Husch Blackwell is pleased to announce that the firm reported revenue of $417,056,000 in 2020. This figure represents the highest single-year revenue total in the firm’s 104-year history. Complementing the total revenue record, the firm also posted year-over-year growth in revenue of 9.7 percent, which represents the firm’s fastest pace of organic revenue growth—growth unrelated to a merger or business combination—in well over a decade.
“Like many firms in the legal industry, this year really challenged our ability to be good stewards of the firm’s resources,” said Husch Blackwell Chairman Greg Smith. “From the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, we had excellent financial modeling and opened near-daily lines of communication with the firm’s leadership in order to gain consensus on how to manage the public health crisis’s impact on the firm.”
Smith will exit the Chairmanship of the firm at the end of the first quarter 2021, when Chair-Elect Catherine Hanaway takes over the role. Smith has served as the firm’s Chairman since 2018, and prior to that, served consecutive three-year terms as the firm’s Chief Executive. He has been with the firm since 1981.
On March 18, 2020, Husch Blackwell’s leadership team sent all employees home, except for a small contingent of essential onsite workers in select offices, and quickly adopted a work-from-home protocol that enabled the vast majority of the firm’s 1,500 employees to service clients from a remote location. The firm remains in its work-from-home protocol nearly one year later.
“Our financial results in 2020 were only possible because of the investments we’ve made over the past few years in our people and in our technology,” said Paul Eberle, the firm’s Chief Executive. “We’ve continued to attract and develop talented lawyers who see the value of our industry-first structure and who embrace our client-service orientation. Our clients value the consistently excellent quality of our teams across offices and across practices.”
The firm had several standout industry and practice teams during 2020, including record revenues from its Financial Services & Capital Markets group and its Labor & Employment team.
“Our clients are the extraordinary achievers. Because they continued to take risk, employ people, and grow, we had the privilege of serving them,” said Hanaway. “The enduring relationships we have built with our clients and the commitment of every member of the firm to elevate each client experience allowed us to work with them to face the worst of the 2020 challenges. Viewing our client’s challenges from a big-picture perspective is something we take great pride in, and getting the right teams on the right matters at the right time—especially during a crisis—made a huge difference with clients who were dealing with novel questions in both established and emerging areas of law. We are very appreciative of the trust our clients placed in us throughout 2020.”