Chicago. (Photo: shutterstock.com)

White & Case staked a claim in the Windy City earlier this summer, launching a Chicago office with the ambitious target of growing to 100 lawyers.

Now that it has absorbed the bulk of the Chicago office of national real estate law firm Pircher Nichols & Meeks, that goal is a looking a good bit closer.

In total, 13 lawyers from Los Angeles-based Pircher Nichols are joining White & Case in the firm's mergers and acquisitions practice and real estate industry group. Six partners are joining—Eugene “Gene” Leone, Michael McKeever, David Pezza, Marc Benjamin, Aaron Potter and Ruth Schoenmeyer—as well as five associates and two counsel.

“This is as good as a 1+1=3 as one will go about seeing,” said John Reiss, White & Case's New York-based global head of M&A. “I certainly am so enthusiastic about this because of the quality of the people at Pircher, both from a professional perspective and personal perspective.”

Conversations with the group began a year-and-a-half ago, as White & Case began looking for a team of “outstanding” real estate attorneys to shore up its practice stateside, Reiss said.

“We have a good real estate practice in the United States,” he noted. “[But] we do not have the necessary depth for the huge U.S. real estate market that exists.”

Looking rectify that, Reiss had reached out to one of White & Case's longtime private equity clients, who recommended the team at Pircher. The client—Reiss declined to identify the company—cautioned that though the lawyers had a national practice, they were committed to the Chicago market. But as luck would have it, White & Case was already targeting Chicago as part of its five-year strategic plan to grow in the United States, Reiss said.

Now Reiss had to convince the team of lawyers from the 50-lawyer boutique, many of whom weren't interested in or had left Big Law, to make the move.

“This is this elite longstanding Chicago firm of real estate lawyers, all of whom flourished and grew this amazing boutique,” Reiss said. “But what they understood at the end of the day is, while we look like a 2,200-lawyer behemoth, it's not what we feel like when you join us. … We're a team, we work together, we know each other.”

White & Case first launched in Chicago in June with only three partners. In three months, the office has expanded to 24 lawyers, including the Pircher group and recent lateral hires from Greenberg Traurig and DLA Piper.

Reiss said that the firm is looking to continue growing its private equity, M&A, finance, bankruptcy and litigation practices in Chicago. “Obviously, I don't know if we're going to succeed as much as we want to succeed, but right now things are going very, very well,” he said.

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