Washington, D.C. (Photo: Diego M. Radzinschi/ALM)

Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith is opening a pair of offices in downtown St. Louis and in Washington, D.C., as it looks to expand its footprint in the Midwest and on the East Coast.

The Washington office is poised to open on Friday, led by former Crowell & Moring partner Katherine Funk, and by existing partner Todd Seelman, who will split his time with the firm's Denver office, where he is also managing partner.

“D.C. is really the center of the universe in regulatory work, and we've been wanting to open up an office, but we wanted to find the right time, space and person to do that,” said Seelman, who also chairs Lewis Brisbois' antitrust and competition practice and government investigations practice. 

For two decades, Funk has worked with clients on a variety of antitrust matters, particularly within the health care industry and related to merger compliance.

Seelman said that the firm is eager to expand its presence in Washington, focusing on building out its regulatory practice and eventually expanding into a full-service law firm office there.

Meanwhile, Lewis Brisbois said last week that it is opening a new office in downtown St. Louis, Missouri, with five new attorneys from the St. Louis office of Atlanta-based Hawkins Parnell & Young.

The St. Louis group includes Tracy Cowan, the managing partner of Hawkins Parnell's St. Louis office, as well as partners Melissa Vaughn and Karen Volkman and associates Alejandro Frank and Andrew Kriegshauser.

“Lewis Brisbois is a much larger firm than Hawkins Parnell, in terms of a platform, and it certainly has offices in numerous cities where we didn't previously with my prior firm,” Cowan said.

Cowan will lead the new office, which will be located in the Deloitte Building across from the city's famous Gateway Arch. Lewis Brisbois also has an office in Madison County, Illinois, which is about a 30-minute drive from St. Louis.

Cowan said that expansion is most certainly the goal for the firm in St. Louis.

The group's departure marks the third big loss for Hawkins Parnell this month, after a total of 19 toxic tort litigators from Hawkins Parnell joined Gordon Rees Scully Mansukhani in Dallas, St. Louis and Los Angeles, and a group of seven toxic and mass tort lawyers left to join Lathrop Gage in Dallas and Los Angeles.

With these new office openings, Lewis Brisbois now has 48 offices nationwide, including the opening of an office in Charlotte, North Carolina, earlier this month.

And it's not stopping anytime soon, Seelman said, noting that the firm plans on opening several other offices this year.

“We look at each market and each city and each office independently and say, 'how does it all connect to what we already do and expand what we do, so that we have a full panoply of legal services to our clients and provide them the best service that we can,'” Seelman said. “We will continue along that clip.”