Last week, Duane Morris pulled out all the stops with a party at the Barbican Conservatory to celebrate 25 years in London. If you weren’t invited, or if your work tends to focus more or less exclusively on the UK, your response to this news will no doubt be, “how nice, congratulations, but who the hell is Duane Morris?”

This sums up the challenge that the firm, along with numerous other US rivals that are all but invisible in the City despite years of presence on the ground, faces. The irony will not be lost on Duane Morris’ leadership that, with a revenue of $758.4m after a 9.2 per cent rise from $694.2m in 2025, it is significantly larger than most of the firms where almost all those UK eyebrow raisers work. Nevertheless, and despite 25 years in the City, it has failed to ever break into the top 50-largest US firms in the UK ranked by revenue.

On the same day as the firm’s bash, The Lawyer popped over to CityPoint to meet Duane Morris’ global chairman since 2019, Matt Taylor. The obvious question? What are your plans for raising your profile in the UK?

“I’d love us to be in that top 50 of US firms in London and I think we will be,” insists Taylor.

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