Lazard Brand Guidelines: New Orleans 1848, Three Houses and a 2005 Listing

Three brothers, a store and the Gold Rush.

Lazard began as a shop, not a bank. On 12 July 1848, English Wikipedia says, three French brothers, Alexandre, Lazare and Simon Lazard, founded Lazard Frères & Co. as a dry goods merchant in New Orleans. French Wikipedia describes them as Jewish brothers from Lorraine who had emigrated to the United States, and says their first trade was in goods sent from France: haberdashery, hardware and groceries. The name simply means “Lazard Brothers.”

The family soon moved west. By 1851, English Wikipedia says, Simon and two more brothers, Maurice and Élie, had settled in San Francisco, where the Gold Rush was at its height. French Wikipedia traces the turn to finance to that period: the brothers stored gold for prospectors, arranged transfers of gold to families in France and then began to lend to customers. Trading gold between San Francisco and western Europe gave the firm its first international business.

Europe followed. In 1854 Alexandre Lazard opened an office in Paris, and English Wikipedia says the firm began advising the French government on gold buying. A London office opened in 1870, and French Wikipedia adds a New York office in the same decade, beside the one in San Francisco. Transatlantic gold transfers and foreign exchange made the firm a link between French and American business, French Wikipedia says.

By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the business had become what English Wikipedia calls the three “Houses of Lazard” — in the United States, France and the United Kingdom — separately managed but allied. Their partners advised clients on financial matters and built a cross-border network of relationships in business and government.

Advice, restructuring and an asset manager.

The Second World War divided the houses. During the German occupation of France, leading partners of the Paris house left for the firm’s New York office, according to English Wikipedia’s biographies of them, and after the liberation in 1944 one returned to Paris while another took charge of the American house. The sources used for this guide do not say how the Paris house itself operated during the occupation of 1940 to 1944. Under that leadership the American operations grew sharply in the post-war boom, and English Wikipedia credits the New York partners of that era with helping to shape the modern market for mergers and acquisitions. French Wikipedia quotes the journalist Martine Orange: “for many, Lazard is the house that invented modern investment banking, that of mergers and acquisitions.”

Asset management came from London. In 1953, English Wikipedia says, Lazard Investors Ltd began an asset management business there, the origin of today’s Lazard Asset Management. The firm now works for institutions such as pension funds, endowments, foundations, insurers and banks, and for family offices and private clients.

The advisory side covers mergers and acquisitions, restructuring, capital structure, capital raising and corporate finance. English Wikipedia says the firm advised on many of the largest restructuring assignments during and after the 2008 financial crisis, and that its Sovereign Advisory group works for governments. French Wikipedia says this government work is run from Paris and has covered privatisations, debt restructurings and sovereign ratings, for clients including Greece, Argentina, Ecuador and Egypt. Lazard advised the Greek government on its 2012 debt restructuring and was hired by the government again in February 2015, both encyclopedias say.

In France the group keeps advisory and investment strictly apart. French Wikipedia says the investment-banking company is Lazard Frères, while Lazard Frères Gestion manages money for institutions and private clients, and that in 2022 the French business launched LazardNext, a team advising smaller companies on mergers and acquisitions. In 2016 Lazard bought Verus Partners, a Toronto advisory firm.

How independent banks present themselves.

Independent investment banks sell advice rather than balance sheets, and their public identities tend to reflect that. An advisory firm’s website usually leads with a name, a list of offices and a record of work. Most of the firms in this guide carry the surname of a founder or founding family, and the house name is typically set in a restrained serif or a plain sans with almost no ornament. The office list itself can run to dozens of cities on several continents.

The record of work is the centrepiece. Advisory firms publish transaction lists, the modern form of the printed “tombstone” notice, naming the client, the counterparty, the firm’s role and the year. Evercore’s transactions pages, for example, mark each mandate as pending or closed. In these guides the deals are named without their sums.

Around that record sit a handful of recurring page types: sector and coverage pages describing the industries and kinds of assignment a firm handles, such as mergers and acquisitions, restructuring, capital markets and private capital; team and leadership pages with partner biographies; and, at firms with research or asset management arms, research reports, outlooks and insights. Media pages often consist largely of announcements of senior hires by sector and city.

Careers pages complete the set: they describe training programmes, internships and the idea of partnership; Evercore, for one, calls talent its primary distinguishing asset. This guide sets out what can be checked about each firm — who founded it, how its ownership changed and how it presents itself today — and keeps each firm’s own claims attributed to it.

One firm since 2000, listed since 2005.

The three houses became one firm late in their history. English Wikipedia says they were formally united in 2000 as Lazard LLC, and that Lazard became a public company in 2005, with nearly two-thirds of its shares then owned by current and former employees; in connection with the listing it spun off its broker-dealer, Lazard Capital Markets. The shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker LAZ. The listed partnership, Lazard Ltd, was reincorporated in Delaware with effect from 1 January 2024 and renamed Lazard, Inc.

The firm today names principal executive offices in New York, Paris and London, and English Wikipedia says it works from about forty cities across North and South America, Europe, Asia and Australia. Its Paris offices have moved several times since 1885 and have been on the Boulevard Haussmann since 1979.

The newest part of the business is private capital. Lazard announced on 30 April 2026 that it would acquire Campbell Lutyens, the private capital advisory firm, and in November 2026 it announced that the purchase was complete and that the combined business would be called Lazard CL, Institutional Real Estate, Inc. reported on 4 November 2026. The trade publication said Lazard CL starts with more than 300 advisory professionals and 19 offices, and English Wikipedia describes it as the firm’s third global business, beside financial advisory and asset management. In 2025 Lazard also agreed a partnership with the alternative credit firm Arini Capital Management on lending opportunities across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, English Wikipedia says.

For a design guide, Lazard shows how a family name from 1848 can carry a modern global firm with very little decoration: today’s company name, Lazard, Inc., keeps the brothers’ surname but drops the “Frères & Co.” Compare Rothschild & Co, another bank built by a family across several European cities, and Evercore, a New York advisory firm founded nearly a century and a half later. For this guide we use a deep ink, a pale stone and an ochre with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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