Houlihan Lokey Brand Guidelines: A 1972 Los Angeles Valuation Firm Turned Global Adviser

Two founders and the privately held company.

Houlihan Lokey was founded in Los Angeles in 1972 by Richard Houlihan and O. Kit Lokey to provide accounting, valuation and other financial services to privately held companies, including financially troubled ones, the Los Angeles Times reported in August 2015. English Wikipedia says the firm started as a general business adviser to private companies, and that two more partners joined early: Robert F. Howard in 1974 and James H. Zukin in 1976. For years the firm carried all four names, as Houlihan Lokey Howard & Zukin, before settling on the shorter two-name form it uses today.

Its first specialism came from a change in the law. English Wikipedia says the passage of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act in 1974 created demand for independent valuations of private businesses, particularly those that had set up employee stock ownership plans, and that this launched the firm’s valuation business. Valuation remained a core trade as the firm grew: during the merger and leveraged-buyout wave of the 1980s, the same source says, large Wall Street banks turned to Houlihan Lokey for independent fairness, solvency and employee-ownership opinions.

Investment banking followed. In 1986 the firm set up an investment banking broker-dealer to give merger advice and to raise debt and equity, and in 1987 that unit bought Cheviot Capital Corporation and began building a financial restructuring group, English Wikipedia says, as many highly leveraged deals of the decade showed signs of distress. In 1995 it bought Mergerstat, a publisher of merger research, from Merrill Lynch. Offices in New York, San Francisco and Chicago opened in the 1980s.

Restructuring, then the world.

Restructuring became the firm’s calling card. The Los Angeles Times described Houlihan Lokey in 2015 as a Los Angeles boutique investment bank that had advised on some of the biggest debt restructurings in history, naming the bankruptcies of Enron, Lehman Brothers and WorldCom. English Wikipedia says that in 2002 the firm advised the official creditors’ committees in the WorldCom, Enron and Conseco bankruptcies, and that in 2008 it advised the creditors of Lehman Brothers. It groups the firm’s work today into mergers and acquisitions, capital solutions, restructuring and distressed M&A, and financial and valuation advisory, which includes fairness opinions.

International growth started in the 2000s. English Wikipedia lists a first office outside the United States in London in 2001, followed by Paris in 2005, Frankfurt in 2006, and Hong Kong and Tokyo in 2007, with Beijing within the next three years. In 2010 a minority stake in Avista Advisory Group brought offices in Mumbai and Singapore. In 2015 it took over the investment banking operations of Leonardo & Co. in Germany, the Netherlands and Spain, and joined a venture with Leonardo’s management in Italy, giving it offices in Rome and Milan. In October 2021 it acquired the Japanese advisory firm GCA Corporation, expanding in Asia and Europe, the same source says.

Acquisition has remained the main route to new specialisms. English Wikipedia lists Black Stone IP in 2017, Quayle Munro in 2018, Freeman & Co. in 2019 and Triago in 2024, among others, and says that in January 2026 the firm acquired the real estate adviser Mellum Capital, with operations in Munich and London, and secured a controlling interest in Audere Partners, a French boutique that trades as Natixis Partners. Citing LSEG and PitchBook data, English Wikipedia ranks Houlihan Lokey first for global M&A by number of transactions in 2024 and first among global restructuring advisers.

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.

Orix USA, then the New York Stock Exchange.

Houlihan Lokey gained a Japanese owner in 2006. That year the firm agreed to merge with Orix USA, the American corporate lending arm of ORIX Corporation of Japan, to meet international demand for middle-market investment banking, English Wikipedia says; its article on ORIX describes the deal as Orix USA acquiring a majority stake. The offices in Hong Kong and Tokyo opened the following year.

The firm went public on 13 August 2015, when its shares began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker HLI, the Los Angeles Times reported that day. The shares offered were sold by its major owners, Orix USA and the firm’s own executives and directors, rather than issued to raise new money; management and directors kept control mainly through Class B shares with superior voting rights. The firm then had about 980 employees in nearly 20 offices. Its chief executive told the paper that the listing was meant mostly to raise the firm’s brand awareness among clients and to attract bankers who would want to own listed shares, and that the business did not need the capital.

Today Houlihan Lokey, Inc. is headquartered at Constellation Place in Century City, Los Angeles, and English Wikipedia gives its staff as more than 2,700 people as of February 2026. It advises large public and closely held companies, institutions and governments. Its name keeps those of the two founders who began it as a valuation practice in 1972, and no longer includes the two partners who joined in the 1970s.

For a design guide, Houlihan Lokey shows how a firm built on valuations and restructuring can present itself as a single plain name, leaning on its record and its rankings rather than on ornament. Compare Lazard and Moelis & Company, two other independent advisory names. For this guide we use a deep green, a pale sea mist and a copper with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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