Values   Global Reach

OUR STANDARDS

Goldberg Kohn: A Firm Built One Lawyer At A Time

Today, many law firms seem to be obsessed with getting bigger and richer, modeling their growth after the global accounting firms. Partners don't know each other, and mergers combine dissimilar cultures and inconsistent standards.

At Goldberg Kohn, we've been charting a different course for 30 years, one lawyer, one client and one matter at a time. We're not the biggest or the oldest firm in Chicago, but we have a reputation for producing great work, for being great to work with and great to work for. Ask around. Not surprising, then, that dozens of big firms have wooed us. But we're for hire, not for sale.

Every day, we at Goldberg Kohn earn and reaffirm our reputation for skill and integrity by competing with the largest and best-known firms in courtrooms and conference rooms all over the country. We get more than our share of top legal talent, first class clients and outstanding results. And, increasingly, both talented lawyers and frustrated clients are turning to us to escape from impersonal and numbers-driven mega-firms.

How do our standards compare? An independent study of 88 of Chicago's largest law firms ranked Goldberg Kohn third overall based on our lawyers' academic credentials. We have grown 15-fold, building a legacy one careful hire at a time.

At Goldberg Kohn, you won't be shunted to our "B-team." We don't have one.

OUR VALUES

Delivering The Resources Of An Entire Firm One Client At A Time

It's no secret what clients want. We ask them. They assume that lawyers will know the law. They want their lawyers to answer their telephone calls, listen actively and find ways to add value to their business. They want advisers who understand them, their goals and their challenges, and they need attorneys who can help them shape solutions that really work, consistently and efficiently. Those are the standards they're held to, so why shouldn't they expect it of their lawyers? At Goldberg Kohn we've built our firm culture around satisfying the highest standards - yours.

In many firms, the prevailing philosophy for partner compensation is, "You eat what you kill." At Goldberg Kohn, we don't view clients as prey. We've built our firm on the values of mutual trust, support and respect - for each other, our staff and our clients. We direct our competitive energies at our competitors and focus our ambitions on our clients' needs. We staff matters with a view to your budget, not ours.

We test our decisions against the values we profess. These values have served us well as the firm's clientele has steadily grown to include an impressive and diverse list of Fortune 500 companies, major financial institutions, middle market businesses, entrepreneurs, state and local governments and agencies, and not-for-profit organizations. Our clients are our best referral sources.

OUR GLOBAL REACH 

From Chicago To The World One Matter At A Time

How do we serve our clients from one office in Chicago? Our clients' businesses take them all over the country and, increasingly, around the world, so we have positioned ourselves to assist them efficiently wherever they need help - not by raising our rates to subsidize branch offices in expensive markets, but by going where the matters take us. Our litigators have handled cases on site in virtually every state, and our transactional lawyers regularly handle matters nationally and internationally. We act as general counsel for clients headquartered from New York to Arizona. We practice coast-to-coast at Midwestern rates.

We are proud to be the Chicago member of Meritas, a long-standing business alliance of approximately 165 carefully selected independent business law firms in 120 U.S. cities, in every major province of Canada and in over 50 other countries. Meritas members are locally based firms who know the local courts and customs and are schooled in cross-border and cross-cultural disputes and transactions. Meritas is the only legal network with an online, searchable database of thousands of its lawyers' skills and experience, and an archive of more than 10,000 written performance evaluations by clients and referring attorneys. Try asking a mega-firm for either of those.

Meritas firms treat every referral as though it came from their best client. Like Goldberg Kohn, they are community leaders with outstanding reputations and connections in their markets. Learn more at www.Meritas.org.