San Francisco-based Thelen Reid & Priest and New York’s Brown Raysman Millstein Felder & Steiner have confirmed they are to merge, creating a 250-partner, 617-lawyer national firm with an estimated $400m annual turnover.

The firm will be known as Thelen Reid Brown Raysman & Steiner, and will be co-chaired by Thelen chairman Stephen O’Neal and Brown’s managing partner Julian Millstein.

The firm will conduct a comprehensive compensation review in the New Year to determine equity status for the new partners. The combined turnover would have ranked the merged firm 66th in The Lawyer’s Global 100 2006 report, just ahead of Bryan Cave.

The merger will give the firm 255 lawyers in New York and 242 in California, primarily in San Francisco and Los Angeles. The merged firm will also have a 70-lawyer Washington DC office, and the Shanghai base Thelen Reid opened in late August.

The merger gives each firm the national coverage it had been after. Thelen Reid, despite the 1998 merger between Thelen Marrin Johnson & Bridges and Reid & Priest, had only 78 lawyers in New York.

In 2003, Thelen Reid formed a strategic partnership with Pinsent Masons to create Masons Thelen Reid, a specialist construction, engineering and infrastructure practice.