Winston & Strawn

Since before the Civil War, Winston & Strawn has attracted and produced some of the country's ablest and most influential lawyers. Founders Frederick H. Winston and Silas H. Strawn played vital roles in Chicago's emergence as a powerful business and financial center. As former four-term governor of Illinois and chairman of the firm, I am proud of both our continuing involvement in Illinois and the Chicago business community and our involvement in the business communities of the other major cities where we have offices. --James R. Thompson, chairman Key Dates: Firm moves from the Monadnock Building to the First National Bank Building; changes name to Winston, Payne & Strawn. Firm merges with Bishop, Cook, Purcell & Reynolds based in Washington, D.C. Winston & Strawn is ranked as the nation's 34th largest law firm. One of the nation's top 50 law firms, Winston & Strawn serves corporate clients, government agencies, and others in most areas of modern law, from business financing, taxation, and antitrust matters to mergers and acquisitions and litigation. Its clients include Sears, Allstate, American Airlines, Bell Atlantic, Monsanto, and Abbott Laboratories. It serves many international clients in trade issues, privatization, and facilitating private investment in many nations. In addition, the firm lobbies for its clients to help them comply with regulatory agencies and sometimes to help Congress or foreign legislatures write new laws beneficial to clients. Winston & Strawn is one of the two oldest Chicago law firms. It also operates branch offices in New York, Geneva, Paris, and Washington, D.C. In 1853 Chicago was still a modest-sized city with a total of only about 30 or 40 lawyers when Frederick Hampden Winston (F.H. Winston) arrived from New York City to begin his Chicago law career. Born in 1830, Winston graduated from the Harvard Law School in 1852 at a time when most lawyers were educated in the apprenticeship system. From 1853 to 1861 Winston was a partner of Norman B. Judd, a prominent Republican who nominated Abraham Lincoln to be the party's 1860 presidential candidate. Winston's second partner was Henry W. Blodgett, who left in 1870 to become a federal judge. In 1865 the firm gained its oldest client, the Union Stock Yard and Transit Company of Chicago, later renamed F.H. Prince & Company. F.H. Winston also represented three railroads: the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern; the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific; and the Pittsburgh, Ft. Wayne and Chicago. Thus the early firm served the booming railroad industry as it consolidated after the Civil War and benefited from improved technology such as steel rails, air brakes, and refrigerated cars. The famous 1871 Chicago fire destroyed much of the city and also many of the early records of the Winston law firm. In any case, the city built the nation's first skyscrapers in the fire's aftermath, and such rebuilding led to increased work for the legal profession in Chicago. In 1878 Frederick Seymour Winston (F.S. Winston), the son of F.H. Winston, joined the law firm. The city of Chicago made F.S. Winston its assistant corporation counsel in 1881, and the following year he successfully represented the city before the U.S. Supreme Court in a case involving river access. It was the first case argued by a firm attorney before the Supreme Court. In the late 1800s the law firm provided counsel to many Chicago breweries and continued to represent them until the Prohibition amendment was approved after World War I. The key figure in the firm's history after the turn of the century was Silas Hardy Strawn, who was born in Ottawa, Illinois, in 1866. After graduating from high school, he studied law in an Ottawa office and in 1889 began practicing. In 1891 he joined the Chicago law firm and became a leading citizen of the city. He served as the firm's managing partner for 40 of the 52 years he worked there. In 1913 Strawn became the president of the Chicago Bar Association, one