Baker McKenzie Brand Guidelines: The Chicago Firm That Went Abroad in 1955 and Became a Verein

Baker & Simpson, then Baker & McKenzie.

Baker McKenzie’s roots go back to Chicago in the 1920s. English Wikipedia says Russell Baker, a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School, opened his first practice, Baker & Simpson, with Dana Simpson in Chicago in 1925. The practice served the city’s growing Mexican American community, work that Wikipedia says laid a foundation for the firm’s later reach abroad. Simpson retired in 1932.

Baker’s role in building the firm abroad has been recognised since: in July 2013 The American Lawyer named him one of its top 50 innovators for ideas that changed large-firm law practice, English Wikipedia says.

In 1949 Baker was joined by John McKenzie, a graduate of Loyola University Chicago School of Law, and the firm took the name Baker & McKenzie; it counts 1949 as its founding year. It now presents itself as Baker McKenzie, without the ampersand, though its London partnership still trades as Baker & McKenzie LLP, the name the Law Gazette used for it in 2023.

Chicago remains its headquarters, English Wikipedia says, although the firm’s structure, described below, means most of its lawyers work for separate partnerships outside the United States.

Abroad from 1955.

The move abroad came early. In 1955, English Wikipedia says, a lawyer in Venezuela approached the firm about opening a joint office in Caracas, and Russell Baker’s son Donald moved there to launch it; Wikipedia describes this as the start of the first multinational law firm. Within three years the firm had offices in Washington, D.C., Amsterdam, Brussels, Zurich, New York and São Paulo. By 1978 it had 26 offices in 20 countries, and by 1990, 49 offices on six continents, with around 1,500 lawyers.

Its leadership became international too. In 1999 the Paris managing partner, Christine Lagarde, an antitrust and labour lawyer who later became France’s finance minister and managing director of the International Monetary Fund, was elected chair of the global executive committee, the first woman to lead the firm, and served for five years, English Wikipedia says. In 2005 about 70 partners from the New York office of the dissolving firm Coudert Brothers joined Baker McKenzie. In October 2025 a London-based partner, previously head of its international trade practice, took over as global chair, according to Wikipedia. Before that, in September 2019, the firm had elected the managing partner of its Hong Kong office as global chair for four years from October 2019, its first Asian chair, Wikipedia says.

The firm has faced court findings. In 1994 a California trial court found against it in a sexual-harassment suit brought by a former legal secretary, and on 4 May 1998 the California Court of Appeal upheld the judgment in full, English Wikipedia records.

It has also withdrawn from one market. On 15 March 2022 Baker McKenzie announced that its offices in Moscow and St Petersburg would become an independent law firm, the Law Gazette reported; the firm said it had operated in Russia for 33 years and had been the first global law firm registered there. In July 2022 it said the Russian offices would cease to be a member firm and launch as an independent firm by October, and that the intention was for the new firm to be Baker McKenzie’s preferred law firm in Russia, the Gazette reported.

Design and documentation.

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 verein that began as one partnership.

Baker McKenzie’s structure is unusual even among large law firms. In 2004, English Wikipedia says, it became the first major law firm to organise itself as a Swiss verein, an association of separate member partnerships. Regional profit pools, with their own tax, accounting and partner-pay systems, stay separate, while strategy, branding, information technology and other functions are shared. Wikipedia adds that it is the only verein that used to be a single partnership; the others were created by firms merging.

That separateness has been tested in court. In August 2023 the Law Gazette reported that a London employment tribunal had ruled that a junior lawyer at a member firm in the United Arab Emirates had no employment contract with Baker & McKenzie LLP; the UAE firm, which English Wikipedia says joined in 2013, had been a member firm until 2022 but was not in partnership with Baker McKenzie and shared no common ownership with it, the tribunal heard. The judge found that the lawyer had a clear express contract with the UAE firm, and the claims against Baker McKenzie failed.

For the brand, the arrangement means one name covers many separately owned firms. English Wikipedia counted 4,595 lawyers in 71 offices across 45 countries in 2025, and Wikipedia describes its offices as decentralised. The shared functions have also changed: in early 2026 the firm announced it would cut up to a tenth of its global business-services workforce in a reorganisation that it attributed in part to its increased use of artificial-intelligence programs, English Wikipedia says.

For a design guide, Baker McKenzie shows how a single shared name and brand can hold together a federation of partnerships that keep their own finances. Compare DLA Piper, which left its own verein for a global LLP in 2026, and Dentons. For this guide we use brick, charcoal and stone with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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