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Description
Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP is a global white shoe law firm headquartered in Los Angeles, California. The firm employs approximately 800 attorneys throughout 23 offices around the world.
History
The firm was established in 1986 by John B. Quinn, Eric Emanuel, David Quinto, and Phyllis Kupferstein, with the purpose of being a litigation-only firm. Name partner A. William Urquhart joined in 1988.
Part of the firm's self-image is its lack of a formal dress code. This casual self-image extends into the corporate structure of the firm, which eschews any formal management committees, other than an advisory committee for the evaluation of contingency fee cases. About 35 percent of Quinn attorneys went to Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Chicago, New York University, or Columbia law schools.
Quinn Emanuel is the first AmLaw 100 firm to have a female name partner. The firm changed its name in March 2010 to include Kathleen Sullivan, former Dean of Stanford Law School, who heads the firm's appellate practice. The firm was previously known as Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges.
In 2014, the firm was the subject of a Freedom of Information Act request by Microsoft, in connection with a contract it had supposedly signed with the IRS.
Intellectual property litigation is the firm’s largest practice area and currently has over 200 lawyers who litigate IP cases. Quinn Emanuel represented the Winklevoss twins' social network, ConnectU, in its lawsuit that accused Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg of stealing ideas for his own social network. The parties reached a confidential settlement, yet Quinn Emanuel later revealed the confidential settlement amount of $65 million in a firm advertisement.
International expansion and offices
Beginning in 2007, Quinn Emanuel expanded internationally by opening its first foreign office in Tokyo. A year later, the firm expanded to London, then Chicago in 2009, Mannheim, Germany in 2010, Moscow in 2011, and Hamburg in 2012.[14] On September 1, 2011, Washington, D.C.'s Legal Times Blog announced that the firm was opening its first office in the nation's capital. In 2013, the firm opened offices in Paris, Munich, Hong Kong, and Sydney, and, in 2014, it opened offices in Brussels and Houston office. LegalWeek reported that Quinn Emanuel opened an office in Seattle in 2015. Other offices of the firm are located in New York City, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Stuttgart, Perth, Shanghai and Zurich.
