Dinsmore’s Growth Continues as Prominent M&A Team Joins Firm in Detroit and Chicago
July, 2021 - Louisville, Kentucky
Dinsmore & Shohl LLP has welcomed five dynamic partners to its Mergers and Acquisitions group this week—four in the national firm’s Detroit office and one in Chicago.
The team is led by Joseph DeVito, who served as chair of Corporate, Finance and Real Estate at Howard & Howard Attorneys PLLC. Also joining Dinsmore in Detroit as M&A specialists are partners Jeffrey Hoover, Evonne Xu and Ian Larkin. The team is rounded out by Jane Hahn, who is joining Dinsmore in Chicago. Both DeVito and Hoover are previous winners of the Association for Corporate Growth Deal Maker of the Year, Xu is a 2021 Crain’s Detroit Business Notable Woman in Law, Hahn has been recognized as an Illinois Leading Lawyer perennially since 2015, and Larkin won the 2020 Mike Ilitch School of Business Emerging Leader Award.
Together, the team represents both buyers and sellers in middle-market strategic transactions averaging $250 million apiece, and ranging anywhere from $50 million up to $1 billion. Their clients are diverse, including private equity firms, multinational corporations and companies in financial services, health care, cryptocurrency, defense, aerospace, hydroponics, industrial, automotive and more. They also specialize in financing and lending transactions on both corporate and real estate matters.
“Our M&A practice is diverse and requires all types of subject-matter specialists,” DeVito said. “Dinsmore’s national presence, depth and breadth—whether they’re attorneys in SEC, IP, ERISA or executive compensation work—give our clients exactly what they need at a beneficial Midwest cost structure. As a group, we’ve always focused on providing the highest level of service to our clients, and joining Dinsmore’s national platform will only improve upon that.”
Mark Schneider, Dinsmore’s office managing partner for Michigan, sees significant benefit in the team’s arrival, which he attributed in part to Dinsmore’s culture of fairness, collegiality and transparency.
“We are excited to continue our growth in the metro Detroit market, particularly in the M&A space,” Schneider said. “Dinsmore offers the strength of a national firm. We are very flexible in terms of the practices we can accommodate and exceptionally transparent when it comes to our realization and compensation structures. When new attorneys join us, we work hard to accommodate their clients in a way that is favorable.”
With the additions, Dinsmore now has 31 attorneys in Southeast Michigan (Detroit and Ann Arbor) and has grown by nearly 50 percent in Chicago over the last 12 months. Dinsmore’s Midwest growth comes just days after the firm’s Denver office more than doubled in headcount with the addition of a construction litigation group from Hall & Evans LLC. DeVito said he’d like to help build the Detroit office to 50-75 attorneys, and Denver founding partner Erich Kennedy said he is aiming to double headcount again and expand office space in the coming years.
This kind of expansion has become routine for Dinsmore, which earlier this year executed the largest legal merger of 2021 thus far, when it joined forces with Wooden McLaughlin in Indiana and opened three new offices. From 2017-20, the firm also opened offices in Cleveland, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Boston and Tampa.
