Morgan Lewis: An American Law Firm in Paris

Today, the building houses only a small portion of Morgan Lewis’ Paris-based lawyers, but that is set to change soon, when the team that had been operating at 68 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré since 2004, moves to the new office, located down the street from the Arc de Triomphe, much to the delight of Steve Wall, the Philadelphia-based lawyer who, as global managing partner of practice, oversees the firm’s practice groups and partner recruiting.

Former co-managing partner of Kramer Levin’s Paris office, Dana Anagnostou, an American who arrived in France in 1998, played a key role in the migration of 17 partners from the NYC-headquartered firm (54 lawyers in all) to Morgan Lewis. After a quarter of a century with Kramer, she now heads up the Paris branch of Morgan Lewis - one of the world’s top ten corporate law firms by revenue - alongside Sabine Smith-Vidal.

A connection was quickly established between the cross-border corporate and M&A specialist and Wall, a Morgan Lewis stalwart who has been with the Philadelphia-headquartered firm for four decades. “We saw this alliance as an opportunity to offer our international clients services in Paris that our 14-strong office here, whose practices were limited to employment law and litigation, previously couldn’t,” explains Wall. Now boasting 65 lawyers (including 23 partners), Paris has become the firm’s second-largest branch on this side of the Atlantic, after London.

Morgan Lewis has been expanding in mainland Europe of late, with the 2023 opening of a second German office, in Munich, bolstering existing locations Frankfurt and Brussels. The aim? To beef up the firm’s European practices in corporate law, finance, asset management, structured transactions, intellectual property and regulatory affairs, “while deepening our existing services in employment law, litigation and compliance,” adds Wall. All of which will be music to the ears of a French and international clientele made up of multinationals, financial institutions, entrepreneurs and investors from a wide range of sectors, including technology, fintech, investment funds, energy and construction, for which Morgan Lewis has a particular appetite.

Major investment in management
Negotiations between Morgan Lewis and Kramer Levin’s Paris-based lawyers began in November 2024, with the installation of the recruits slated for - and carried out on - on January 1st, 2025. “Initially, there were few of us who believed that we would actually meet this tight timeframe,” recounts Anagnostou, but [Morgan Lewis] “were serious from day one,” and pulled out all the stops to make it happen.

“For us, lawyers are never numbers on a balance sheet,” explains Wall. That’s why the firm, which has an annual revenue of over $3 billion, invests heavily to unite its members, broaden their skills, deepen their experience and develop their ability to maintain customer relations. Money well spent, with results “exceeding [Morgan Lewis’] expectations,” says the managing partner for practice. The secret to this success? Morgan Lewis’ carefully designed and maintained internal policy, spearheaded by the firm’s chair Jami McKeon, which allows its to lawyers stay ahead of the curve in their respective fields.

Those starting their legal careers today will have to learn differently

This also informs their vocation to be at the disposal of clients around the globe - a far cry from the old-fashioned view still prevalent in some corners of the legal profession, which assumes that lawyers set the terms of the relationship with those they represent. At Morgan Lewis, each lawyer treats each client as if they were their own. It’s a win-win situation, both for the firm and for its clients, who dislike being assigned a revolving roster of partners.

This care and attention has paid dividends, with Morgan Lewis, for example, one of just a handful of firms retained by General Motors which, following the arrival of its new general counsel, slashed the number of external advisors it had from 300 to 13. The same applies to Credit Suisse and UBS, following their merger, or Tesla, which knows it need only make one call to Morgan Lewis to get crucial advice in any field, in any country.

Thanks to close co-operation with practices and partners based outside France, the new Paris team has been able to hit the ground running on a wide range of cases - underway or under discussion - in sectors such as aviation, fintech, investment funds, energy, retail and banking. Among the most significant cases: McLaren versus Palou, labelled as one of the 20 most important of 2025 byThe Lawyer magazine, or the one that has shaken the aviation insurance industry since the war in Ukraine, worth over $12 billion.

Cutting-edge technology
Another string to the firm’s bow is its ultra-efficient IT team, with technicians in situ on New Year’s Eve to prepare the office for the new arrivals from Kramer Levin. With the pace of technological change in the profession faster now than ever before, Morgan Lewis has invested in a 70-strong AI and knowledge office, led by Colleen Nihill. Morgan Lewis’ chief AI officer was “convinced that the advent of generative AI represents one of the most important technological advances of our time, if not the most important,” when she announced in the winter of 2023 that Morgan Lewis had entered into a partnership with Thomson Reuters to trial legal products which utilize artificial intelligence.

The firm has a core team of partners who regularly exchange ideas with Thomson Reuters: “We beta-test specific tools related to generative AI for the agency,” explains Wall. By “we”, he means the people who have undergone in-house certification training to use the tools under development. “It was probably the first time since law school that I was worried about taking an exam,” laughs the global managing partner for practice.

The result is CoCounsel Core 2.0, whose secure technical architecture has successfully passed beta testing. In line with the promise of AI, the tool saves users a lot of time (40,000 queries and 4,000 users already). What is still to be determined is how best to use AI internally and with others, i.e. clients.

On cyber-threats, Morgan Lewis uses a cunning method to prep its troops: the firm organizes test phishing campaigns designed to teach lawyers how to spot scam attempts aimed at extracting sensitive data. Anyone unfortunate enough to fall for the fake scam is required to undergo a few hours’ training… and not let it happen again! Wall himself confesses to having taken the bait – though just the once, he stresses. As for clients who need to protect their own information when developing data-driven technology, Morgan Lewis has made consulting a priority, particularly on privacy and competition issues. The client remains king: using AI on their data, even if that data is anonymized, requires their prior authorization.

In any case, the effects of AI on lawyers’ work at his firm are already being felt. Wall explains that, to draw up a timeline of the year’s court cases, his colleagues used to spend days on end in a room going through files. The AI does the job in fifteen minutes. “The faster this timeline, the faster the lawyer can move on to another case (...) No one has lost their job because of AI.”

That’s all well and good, but what about the hands-on training of young lawyers? “Those starting their careers today will have to learn differently. Young people spend a lot more time practicing law than we did 20 or 30 years ago,” replies the man who cut his teeth in the pre-Internet era. Without denying the usefulness of tried-and-tested methods of training lawyers, Wall has no qualms about embracing new modes of learning, transformed by the spread of AI into the daily lives of workers.

With a talented team and the full backing of a forward-thinking executive, Morgan Lewis’ Paris office is set for a bright future.