The original firm was founded as Arnold & Fortas in 1946 by
New Deal veterans
Thurman Arnold, a former
Yale Law School professor and U.S. Court of Appeals judge on the
D.C. Circuit, and
Abe Fortas, another former Yale Law School professor who later became a
Supreme Court Justice.[5] In 1947,
Paul A. Porter, a former chairman of the
Federal Communications Commission, joined the firm and it was renamed as Arnold, Fortas & Porter. In 1965, Abe Fortas' name was dropped from the firm's moniker after his ascension to the Supreme Court.
In November 2016, Arnold & Porter announced that it would be merging with New York-based firm
Kaye Scholer (founded in 1917) to form Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP, with approximately 1000 attorneys across ten domestic and four international offices. The merger took effect on January 1, 2017.[6]
In February 2018, The National Law Journal reported that the newly combined "firm has quietly reversed its post-merger branding efforts" and "scrubbed nearly all mention of 'Kaye Scholer' from its public image, changing its brand name, email addresses and web domain", while retaining the legal entity name in full.[7] In September 2020, Arnold & Porter announced that it will shut down its Frankfurt office by the end of March 2021.[8]
In 2020, Arnold & Porter attorneys helped secure a $14 million judgment for 12
Black Lives Matter protesters who were victims of police brutality in Colorado.[10] The matter took 18 months to settle and required 14,000-plus lawyer hours.[11]
Attorneys with the firm assisted the family of Lt.
Henry Ossian Flipper in obtaining the first posthumous
presidential pardon in U.S. history, and representated Ukrainian
mail order bride Nataliya Fox against international marriage broker Encounters International in a landmark case that helped to establish the rights of such women.[12]
The firm is co-counsel with the DC Prisoners' Project of the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, which represents prisoners at
ADX Florence who allege deficiencies in psychiatric evaluation and care in Cunningham v. Federal Bureau of Prisons.[13]