Mayer Brown is one of the world’s largest and oldest law firms. The three entities that make up Mayer Brown today all began to practice law in the 19th century. JSM (formerly Johnson Stokes & Master) was formed in 1863 in Hong Kong and today is known across Asia as Mayer Brown JSM. The US portion of the firm was founded in 1881 in Chicago and has been known by several different names (always including the name of its founder, Levy Mayer) as it grew over the years. In the UK, Rowe & Maw was established in 1895 in London, and operated under that name until joining with its US counterpart in 2002.
In the summer of 1879, in a Chicago Justice of the Peace courtroom, a 30-year-old Czech immigrant and self-educated lawyer named Adolf Kraus squared off against a 21-year-old assistant librarian at the Chicago Law Institute and recent Yale Law School graduate named Levy Mayer. The case involved the sale of a lame horse. Mayer's client, the defendant in the case, was his older brother David, a prosperous Chicago merchant (he commissioned the landmark Louis Sullivan-designed Schlesinger & Mayer department store, occupied until 2007 by Carson, Pirie & Scott).
Mayer lost the case and both parties appealed to the Cook County Circuit Court. (Kraus appealed because he wanted $200 and only got $25.) In 1881, while the appeal was pending, Kraus, impressed with his adversary’s brilliance, invited Mayer to form a partnership. They astutely solved their conflict of interest by paying to settle the case themselves, each contributing $100 to satisfy the full claim. Riding Chicago’s growth, their caseload tripled over the next five years.
The firm became known as Moran, Kraus, Mayer & Stein, in 1893, when Judge Thomas A. Moran of the Illinois Appellate Court joined the firm. Stein was elected Cook County judge that year and the firm became Moran, Kraus & Mayer.
In 1903, a fire tore through downtown Chicago's Iroquois Theater in the middle of a performance. In 15 minutes, the conflagration killed approximately 600 people, many of them blocked from escape by exit doors that opened only inward. As this was standard practice, the firm's clients, the theater owners and producers, were exonerated, but the case led to changes in municipal fire codes still in place in thousands of communities across the country.
In 1920, the firm, now called Mayer, Meyer, Austrian & Platt, represented Charles A. Comiskey, whose "Black Sox" threw the 1919 World Series. Comiskey asked the firm to sift truth from rumor without formally incriminating the players or destroying the team. Five years later, the firm represented Comiskey again when the banished players sued him for unpaid salaries.
The US-based practice became Mayer, Brown & Platt in 1970, and, through the explosive decades that followed, grew into a national institution with offices throughout the United States and selected cities in Europe. During these years the practice doubled in size to around 200 lawyers, having grown from 50 to 100 lawyers in the preceding 15-year period.
UK-based Rowe & Maw's history, like Mayer, Brown & Platt's, reaches back to the 19th century, when it was established in 1895 by Frank Rowe and Frederick James Maw. The latter's nephew, Frederick Graham Maw, assumed the reins in 1926 and remained the senior partner until 1973. He oversaw fast growth leading up to World War II, and carried Rowe & Maw through the tough times after the war. It was Maw's decision to offer jobs to any Rowe & Maw lawyer returning from the Armed Forces — even though there was then precious little work in post-war England to support those lawyers. For nearly all of Rowe & Maw’s first century, a Maw was senior partner of the firm.
In 1976, Nigel Graham Maw became senior partner. His practice included extradition work for the French and American governments, and his most notable extradition case involved sending James Earl Ray back to Memphis for trial for the shooting of Martin Luther King, Jr.
By 1978, revenue had passed one million pounds, and that would triple by 1983. Rowe & Maw continued to grow at a torrid 14% annual rate during the two subsequent decades.
In 2001, Mayer, Brown & Platt merged with boutique firms in Paris and Frankfurt.
On January 28, 2002, Mayer, Brown & Platt embarked on a new, definitive chapter in its history by merging with the 250-lawyer UK firm of Rowe & Maw. The groundbreaking combination, "arguably the most significant transatlantic merger to date," according to UK industry journal Legal Week, created Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw, the 21st century incarnation of what had begun 122 years earlier with the joining of two lawyers and the settlement of a lawsuit over a lame horse.
In September of 2007, the firm took the next step in solidifying its brand and reflecting its position in the global legal marketplace by shortening its name to Mayer Brown, a partnership with nearly 600 partners and more than 1,500 lawyers spread across the globe.
On January 28, 2008, Mayer Brown further extends its global reach by combining with leading Asian law firm JSM (formerly known as Johnson Stokes & Master), one of the oldest and the largest law firms in Asia. The combination creates a truly international law firm with offices across Asia, Europe and the Americas.
The history of JSM dates back to the 19th Century when Edmund Sharp, the founder and sole proprietor of the firm, started practising in Hong Kong in 1863, a time when Hong Kong had less then a dozen practising lawyers. The firm's name Johnson Stokes & Master was first assumed in 1890 and since then, the firm has been expanding to keep pace with the growing economy. Today, the firm has grown from four solicitors to some 300 lawyers offering a full service package to clients in the major cities in the region, including Hong Kong, Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Bangkok, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.
