The story
Founded by Justin DuPratt White in 1901, in New York City.1
The firm was founded on May 1, 1901, when two Wall Street lawyers, Justin DuPratt White, 31, and George B. Case, 28, each contributed $250 (equivalent to $9,675 in 2025) to establish White & Case.
White attended Cornell Law School on a state scholarship, where he was an editor of The Cornell Daily Sun. Case attended Yale University, where he played college baseball for the Yale Bulldogs, and then Columbia Law School.
The pair had a close relationship with Henry P. Davison, a noted banker who helped create the Federal Reserve. The firm's first clients included Bankers Trust Company.
James Hurlock led the firm as chairman from 1980 to 2000. Under Hurlock, the firm tripled its roster of lawyers and expanded into multiple global markets.
In 1994, White & Case was among the first American law firms to open offices in Vietnam. Among the firm’s first clients in the region were PetroVietnam and Vietnamese State Bank.
Duane Wall was named chairman in 2000. Although he refocused its business on New York's financial services industry, Wall also oversaw a merger with the German firm Feddersen Laule Ewerwahn Scherzberg Finkelnburg Clemm. This enabled White & Case to become the first American company to enter the "top ten" firms in Germany.
On October 1, 2007, White & Case announced a new leadership team led by chairman Hugh Verrier. Shortly after taking the reins of the firm, Verrier retained the consulting firm of McKinsey & Company to conduct a review of its worldwide business operations.
In 2010, White & Case created a global pro bono practice, focusing on three areas: access to justice, promoting the rule of law, and serving the world’s leading non-governmental organizations. The firm was profiled by Law360 in 2012 for its pro bono efforts.
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The firm's antitrust law practice has been recognized as part of the top 5 Global Elite by the Global Competition Review (GCR) in 2020.
The firm also has one of the most successful international arbitration practices in the world, having ranked first every year from 2015 to 2019, and most recently in 2021, by Global Arbitration Review (GAR). White & Case is also noted by GAR as having the largest portfolio valuation of any firm for 2020 to 2022 (20 percent larger than the portfolio at the second-largest firm), and has the highest number of recognized market-leading practitioners. The firm's arbitration practice is consistently ranked in the top bands across all market leading legal rankings, and was most recently recognized in 2024 by Chambers as the top 4 Global Elite.
In June 2020, the firm announced that it had "poached" four Winston & Strawn specialists to establish itself as a destination law firm for special-purpose acquisition companies (SPACs): Joel Rubinstein, Jonathan Rochwarger, Elliott Smith and Daniel Nussen.
In March 2026, a lawsuit was filed in Bronx County Court against the firm by a digital production specialist alleging a workplace culture of misconduct and retaliation after the firm reportedly covered up the dissemination of non-consensual intimate photos taken at a firm event.
From Wikipedia’s article on White & Case, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5