Kelley Drye & Warren LLP

Based in the Big Apple, Kelley Drye & Warren has more than 185 years of legal experience. With expertise in over 30 practice areas, the firm has compiled an impressive client roster including Tata America, ArcelorMittal USA, JPMorgan, Unilever, salesforce.com, Labcorp, and Verizon Communications.

Young Prodigy

In 1836, New York attorneys Hiram Barney and William Mulligan founded a firm that started taking major cases early on, working on the bankruptcies of the Metropolitan Street Railway and New York City Railway. Barney was later appointed to the then-prestigious position of Collector of the Customs of the Port of New York by none other than President Abraham Lincoln.

Around the turn of the century, name partner Nicholas Kelley joined the firm. Kelley was instrumental in negotiations to finance the production of Chrysler automobiles. The firm also landed a major bankruptcy matter for Westinghouse Electric, a company that would go on to merge with CBS some 90 years later. Name partner John Wilson Drye also landed the firm huge clients including Union Carbide Corporation, one of the oldest chemical companies.

Big Apple Home and Beyond

New York is Kelley Drye's birthplace and headquarters, but the firm's national footprint includes offices in other key markets including Chicago, DC, Houston, LA, and more. Kelley Drye is a full service firm with deep experience in litigation and investigations, regulatory and government relations, and transactions,. The firm’s attorneys focus on a range of practices within those areas including advertising, bankruptcy, communications, corporate transactions, employee benefits, environmental, government contracts, intellectual property, international trade, labor and employment, privacy, and real estate.Kelley Drye now also has a presence in Texas as the result of a combination in 2016 with Jackson Gilmour & Dobbs, a law firm best known for success in litigation and environmental litigation matters.

High-Profile History

Kelley Drye served as Special Counsel to the Attorney General of Guam in bringing an action against the United States to require that the U.S. pay its fair share of environmental remediation costs arising from decades of military operations on Guam.  On May 24, 2021, Justice Clarence Thomas delivered a unanimous decision for the Supreme Court of the United States in the case of Territory of Guam v The United States, brought on behalf of Guam by Kelley Drye.  The Court found in favor of Guam, reversing a D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals decision and remanding the case to the district court for further proceedings.

Further, Kelley Drye’s renowned International Trade practice won two of the largest international trade remedy cases ever, filed on behalf of the U.S. Aluminum Association and producers of steel wire in 2021.  The practice also won a significant victory on behalf of American honey producers by securing antidumping orders on imports of raw honey from Argentina, Brazil, India, and Vietnam that were being sold in the United States at less than fair value. In transactional matters, Kelley Drye's Real Estate attorneys were instrumental in the development of a 52-story office tower in New York City to serve as the international headquarters of The New York Times Company. In 2022, a team of Kelley Drye lawyers closed an IPO for Applied Blockchain, Inc., an owner and operator of next-generation datacenters across North America that provide substantial compute power to blockchain infrastructure and other users and support crypto mining. The transaction raised $40 million and Applied Blockchain’s common stock is now listed on the Nasdaq Global Select Market.