Highlights Davis Polk & Wardwell

Five Reasons to Choose Davis Polk

1. Preeminence. No matter what their practice or in which of our 10 offices worldwide they may work, our lawyers are at the very top of the profession.

• Across our entire practice, we routinely rank among the leading firms in all major league rankings and legal directories.
• For the second consecutive year, Davis Polk has been named “Americas Law Firm of the Year” and won the “Debt and Equity-Linked Team of the Year” award at the 2013  International Financial Law Review Americas Awards. We received five awards in total, including “Restructuring Deal of the Year” for work on the Lehman Brothers Chapter 11 proceedings.
• Davis Polk routinely ranks among the top firms in the American Lawyer’s “A-List” rankings of elite U.S. law firms, which measure the firm’s financial performance, pro bono activity, associate satisfaction and lawyer diversity.
• Over the past year, Davis Polk has received numerous firm, team, deal and individual honors in the United States, Asia, Europe and Latin America. 

2. Unrivaled Deal and Case Experience. From groundbreaking global transactions to bet-the-company government investigations and civil and commercial litigation, our lawyers focus on streamlining complex matters and developing strategies that win.

• Davis Polk is the only law firm that has worked on each of the five largest IPOs in history.
• Recent clients in major M&A transactions include Aetna, AstraZeneca, Citi, Comcast, CNOOC, CVS Caremark, ExxonMobil, Freeport McMoRan Copper & Gold, H.J. Heinz, Morgan Stanley, PepsiCo, Roche and Symantec.
• Our Litigation Department is perennially a go-to practice for the most complex “litigation-of-the-moment” cases – for example, we currently are representing clients in approximately 20 FCPA-related matters.
• We successfully represented the New York Mets and their owners in a billion-dollar case brought by the trustee for Bernard Madoff. Two particularly significant legal victories reduced the trustee’s claims from $1 billion to a maximum of $386 million. This has been described by the New York Times and other media outlets as a "significant victory" for the New York Mets and their owners. 

3. Truly Global Reach. Davis Polk is a recognized leader worldwide and we have a long-standing and growing presence in key financial centers across the United States, Asia, Europe and Latin America.

• Opportunities for associates to practice overseas abound – either through short-term travel for a specific deal or case, or longer-term assignments at one of our non-U.S. offices.
• More than half of the assignments that we handle have a global component, which means that associates, no matter where they are based, are working on matters worldwide.
   

4. Invaluable Preparation and Boundless Career Opportunities. There is no better place to launch and build a career in the law. And whether within the firm or beyond, working at Davis Polk opens a junior lawyer to an astonishingly broad array of career paths.

• Our junior lawyers receive real responsibility and extensive client contact very early in their careers.
• They acquire unsurpassed instruction, both through a formal worldwide training program that offers over 300 sessions annually, and, more importantly, through on-the-job experience, working on the most intricate client matters. They also benefit from mentoring relationships that they develop with partners and senior associates.
• The vast majority of our partners began their careers at Davis Polk as summer associates.
• Our counsel program began 30 years ago to provide experienced lawyers here with an alternative long-term career option at the firm. We currently have 65 counsel in our offices worldwide.
• Over 25 of our lawyers currently work on a part- or flex-time basis.
• Davis Polk is a world-class springboard. Our alumni serve in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, and as CEOs, senior executives, bankers, investors, entrepreneurs, judges, federal and local prosecutors, regulators across a variety of government agencies, law professors, non-profit workers, in-house counsel at major global corporations, and in leadership roles in many other fields.
   

5. Exceptional Colleagues. Davis Polk lawyers are not only among the most accomplished and talented in the world, they are also people of substance and integrity from an impressively diverse range of backgrounds. They have intense professional focus, keen intellectual curiosity, widely varying interests outside of the law and a solid commitment to supporting one another in pursuing the business objectives of our clients.

• Our lawyers come from 55 countries and collectively speak more than 48 languages.
• Davis Polk consistently ranks in the top 20 firms among all AmLaw 100 and 200 firms in the American Lawyer’s “Diversity Scorecard.”
• More than 100 of our lawyers have advanced degrees outside of the law.

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