Chicago’s legal market is continuing to contract, with local firm Seyfarth Shaw taking over D’Ancona & Pflaum.
Seyfarth, which voted through the merger last Thursday (9 September), will house all D’Ancona’s 60 lawyers, including 34 partners, in its Chicago office, which houses 270 attorneys. However, it is expected that there will be some redundancies from the firm’s administrative staff.
The merger is the latest development to hit the Chicago legal sector, which has seen two firms – Altheimer & Gray and Peterson & Ross – unceremoniously collapse within the last few months. Also, Chicago’s Ross & Hardies recently merged with McGuireWoods.
D’Ancona has been in existence for nearly a century but over the past three years it has seen its number of lawyers shrink from 110 to today’s total of 60.