Who We Are: Barack Ferrazzano was founded in 1984 with a vision focused on delivering efficient, team-oriented services of the highest quality. The firm has continued to focus on this vision and has grown and evolved into a sophisticated, first-class legal practice with a diverse client roster of national and international clients. We’ve accomplished this by practicing law in a different way. Our strategic focus is to continue growing organically by helping our clients succeed, by constantly evaluating and implementing ways to better serve our clients, and by recruiting the highest caliber of diverse talent. Our growth has been steady and measured, and we’ve chartered our own unique path to success, which is different than any other firm.
Today, Barack Ferrazzano has more than 120 attorneys in eleven practice groups. The firm regularly serves a wide array of industries, but has particular experience serving: Luxury, Financial Services & Fintech, Manufacturing & Distribution, Motor Vehicle, Private Equity & Venture Capital, and Real Estate.
Barack Ferrazzano represents a wide array of clients, from start-ups to Fortune 50 corporations across all industries. Our clients are sophisticated and located across the globe, from the Midwest to the East and West coasts to Europe and Asia. Our firm is lucky to have nurtured several generational client relationships, where we have served as outside counsel to those clients for many decades and have grown with them through changes, challenges, and triumphs. We also have a mix of new-generation clients that appreciate our creative and customized approach to representation.
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion: Barack Ferrazzano is committed to the establishment, maintenance, and growth of a culture where diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are respected and intentionally valued through the implementation of initiatives and programs that encourage collaboration and connection. We strive to attract the most qualified professionals from all backgrounds, perspectives, and abilities and to create a rewarding and inclusive environment where all individuals feel valued, appreciated, and have the opportunity to grow and advance their careers. The firm’s DEI Committee oversees focused reviews of the firm’s policies and procedures, its participation in and implementation of the Midsized Mansfield Rule program, diversity, equity, and inclusion training, and holistic recruiting procedures on an ongoing and forward-looking basis.
Barack Ferrazzano is proud to have earned Midsize Mansfield Rule Certification Plus for three consecutive years — 2023, 2024, and 2025. The Mansfield Rule, an initiative from Diversity Lab, encourages the design and implementation of practices and processes that will better ensure our paths to leadership are open and transparent to all qualified attorneys. The firm remains dedicated to broadening its network for recruiting highly qualified candidates in the legal profession.
Litigation: Barack Ferrazzano’s Litigation Group attorneys have been selected by some of the world’s most prominent companies to represent them in their most significant legal disputes. Our firm has assembled a group of highly skilled trial lawyers—seasoned partners and well-trained associates—who represent clients both forcefully and efficiently. Unlike some litigators, who spend years engaging in expensive discovery only to recommend settlement on the eve of trial, we are always ready to try cases when necessary but strive to achieve business resolutions early and economically when appropriate.
Barack Ferrazzano is a mid-sized firm that handles many of our clients’ most significant matters. We take pride in our efficient approach to dispute resolution. Even for the biggest matters, our litigation teams are lean, typically comprised of experienced partners and small numbers of associates and paralegals who can manage large amounts of data by leveraging our in-house discovery technology. A litigation team is assembled for each assignment based on the skill and experience required for that engagement.
We represent a diverse group of businesses in resolving these disputes, ranging from the world’s largest luxury goods company to large financial institutions, major telecommunications service providers, REITs, motor vehicle manufacturers, hedge funds, law firms, and consumer goods companies.
Our litigators have extensive experience in state and federal courts throughout the U.S., at both the trial and appellate levels. We understand that we are asked to help resolve business problems, and we recognize that a trial is only one potential solution.
The Litigation Group has again received Illinois Band recognition by Chambers USA and both national and Chicago recognition in The Best Lawyers® in America “Best Law Firms” 2025 report. In 2025, the Litigation Group was also named a “Highly Recommended Firm” by Benchmark Litigation as well as making their shortlist for Illinois Litigation Firm of the Year.
Because our clients' success often rests on our ability to design thoughtful, cost-effective solutions to complex scenarios, a significant part of our time is focused on strategic counseling and alternative dispute resolution.
Alternative Dispute Resolution: Members of our group are experienced in a broad range of alternative dispute resolution techniques, including mediations, binding and non-binding arbitrations, mini-trials, and settlement trials with floors and caps.
Counseling: The Litigation Group also has extensive experience in strategic counseling designed to minimize the likelihood of litigation or reduce the exposure to litigation when potential problems arise. For engagements requiring a certain legal or industry focus, we assemble strong interdisciplinary teams designed to leverage the talents of attorneys in other practice areas. The Litigation Group is often involved in complex corporate and real estate disputes that benefit from the comprehensive experience of our corporate, real estate, and bankruptcy attorneys. Such a cross-functional approach has proved successful in resolving controversies ranging from dissenting shareholders' rights disputes to take-over litigation.
Sidley is an elite global law firm. Harnessing 158 years of legal heritage, we provide strong representation on behalf of clients in more than 70 countries. Our lawyers apply a Built to WinSM client service model to their legal strategies, ensuring the best possible outcomes in complex transactional, restructuring, regulatory, and litigation matters. With 21 offices strategically situated in key commercial and financial hubs across the world, our perspective and our reach are truly global. Our 2,300 lawyers, fluent in more than 80 languages, possess the cultural awareness and cross-border legal acumen needed to bring clarity to a dynamic business landscape.
Follow Sidley on Twitter @SidleyLaw.
Appellate: Sidley is widely recognized as one of the premier appellate firms in the country, and as a trailblazer — regularly addressing intricate, precedent-setting issues in federal and state law in the Supreme Court, the federal courts of appeals, as well as state appellate and supreme courts across the nation. Since the inception of the practice in 1985, the team, including more than 20 former Supreme Court clerks, has briefed over 220 cases on the merits and argued more than 150 cases before the Court.
Bankruptcy: Sidley’s global Restructuring group is regularly involved in the largest restructurings throughout the world. The team represents companies facing in-court or out-of-court restructurings, official and ad hoc committees of creditors, agent lenders, and participants in distressed M&A processes. Sidley prides itself on the group’s ability to use innovative, bespoke approaches to obtain the best results in complex situations.
Commercial: Clients repeatedly turn to Sidley’s Commercial Litigation team when their most important disputes must be tried. Sidley’s track record of successes is unparalleled in high-stakes, mission-critical cases against well-regarded opponents, no matter the forum. The team’s full-service litigation capabilities are relied upon by leading global companies with household names.
Competition/Antitrust: As a part of the firm’s global antitrust offering, Sidley has a strong and well-respected litigation practice. Sidley lawyers represent clients in their most complex cases, including matters involving antitrust enforcement, merger clearances, claims of collusion, and other alleged antitrust violations. The team has represented domestic and international corporations, trade associations, government entities, professional societies, and individuals in the full range of civil and criminal trials.
Insurance: Sidley’s Insurance Disputes practice advises on significant insurance litigation nationwide across a variety of areas, including regulatory compliance, insurance class actions, reinsurance disputes, ERISA litigation, general commercial litigation, securities and shareholder litigation, and Supreme Court and appellate courts, among other areas.
Intellectual Property: Sidley boasts one of the most distinguished and highly regarded Intellectual Property litigation practices in the U.S., with approximately 80 lawyers and a deep bench of trial lawyers. Handling matters for innovation-driven clients ranging from global Fortune 500 companies to groundbreaking startups, the team develops winning strategies for high-stakes IP litigation involving patents, trade secret and unfair competition, false advertising, copyright infringement, and trademarks.
International Arbitration: Sidley’s Global Arbitration, Trade and Advocacy practice exemplifies a superior depth of knowledge of the law, regulatory challenges, and culture of the jurisdictions in which the team practices. Operating from the U.S., Europe, and Asia, the team works as a tightly integrated team of practitioners with different cultural and legal backgrounds and broad language capabilities.
Labor and Employment: Sidley is at the forefront of representing employers in major high-profile class and collective action litigation against many of the biggest and most aggressive plaintiffs’ firms in the country. The team is known for winning bet-the-company cases and deftly handling high-value discrimination, harassment, and retaliation claims, executive disputes, whistle-blower claims, restrictive covenant and trade secret litigation, and investigations involving matters of the utmost importance to companies.
Product Liability and Recall: Sidley’s Product Liability and Mass Torts practice has played key roles in many of the most significant product liability litigations. The team has decades of experience handling claims associated with products, the facilities that manufacture them, and the companies that sell them. We defend clients in state and federal courts and are typically lead counsel in multidistrict litigations and state coordinated proceedings.
Securities: Sidley’s Securities and Shareholder Litigation team stands out for the strength of its work, winning complex securities matters at the trial level and on appeal across a variety of sectors. The team’s deep bench and extensive experience allows Sidley to represent a wide range of clients. This includes major corporations and private companies, boards of directors and board committees, senior executives, financial advisers, investment banks, and auditors.
White Collar Crime: Sidley lawyers have handled investigations in more than 130 countries, collaborating seamlessly across borders and practice groups to offer a cohesive approach to white collar crime and corporate investigations matters. The firm can mobilize teams quickly to swiftly deploy the critical legal support needed to manage sensitive, high-profile investigations and litigation.
Updated Sep 2024
Husch Blackwell’s litigators are active coast to coast, asserting and defending client interests in virtually all types of litigation. We feature more than 400 litigators across more than 20 offices across the United States and are capable of taking on the most complex matters, ranging from bet-the-company cases to large portfolios of litigation spread across multiple jurisdictions. Clients around the world trust us to understand their businesses, their objectives, and their unique ways of working and to develop solutions that are practical, efficient and comprehensive in scope.
The efficiency and effectiveness of our case management capabilities are well attested. Both in 2017, 2018, and 2022, our firm’s Litigation Department was honored by the Association of Corporate Counsel with its prestigious Value Champion award, an accolade that recognizes collaborations that delivered substantial value to client organizations by cutting spending, improving predictability and achieving better legal results. Again in 2020, Husch Blackwell was recognized for its litigation teams’ innovation and design excellence in legal operations by the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC), which chose the firm as a showcase firm for the 2020 Legal Innovation in Operations (LIO) Project designees. Husch Blackwell received the recognition on the basis of its management of a large portfolio of asbestos-related litigation for a client. In the ten months our team handled the portfolio, we posted results that vastly outperformed the client’s prior efforts, including over a 30 percent reduction in legal costs.
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Updated Sep 2024
Bartlit Beck has achieved an unparalleled record of success in complex litigation.
The firm is renowned for delivering extraordinary results to clients in difficult situations. Our successes include trial wins, victories on motions and appeals, and creative settlements across the gamut of commercial litigation, including intellectual property, breach of contract, product liability, antitrust, and shareholder disputes.
As a result of the firm’s success at trial, Bartlit Beck was named 2020 Trial Firm of the Year by Benchmark and was identified as one of the top nine firms in the United States for “striking the utmost fear into the hearts of seasoned General Counsel and legal decision makers” in a survey conducted by consulting firm BTI of 350 in-house leaders.
The average Bartlit Beck lawyer has more than 18 years of experience and has participated in multiple high-stakes trials. This is a product of our unique structure in which more than three-quarters of our lawyers are experienced partners and fewer than a quarter are associates. Thus, each case team is comprised mainly of experienced partners.
Our trial experience informs our overall approach: we focus on the key facts and issues that will drive the outcome, we make complex things simple, we win by showing the evidence rather than telling why we should win, we use demonstratives to boil down the key concepts to a few memorable images, and we establish ourselves as the reliable source of information.
Our lawyers intensely focus on a small number of cases at a time, allowing each team member to have command of the entire case. We believe our approach ensures better quality and results for our clients because each team member has a thorough understanding of the client’s goals and the path to success.
Our success is also due to the way we align our clients’ interests with our own. Our fixed and success-based fee structure is designed to eliminate the usual and often conflicting incentives present in the traditional hourly billing model.
We have extensive experience partnering with other law firms and service providers as part of a “virtual law firm.” Our highly collaborative approach means that we view in-house counsel and co-counsel as invaluable members of the team.
The information contained herein is for informational purposes only and is not legal advice or a substitute for legal counsel. Please contact any of our lawyers using the contact information found at bartlitbeck.com
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