Cleary Gottlieb is a pioneer in globalizing the legal profession. Since 1946 our lawyers and staff have worked across practices, industries, jurisdictions and continents to provide clients with simple, actionable approaches to their most complex legal and business challenges, whether domestic or international. We support every client relationship with intellectual agility, commercial acumen and a human touch.

Driven to deliver exceptional results for their clients, they push boundaries and challenge assumptions. That’s been core to their ethos since their founding in 1866. It fuels how they work and define themselves, and it informs their growth and evolution as a firm.

They keep impressive company. Their clients are market leaders, global innovators and paradigm-shifting entrepreneurs who advance emerging industries. Surrounding ourselves with the best inspires and challenges them to constantly reimagine what’s possible.

From their main offices in Amsterdam, Brussels and Luxembourg, together with their branch offices in Dubai, London and New York, they handle their clients’ complex legal challenges both locally and cross-border.

As a specialist firm, their lawyers work in multidisciplinary teams with the aim to deliver pragmatic advice. They build close business relationships with their clients that range from local and multinational corporations to state organisations and public authorities. They realise that understanding their clients’ commercial objectives, their position in the market and their sector or industry, allows them to render suitable and effective advice.

In addition to their own international presence, they collaborate closely with other top-tier firms for cross-border matters outside their home jurisdictions. These relations are non-exclusive and enable them to assemble a tailor-made, integrated team of lawyers with the best expertise and contacts for each specific matter. This guarantees efficient coordination on cross-border transactions throughout a multitude of legal areas, whatever their complexity and nature.

Founded by Marshall Skadden, Les Arps and John Slate on April Fools’ Day in 1948, Skadden began as a scrappy upstart among a sea of established “white shoe” law firms in New York. Joe Flom was hired as the firm’s first associate later that year, and litigator Bill Meagher, the fifth partner to lend his name to the firm’s letterhead as it appears today, joined in 1959.

Our first two decades were marked by slow and steady growth of our client base as we set out to establish ourselves as the go-to firm for our clients’ most complex legal problems. Our willingness to handle proxy fights in the 1950s and early 1960s — matters deemed unseemly by white shoe firms — positioned us to ultimately become the firm of choice for the hostile takeovers that dominated the M&A landscape beginning in the 1970s.

Recognizing the value of providing full-service advice to clients, from day one we sought to develop a range of complementary practices, like litigation, tax and antitrust. Client needs led us to open offices in other cities beginning in 1973, and the volume of work we were handling fueled exponential growth in the number of attorneys at the firm in the 1980s. That growth included a significant expansion of the practices we offered to clients, including restructuring, finance, real estate, mass torts and securities litigation, as well as the opening of offices in Europe and Asia.

In the decades since, we’ve built on that platform to provide advice to clients around the world on their most important matters. Our core values reflect the ideals of our history, and we remain committed to providing excellent lawyering and unrivaled client service in all our work.