It was announced on Thursday that the third-largest law firm in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania will merge with a firm form Tampa, Florida. The firm from Pittsburgh is Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney PC. It will merge with Fowler White Boggs, according to the Pittsburgh Business Times.
The merger takes effect on Friday and will launch the firm into the country’s top 100 largest with more than 530 lawyers. It will increase the number of offices at Buchanan to 18. There were no financial terms of the deal released to the media.
This is the largest deal for Buchanan since 2006 when Buchanan Ingersoll PC and Klett Rooney PC merged.
During a one-year transition, the firm will be known in Florida as Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney/Fowler White Boggs. Rhea Law, the CEO of Fowler, will be the chair of the Florida offices of Buchanan. Buchanan already had offices in Florida located in Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Tampa. Now, the firm will add offices in Tallahassee, Fort Myers and Jacksonville.
There were five Fowler offices, all in Florida, that employed 90 lawyers.
“I don’t know that we have all the details worked out,” Rooney CEO Jack Barbour said.
“That’s putting the cart before the horse. Our goal is to get them together. We’ve had exploratory talks, and that’s where it stands at the moment.”
The merger talks between the firms started in the fall. A shareholder from Buchanan attended college with a lawyer from Fowler and the talks went from there. Barbour and Law met often in Washington, D.C. to discuss terms of the merger before coming to an agreement.
“This was driven by clients,” Law said. Barbour agreed.
Barbour continued with, “Doing any deal like this requires a lot of work, and once we get it all done, that’s just the beginning. We’ve got to make the combined firm work better than the two firms did separately. I’d sit back in Pittsburgh and say, ‘Geez, do I really want to do this? We’ll be good next year whether we do the deal or not. I know all the shareholders in our firm, all the counsel and associates on a personal basis, and now I’ve got 90 lawyers’ names, families, where they went to college to learn.’ But every time I went to Florida to meet with the Fowler White people, I felt very good coming back. Because they’re nice people, good lawyers, good professionals. That spurred it on. These are people we want to have as partners.”
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