Law360’s top seven Firms of the Year cleaned up at the 2019 Practice Group of the Year awards, notching a combined 46 wins after spending the past year helping companies navigate blockbuster deals and secure key high court rulings.
Paul Theiss, chair of Mayer Brown, credited the firm’s success to its attorneys' ability to work together across groups and countries, calling that collaboration a “hallmark” of the firm.
“These eight practice areas, and the other practice areas that we work in, we all work together as one integrated law firm throughout the world, and we think that our clients benefit from that collaboration,” he told Law360.
Mayer Brown
Theiss highlighted Mayer Brown’s securitization practice as one of the firm’s key assets. According to the firm, Mayer Brown was the only law firm to serve as counsel for issuers or underwriters on more than 150 public and private transactions in 2019.
“We’ve been one of the top securitization firms in the world for a long time,” Theiss said.
Last year, Mayer Brown advised Goldman Sachs on a $100 million secured credit facility loan to Mexican start-up Konfio, making Konfio one of the biggest financial technology companies in Latin America by investment.
The firm has also recently done securitization work for a wide range of businesses in the public and private sectors, including AT&T, RBC Capital Markets and the Overseas Private Investment Corp.
That work has extended across the Atlantic as well, with Mayer Brown attorneys advising a financial institution in its purchase of the first commercial mortgage-backed security in Europe to comply with new regulations on the Continent that took effect Jan. 1.
The firm’s appellate practice is another “core strength of Mayer Brown,” Theiss said, noting that the firm argued more cases before the U.S. Supreme Court last year than any other firm.
“The firm has long had a reputation as a Supreme Court and appellate powerhouse, and we also have a very strong track record of winning those arguments,” Theiss said.
In particular, the firm has notched important victories in 2019 in defense of arbitration clauses.
In April, the Supreme Court ruled that arbitration agreements must explicitly allow classwide arbitration for class claims to be brought, rebuffing a worker’s attempt to bring a class arbitration over a data breach and delivering a win to Mayer Brown’s client Lamps Plus Inc., a lighting retailer.
Mayer Brown attorneys also secured another court win in favor of arbitration last month after a California federal judge temporarily blocked a state law criminalizing mandatory arbitration provisions in employment contracts.
Mayer Brown won Practice Group of the Year awards in the appellate, banking, benefits, consumer protection, environmental, project finance, securitization and tax practice areas.
