Kirkland & Ellis
law firm in the United States, based in Chicago, Illinois
Kirkland & Ellis LLP is an American multinational white-shoe corporate law firm founded in 1909. As of 2025, the firm is the seventh-largest law firm by number of attorneys. It is the largest law firm in the world by revenue.
The firm's alumni include several notable judges and government officials, including United States Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and former United States Attorneys General William Barr and Robert Bork.
History
20th century
In 1909, two attorneys, Stuart G. Shepard and Robert R. McCormick, formed the Chicago-based partnership that would eventually become Kirkland & Ellis. McCormick was the grandson of Joseph Medill, who had founded the Chicago Tribune. McCormick became president of the Tribune Company in 1914 and, in 1925, sole publisher of the Tribune.
Weymouth Kirkland and his associate Howard Ellis joined the firm in 1915. Kirkland served as chief counsel to the Tribune and other newspapers in various free speech and defamation cases, including Near v. Minnesota.
“Kirkland & Ellis” enters the record as law firm in the United States, based in Chicago, Illinois. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Kirkland, Ellis and firm can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1743511. VIAF identifies the subject as 144337328. The Library of Congress control number is n86850845. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1909, 2025, 1914 and 1925.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kirkland & Ellis” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.