Some of these mega firms are no longer partnerships at all, in the strict sense, or even law firms, but are what are known as "vereins," a constellation of separate legal entities doing business under a single brand name.
He's spent most of his career behind the scenes, first helping Tom Dixon transform Habitat and now as the creative director of the industrial design mega-firm Frog Design.
On the back of its pioneering mergers practice, the firm expanded into other areas and geographies, becoming a model for the global mega-firm that today dominates the legal industry.
1WTC – which Pataki (not Libeskind, as is often erroneously assumed) smarmily christened the "Freedom Tower" – would henceforth be designed by David Childs of the mega-firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.
WPP has become, in effect, a special interest mega-firm, with offerings for conservatives and liberals, environmentalists and polluters, gun lovers and gun haters, Tea Party die-hards and public sector unions, old guard media and their high tech competitors – the entire gamut from left to right, top to bottom.
But new innovations are coming thick and fast: the USDA recently announced a $2m investment for wood innovation, and in the previously scorched city of Chicago, mega-firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill published a study that re-imagines the 42-storey Dewitt Chestnut apartment block as a timber tower.
"The generative idea is that a plant-rich environment has many positive qualities that are not often found in a typical office setting," says the architecture group NBBJ, a global mega-firm that has built headquarters for Reebok and Boeing, and is currently working on a new Samsung HQ in Silicon Valley.
While other elite Washington firms grew into global mega-firms, Williams & Connolly, with 250 lawyers, has remained relatively small.
Industry experts say they don't expect that trend to spread to mega-firms like K.K.R. and Blackstone.
While other elite Washington firms, like Hogan Lovells, have grown into global mega-firms, Williams & Connolly, at 250 lawyers, has remained relatively small.
