Hogan Lovells Brand Guidelines: The 2010 Merger Now Trading as Hogan Lovells Cadwalader

A Washington practice and a London one.

Hogan Lovells was formed from two firms on either side of the Atlantic. The American one, Hogan & Hartson, was founded in Washington, D.C. by Frank J. Hogan in 1904; Nelson T. Hartson, a former tax lawyer for the Internal Revenue Service, joined him in 1925, English Wikipedia says. In 1970 the firm set up a separate group for unpaid public-interest work, its Community Services Department, which Wikipedia calls the first such group at a major firm. Hogan & Hartson opened in London in 1990, its first office outside the United States, and added the New York firm Squadron, Ellenoff, Plesent & Sheinfeld in 2002.

The British side traced its history to 1899, when John Lovell set up on his own at Snow Hill in the City of London. Reginald White and Charles King later joined him, and in 1924 the firm became Lovell, White & King. It moved to Thavies Inn at Holborn Circus, then to Serjeant’s Inn on Fleet Street, and in October 1977 to Holborn Viaduct. It grew through mergers: with Haslewoods, an older private-client firm whose clients included the Treasury Solicitor, in 1966; with the banking specialists Durrant Piesse in 1988, forming Lovell White Durrant; and in 2000 with the German firm Boesebeck Droste, when it took the short name Lovells. German Wikipedia says the German strand came from the Hamburg firm Droste, which had joined the Frankfurt firm Boesebeck Barz & Partner in 1997. The sources used for this guide do not say how the German predecessor firms fared between 1933 and 1945.

The two firms announced their merger on 15 December 2009, and Hogan Lovells was formed on 1 May 2010. Before the merger, German Wikipedia says, Hogan & Hartson’s Warsaw and Geneva offices split away and many lawyers from its Berlin office set up on their own. It was run as two partnerships, one for the United States offices and one for everywhere else, German Wikipedia says, with co-headquarters in London and Washington. In Germany it works from five cities, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Munich and Berlin, according to German Wikipedia.

Regulation, finance and a long pro bono record.

The name joined two surnames with no ampersand, and the firm grew under it for sixteen years. In December 2013 it merged with the South African firm Routledge Modise, giving it a Johannesburg office, its first in Africa, according to Wikipedia. The Washington side brought a large government and regulatory practice, and Wikipedia says Hogan Lovells remained among the largest lobbying firms in the United States after the merger.

Pro bono work stayed part of its public face. In 2015 the firm brought in a global citizenship policy that asks lawyers and business staff to spend at least 25 hours a year on pro bono and community work, the legal trade site Nonbillable reported in November 2026. That expectation now covers the merged firm, which says its people gave more than 174,000 hours of pro bono work in 2025.

Some offices closed. In March 2022, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Hogan Lovells said it was “progressing with an orderly wind down” of its Moscow operations, Legal Cheek reported on 14 March 2022.

How global law firms present themselves.

Large UK and global law firms sell advice rather than objects, so their identities rest on names, words and a small number of visual constants. Many trade under founders’ surnames that have been shortened or combined through mergers, and the wordmark is usually set plainly, in one weight, with the colour doing quiet work: often a single accent, used sparingly against white, grey or a dark neutral.

The firm website carries most of the brand. A typical site is organised around expertise and sectors, with practice pages for areas such as finance, disputes or competition, and an office list or map that shows how many cities and countries the firm covers. Partner profiles, with photographs, practice areas and contact details, sit at the centre of the client-facing pages, because clients often choose a lawyer as much as a firm.

Firms also publish a steady stream of thought leadership: insights, briefings, blogs, webinars and seminars on regulation, markets and technology. Alongside these sit annual reports or results pages, statements on responsible business, inclusion and sustainability, and pro bono reports that describe unpaid work for charities and community groups. Graduate-recruitment pages, sometimes run as separate microsites, address law students with a different, warmer voice, while alumni networks keep former lawyers in touch.

The firms in this guide, many of them with long roots in London, share that vocabulary, but their histories differ: some go back to the eighteenth or nineteenth century, others are the products of mergers this century, and several now operate as international partnerships spanning dozens of countries. This guide sets out what can be checked about each one, from founding and mergers to how it presents itself today, and marks clearly what rests on the firm’s own word.

A third name joins in 2026.

The Hogan Lovells name did not stay on its own. In December 2025 the firm announced a merger with Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, the New York firm that English Wikipedia says was founded by John Wells in 1792 and calls the city’s oldest law firm. It became Wells & Strong in 1818, took on John Lambert Cadwalader as a partner in 1878 and has used the name Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft since 1914, opening in London in 1997. Partners of both firms approved the deal in April 2026, and it was completed on 1 July 2026, City AM and Nonbillable reported. City AM described it as the largest transatlantic legal merger in history and put the combined headcount at more than 3,200; the firm’s own website says it has 3,100 lawyers. Its UK managing partner told City AM that the merger was about strengthening the New York–London corridor and the firm’s private capital work, not size alone.

The merged firm trades as Hogan Lovells Cadwalader, and its website now runs at hlc.com, where the old hoganlovells.com address forwards. The site uses the short form HLC in places, and its legal notice says the name covers Hogan Lovells Cadwalader International LLP, Hogan Lovells Cadwalader US LLP and their affiliated businesses. In its first months the firm wrote a commitment to pro bono work into its new partnership deed, which it says is a first for a global law firm, Nonbillable reported in November 2026. The Hogan Lovells name survives inside the longer one, and legacy news on the firm’s site still carries it.

For a design guide, Hogan Lovells shows how a merged name can absorb a third firm by growing longer rather than starting again. Compare A&O Shearman and Herbert Smith Freehills, two other London-based global firms. For this guide we use a deep green, ink and brass with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Hogan Lovells’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.