BakerHostetler ranks 54th among the top 100 grossing firms in the 2016 AmLaw 100, with 942 attorneys in 14 U.S. offices, including 170 lawyers in Cleveland.
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- When 900 of BakerHostetler's partners, spouses and significant others assemble here for its annual partners meeting and black-tie dinner this weekend, they will commemorate the centennial of one of Cleveland's most enduring and influential law firms.
In an industry where big law firms grow by swallowing other firms, and attorneys move up by switching employers, BakerHostetler has largely bucked the trends, fostering longterm relationships with its clients and cultivating loyalty among its employees while steadily growing in size and scope.
BakerHostetler Chairman Steve Kestner, right, and Cleveland Office Managing Partner Hewitt Shaw, talk about the firm's 100th anniversary. More than half of the people in its Cleveland office have ties to the city, and Chairman Steven Kestner and Hewitt Shaw, managing partner of the Cleveland office, each joined the firm straight out of law school 37 and 36 years ago.
Cleveland not only gave birth several major law firms, those law firms continued to represent major companies long after other cities lost their legal work, Kestner said. A graduate of St. Ignatius High School, Ohio Wesleyan University and The Ohio State University Michael E. Moritz College of Law, Kestner said that when he joined the firm, all 100 of its lawyers' names still fit on the company letterhead.
BakerHostetler law firm founders Cleveland Mayor Newton Baker, left, and two of his cabinet members: Joseph Hostetler, right, assistant city law director, and Thomas L. Sidlo, middle, director of public service. Today BakerHostetler ranks 54th among the top 100 grossing firms in the 2016 AmLaw 100, with 942 attorneys in 14 U.S. offices, from Orlando to Seattle, New York to Los Angeles, with clients across Ohio and around the world. It is the second-largest law firm in Cleveland, after Jones Day.
When Hewitt Shaw came to Cleveland from Altoona, Pennsylvania, to study law at Case Western Reserve University, "the plan was to leave the day after graduation, and we never got around to it," he said. "The experience I had with the firm, the size of the city, and the really highly regarded legal community, was too exciting to leave. For a young married couple, it was a great place to settle down."
It has been more than 25 years since BakerHostetler, which just moved into Kay Tower this January, has summoned nearly all of its employees to its hometown.
From the floor-to-ceiling windows of its new lobby on the 20th floor, they will be able to look out on the firm's original offices in the former East Ohio Gas Building.
Inside those offices, Newton D. Baker, who had just finished his second term as Cleveland Mayor, and two members of his cabinet, Assistant City Law Director Joseph C. Hostetler and Public Service Director Thomas L. Sidlo, each put $500 into a firm account and opened for business.
Dan Moulthrop, chief executive of The City Club of Cleveland, which celebrated its own centennial in 2012, said then-Mayor Baker not only helped found the City Club, he believed it was critical to civic engagement and dialogue.
"Newton D. is my homie," Moulthrop said. "The City Club was founded in 1912, the year that Newton Baker became mayor of the City of Cleveland. Baker had been law director under the last mayor, Tom L. Johnston," and embodied the same spirit of Progressivism.
"City Clubs were popping up all over the United States, and any municipality worth its salt, that gave a damn about its government, had a city club: a social club with a civic purpose. A place for civic dialogue where people who cared about government policy and making the community work better would get together for lunch everyday."
Copy of 1916 Western Union telegraph from President Woodrow Wilson to Newton D. Baker asking him to accept a cabinet position as Secretary of War. Barely two months after Baker, Hostetler & Sidlo hung out its shingle, Newton Baker received a telegram from President Woodrow Wilson asking him to serve as his Secretary of War. "Earnestly hope that you can see your way to do so," Wilson wrote. "It would greatly strengthen my hand."
"Baker brought a round-trip ticket to Washington, D.C., to explain to Wilson why he didn't want to be his Secretary of War, because he was a pacifist, and he did not use the second half of his ticket," Kestner said.
Instead, Baker became responsible for "drafting, organizing, and outfitting an army of 2 million men as quickly as possible; demobilizing the troops and negotiating the cancelation of war contracts when the war ended," according to The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History. Baker returned to Cleveland in 1921.
"Cleveland was the Silicon Valley of its time, an industrial hub, center of shipping," and a hotspot for trade, Shaw said. The city's business leaders poured much of their prosperity into the arts and cultural landmarks that are now celebrating their own centennials, including the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Cleveland Orchestra.
BakerHostetler was founded in 1916 by Newton D. Baker, left, a two-term mayor of the City of Cleveland, and Joseph C. Hostetler, right. Sidlo was financial director, controller, and general counsel for Scripps-Howard Newspapers, United Press Assoc., and the Newspaper Enterprise Assoc., but he was also chairman of the Northern Ohio Opera Association, president of the Musical Arts Association (which oversees the Cleveland Orchestra), Cleveland Playhouse, the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, and the Foreign Affairs Council in Cleveland, according to the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History.
Hostetler ran the business side of the firm. To pay his way through law school at Western Reserve University, he sold red suspenders for 50 cents to $1 a pair, first door to door, then coast to coast, traveling to every one of the then-45 states of the union during an 18-month sales blitz. He later organized the Northern Ohio Food Terminals, headed efforts to create a theater season in Cleveland, was secretary of the Cleveland Baseball Co., and counsel to the American League.
Brad Hildebrandt, founder and chief executive of Hildebrandt Consulting, which advises law firms around the world on strategic planning, mergers, and other corporate matters, said: "I think this is a firm that right from their founding partners created a culture of collegiality which is not a part of other firms."
Baker is very conservative in how it manages its operations, and whom it brings into the firm, he said. "They're not just running around getting big just because everybody else is," he said. "There's a great deal of personal and professional respect at BakerHostetler, and they guard that DNA very carefully."
"I attend a lot of partner meetings like this, and sometimes I can't wait to get out of there," he said. "BakerHostetler, I always look forward to, because it's great being with these people. I have a lot of respect for them."
Over the decades, BakerHostetler has represented a number of businesses that remain its clients today, from the Cleveland Baseball Co. and the American League of Professional Baseball Clubs, now operating as Major League Baseball, to The Plain Dealer Publishing Co., and The E.W. Scripps Co.
"I think BakerHostetler is unique, as compared to other large law firms, in the well-roundedness of its lawyers," said Halle Fine Terrion, general counsel, chief compliance officer, and secretary of TransDigm Group Inc., a Cleveland-based global designer, producer and supplier of engineered aircraft components for commercial and military aircraft. TransDigm has been a Baker client since 2003.
"While they often have specialized expertise, for the most part Baker lawyers maintain more general experience in a larger breadth of legal matters than other large law firms. I find that makes them more effective as counselors," she said. "It is the utmost importance for me in hiring a lawyer that I can count on him or her to be truthful and realistic in his or her counsel - even if it means delivering 'bad news.'
"Too often lawyers are focused on either flattering me as a client or promoting their own legal skills, or are afraid to take risk in their advice and, consequently, lose sight of my need for real advice and the benefit of their experience. With Baker lawyers, I do not have those issues," she added.
A century later, BakerHostetler continues to support the City Club, sponsoring the annual High School Debate Championship in memory of partner Patrick J. Jordan, and recently winning the Literacy Cooperative's first CLEBEE corporate spelling bee there.
"It's hard to quantify the financial contributions that Baker has made to the City Club," Moulthrop said. "We get a lot of support from a lot of firms, but there's no relationship we have that goes further back than Baker Hostetler."
"One of the reasons I feel a fondness for Baker is that generation after generation after generation, their lawyers have been consistently active and engaged leaders. When we brought our program to Public Square, there was a Baker table right there, front and center. The Baker attorneys, they show up, and they care."