Simpson Thacher Brand Guidelines: The 1884 Wall Street Firm Behind Railroads, Banks and Buyouts

Three law clerks and an office on Pine Street.

Simpson Thacher began in New York City in 1884. English Wikipedia says John Woodruff Simpson, Thomas Thacher and William Milo Barnum organized the firm as Simpson, Thacher & Barnum on 1 January that year, with offices at 9 Pine Street in lower Manhattan; the three had been law clerks at the older firm Alexander & Green. The firm’s own history page calls them three young law clerks, all graduates of Columbia Law School, and says the new Wall Street practice quickly became an adviser to several major railroads, litigating disputes and guiding the mergers that consolidated the industry.

The name changed several times before it settled. English Wikipedia says that in 1889 the former Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Thomas Brackett Reed, joined, and the firm became Reed Simpson Thacher & Barnum; it then briefly carried the name Simpson Thacher Barnum & Bartlett, with Philip Bartlett as the new name partner. Both Wikipedia and the firm date the final name, Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, to 1904, when Barnum retired. Today the firm uses the shorter “Simpson Thacher” across its website, with the full name kept for the partnership, Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP.

The firm’s history lists early work for utilities and industry: it says it represented General Electric in establishing light and power companies, formed the American Locomotive Company and reorganized the businesses that merged into the International Silver Company. After the First World War, it says, it advised utilities investing in Latin America and investment banks underwriting steamships, cement, rubber and oil refining, and in the 1920s worked on early cooperative-apartment buildings in New York.

Regulation, banks and the leveraged buyout.

The New Deal changed the work. The firm says the Securities Act of 1933, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 brought clients to court and to the new Securities and Exchange Commission, and marked the start of its financial-services practice. During the Second World War, it says, clients that had made cans and typewriters turned to war production, and after the war the firm formalized departments for litigation, corporate finance, banking, labour, tax, real estate and trusts and estates.

The firm’s history credits a long-serving leader, the litigator Whitney North Seymour, who joined in 1923 and led it from the 1930s, with setting its course on pro bono work; it cites his 1937 Supreme Court case Herndon v. Lowry. In 1952, it says, Simpson Thacher became general counsel to Manufacturers Trust Company, a relationship that continued through the bank mergers that formed JPMorgan Chase between 1991 and 2004. In 1968 it took on product-liability trial work for General Motors in the New York area, which the firm says helped build a stand-alone litigation practice. Its alumni include Cyrus Vance, a partner who served as US Secretary of State.

Private equity is the thread most often tied to the firm. Simpson Thacher says it began advising the newly formed Kohlberg Kravis Roberts in 1976 and worked with it on the contract structures of early leveraged buyouts; Blackstone became a client in 1985. English Wikipedia records the firm advising KKR on its 1988–89 takeover of RJR Nabisco, the deal told in the book Barbarians at the Gate. The firm also records milestones in its own partnership: it made Eleanor Fox its first woman partner in 1970, and in 1974 Conrad Harper, who had come from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, became its first African-American partner — according to English Wikipedia, only the second Black partner at a major New York firm.

Design and documentation.

Large American law firms tend to present themselves with restraint. Many are named after founding or senior partners, and their names are often set as sober wordmarks: a serif with a long institutional pedigree, or a plain grotesque sans, usually in a single colour. Navy, near-black and white are common choices, with an occasional accent kept for links and headings rather than for decoration. Long partnership titles are frequently cut down over the decades to two surnames joined by an ampersand, or to a single surname used in conversation.

Their websites are built around how clients and recruits search. Practice-area and industry pages sit near the top, alongside a directory of lawyer biographies, each with a headshot, admissions, education and representative work. Latham & Watkins, for example, organises its main menu under People, Capabilities, Achievements, Insights and Global Citizenship, and lists every office by city on its About Us page.

Publishing is a large part of the presentation. Firms issue client alerts on new laws and rulings, along with articles, podcasts and webcasts grouped under headings such as insights or thought leadership. Many also publish pro bono reports, figures on community service and reports on diversity and inclusion, and some set out environmental commitments for their offices.

Recruiting pages form a separate register, written for law students and junior lawyers: summer associate programmes, training, office life and alumni networks. Across all of these pages the visual system usually stays quiet, so that the firm’s name, its people and its record of work carry the identity. The guides in this series look at how individual firms use those conventions, and where their histories and names differ.

From Pine Street to 17 offices.

The office map grew from New York. The firm and English Wikipedia list London in 1978, Tokyo in 1990, Hong Kong in 1993, Los Angeles in 1996, Palo Alto in 1999, Washington, D.C. in 2005, Beijing in 2007 and São Paulo in 2009; the firm adds Houston in 2011, and Wikipedia gives Brussels in 2021. Wikipedia says the firm announced a Boston office in May 2024 and, in May 2025, signed a lease for a San Francisco office planned for 2026. In August 2026 Pulse 2.0 reported that Simpson Thacher was opening in Chicago with five incoming partners focused on middle-market private equity and family-office clients. The firm’s About page now gives a figure of approximately 2,000 lawyers in 17 offices, across 32 major practice areas, and its headquarters sits in midtown Manhattan opposite Grand Central Terminal.

In April 2025 Simpson Thacher was one of several large firms that reached agreements with the White House, at a time when executive orders were being issued against several law firms, committing to provide pro bono legal work; English Wikipedia dates that group of agreements to 11 April 2025.

The website is organized the way many old New York partnerships organize theirs: pages for practices, industries and client solutions, with separate sections for pro bono work, community and opportunity programmes, alumni and summer-associate recruiting, and versions of the site in Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish. Its history page sets out the firm’s past as a timeline that runs from 1884 to the present.

For a design guide, Simpson Thacher shows how a firm can keep one partnership name from 1904 onwards and trade on two of its three surnames. Compare Cravath and Davis Polk, two more New York partnerships of the 19th century. For this guide we use a deep navy, cream and an old brass with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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