missouri-based Emerson.

National law firm Morgan Lewis got the most mentions – 24.

Five Missouri firms with fewer than 50 attorneys also got work from the Fortune 100, giving credence to managing partners’ assertions that big companies have been willing to look beyond the large national firms to smaller, less expensive firms to save on outside counsel costs.

St. Louis-based Dowd Bennett; Schlichter Bogard & Denton; Senniger Powers; Summers Compton Wells; and Williams Venker & Sanders were on the list with clients including Caterpillar Inc., Costco Wholesale Corp. and Supervalu Inc. 

Shook, Hardy & Bacon, Missouri’s second-largest firm after Bryan Cave, represented eight of the companies, including The Home Depot Inc. Missouri’s No. 3, Husch Blackwell Sanders, worked for three, including News Corp.

Corporate Counsel researchers comb through public records and Thomson Reuters’ information about law firm representation from legal documents to come up with the list of firms used by the largest companies in the United States. 

The go-to firm lists, included in the September issue of the magazine, can be found at http://www.law.com/jsp/cc/PubArticleCC.jsp?id=1202432923522.