Dinsmore & Shohl LLP is excited to announce continued substantial growth across the country, as the firm has welcomed 11 new attorneys (10 partners) this week, largely in its Denver and Detroit offices.  

A team of six construction litigators (five partners, one associate) have come to Dinsmore from the regional firm of Hall & Evans LLC in Colorado. And five mergers and acquisitions partners have joined Dinsmore in the Midwest (four in Detroit, one in Chicago) from the firm of Howard & Howard Attorneys PLLC. With the additions, Dinsmore now has 31 attorneys in Southeast Michigan (Detroit and Ann Arbor) and has grown by nearly 50 percent in Chicago over the last 12 months. This kind of expansion has become routine for Dinsmore, which earlier this year executed the largest legal merger of 2021 thus far, when it joined forces with Wooden McLaughlin in Indiana and opened three new offices.

Mark Schneider, Dinsmore’s office managing partner for Michigan, attributed the growth in part to Dinsmore’s culture of fairness, collegiality and transparency.

“Dinsmore offers the strength of a national firm,” he said. “We are very flexible in terms of the practices we can accommodate and exceptionally transparent when it comes to our realization and compensation structures. When new attorneys join us, we work hard to accommodate their clients in a way that is favorable.”

The new group in Denver—comprised of partners Michael Paul, Todd Fleckenstein, Kelley Albright, Kevin Poyner, Nick Snow and associate Matt Blubaugh—represents developers, general contractors, architects and engineers in drafting contracts and helping with front-end negotiations, including sureties and bonds. They also represent the same clients in wrongful death and injury cases, due to the dangerous nature of construction sites, and they have experience in asbestos and environmental work as well.

“Denver is exploding, and our clients are doing more and more work both here and across the country,” Paul said. “By joining Dinsmore with its national platform, we can help them in so many more ways, and Dinsmore’s existing clients now have construction counsel in the Rocky Mountain region as well.”

The Midwest M&A team is led by former Howard & Howard Corporate, Finance and Real Estate Chair Joseph DeVito, and includes Jeffrey Hoover, Evonne Xu, Ian Larkin and Jane Hahn. The team represents both buyers and sellers in middle-market strategic transactions averaging $250 million apiece, and ranging anywhere from $50 million up to $1 billion. Their clients are diverse, including private equity firms, multinational corporations and companies in financial services, health care, cryptocurrency, defense, aerospace, hydroponics, industrial, automotive and more. They also specialize in financing and lending transactions on both corporate and real estate matters.

“Our M&A practice is diverse and requires all types of subject-matter specialists,” DeVito said. “Dinsmore’s national presence, depth and breadth—whether they’re attorneys in SEC, IP, ERISA or executive compensation work—give our clients exactly what they need at a beneficial Midwest cost structure. As a group, we’ve always focused on providing the highest level of service to our clients, and joining Dinsmore’s national platform will only improve upon that.”

As an attractive destination to attorneys across the country, Dinsmore’s growth trend is poised to continue well into the future, and current partners are planning to accommodate that. Denver founding partner Erich Kennedy, who is actively seeking more public finance and corporate lawyers in Colorado, is aiming to double Denver’s headcount again and expand the office’s square footage in the years to come, and DeVito said he’d like to help build the Detroit office to 50-75 attorneys.