Morgan Lewis history

The firm began representing the United Gas Improvement Company, later UGI, in 1882, which became the largest gas and electric utility company in the United States and which, well over a century later, remained a client of the firm.

In 1883, Morgan & Lewis hired Morris Rex Bockius, who had graduated in June of that year with Master of Arts and Bachelor of Law degrees from the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

MLB handled thousands of claims, most of them filed against Reading by railroad employees, under the 1908 Federal Employers' Liability Act, which gave employees the right to sue in federal court for job-related injuries.

In 1922 MLB began representing the Reading Company, owner of the well-known Reading Railroad of Monopoly game fame.

The law firm handled the coal company's bankruptcy reorganization beginning in 1937 and later handled related litigation.

Morris Bockius, the last of the firm's founding attorneys and perhaps its greatest contributor in terms of bringing in new business, died in 1939.

The firm's first Jewish partner was recruited in 1961, and two years later MLB hired its first woman attorney.

In 1972, MLB organized an international division with a small office in Paris at which it worked in conjunction with another law firm.

By this time, MLB had offices in Philadelphia, New York, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C. In 1976 the firm entered the West Coast market by opening new facilities in Los Angeles, and the following year, a Miami office was added.

In addition, 1979 saw the introduction of American Lawyer, which provided comparative information on lawyer salaries and other data regarding the nation's major firms.

By 1981 MLB had become one of the first firms to start a multinational practice in London.

MLB also represented the Major League Baseball Player Relations Committee, Inc., starting in 1982.

In 1986, the Japanese government began allowing foreign lawyers to practice in Japan under very strict conditions.

Like other law firms, it recruited lateral hires, associates, and new law school graduates to meet the rising demand for attorneys, and in 1996 it opened branch offices in Pittsburgh and Singapore, as well as an associated office in Jakarta.

In its first ranking of the world's largest law firms, the magazine listed MLB as 12th based on 1997 revenues and tenth based on number of attorneys, which numbered 901 at the time. Based on its 1997 gross revenues of $359 million, MLB was ranked eighth among United States law firms by American Lawyer.

In February 1998 a settlement was announced in which the law firm agreed to pay $35 million.

Indeed, while fighting against an organizing campaign by the Communications Workers of America at a Seattle call center in 2000, Amazon was one the nation’s first corporations to use an anti-union website.

Morgan Lewis has an extensive background in fighting unions at Amazon: For example, the firm helped Amazon defeat its previous NLRB election, during an organizing campaign by the International Association of Machinists (IAM) union in Middleton, Delaware in 2014.

Amazon acquired the Whole Foods grocery chain for $13.7 billion in June 2017, and it has subsequently engaged in several anti-union actions at the upmarket food retailer.

In 2018, former Morgan Lewis partner John Ring was confirmed by the National Labor Relations Board, one of several firm partners who have served on its board, including Harry Johnson and senior counsel Charles Cohen.

In May 2020, Amazon, represented by Morgan Lewis, paid $11 million to settle an overtime suit by warehouse workers in California concerning unpaid security searches