Sidley Austin

Overview

Most profiles of Sidley Austin read like tombstones: founded 1866, Chicago, thousands of lawyers, billions in revenue. The interesting things about the firm in 2026 are not in those tombstones. One is that the sitting Vice President of the United States, JD Vance, began his legal career there — graduating Yale Law School in 2013 and working as a litigator with Sidley Austin in 2014–15 (CNN). The other is that the firm just chose a new leader who breaks its 160-year pattern: Yvette Ostolaza, elected in September 2026 as the next chair of the management committee, will be the first woman to lead the Chicago-based firm — and the first Latina lawyer to lead a top-10 U.S. law firm (The Global Legal Post).

Behind those headlines sits one of the oldest continuously operating corporate practices in American law — a firm whose name reads like a Chicago business directory from three centuries, and whose merger history mirrors the consolidation of the industry itself (Encyclopedia.com).

1866: two Chicago lawyers and a burned city

Norman Williams and John Leverett Thompson founded Williams & Thompson in Chicago in 1866. Their early practice was the unglamorous backbone of a frontier commercial city: debt collection, litigation, real estate, wills and estates (Encyclopedia.com). Williams had already put his name on bigger things — he was an incorporator of Pullman’s Palace Car Company in 1867 and of the Chicago Telephone Company in 1881 (Encyclopedia.com).

The firm’s client list tracked Chicago’s industrial rise. In 1868 it represented Mrs. Newberry in litigation over a will dispute, winning the estate that would fund the Newberry Library (chartered 1894). After the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, it represented several of the insurers whose payout fights defined the city’s rebuilding — including the Equitable Life Assurance Society, a client for more than a century. The firm also represented Western Electric, incorporated Western Edison Light in 1882 and Chicago Edison in 1887, and represented Western Union from the time the telegraph giant moved its headquarters from Cleveland to Chicago in 1969 (Encyclopedia.com).

The names came in sequence. William P. Sidley joined after the firm’s 1889 move to the Tacoma Building and became the lead name partner when the firm was styled Holt, Wheeler & Sidley in 1900. Edwin C. Austin joined in 1915 and remained a central figure for more than 60 years. The firm restyled itself repeatedly — 1913 Holt, Cutting & Sidley; 1919 Cutting, Moore & Sidley; 1937 Sidley, McPherson, Austin & Burgess; 1944 Sidley, Austin, Burgess & Harper; 1950 Sidley, Austin, Burgess & Smith — before settling on Sidley & Austin in 1967 (Encyclopedia.com).

One of its most prominent twentieth-century lawyers was Adlai Stevenson, who joined the firm in 1926 and left in 1933 to work for President Franklin D. Roosevelt (Encyclopedia.com). The firm’s Supreme Court specialty — one of its signature practices — was built starting in 1983 by former U.S. Solicitor General Rex Lee and Carter Phillips (Encyclopedia.com). The 1980s savings-and-loan crisis left a scar: the firm paid $7.5 million to settle federal malpractice claims over its representation of Lincoln Savings, according to the company history (Encyclopedia.com).

The modern firm was formed in 2001, when Sidley & Austin merged with Brown & Wood, the 400-lawyer New York firm founded in 1914. The combined entity was briefly called Sidley Austin Brown & Wood before shortening to Sidley Austin (Encyclopedia.com).

2026: a new kind of leader

Leadership at Sidley has historically been a Chicago insider’s game. Larry Barden, who took the reins as management-committee chair in 2014, joined the firm as an associate in 1982 — the classic firm-lifer ascent (The Global Legal Post). His successor, endorsed by the firm’s more than 1,000 partners in September 2026, represents a break: Yvette Ostolaza is the firm’s global litigation and disputes co-head and its Dallas managing partner, and her election makes her the first woman to lead the 160-year-old firm and the first Latina lawyer to lead a top-10 U.S. law firm (The Global Legal Post).

The biography adds texture the milestone alone doesn’t carry. Ostolaza was born in Cuba, raised in Miami, and joined Sidley in 1999 (The Global Legal Post). She takes over when Barden’s term concludes in 2027; Michael Schmidtberger remains chair of the executive committee, the firm’s other governing body (The Global Legal Post). The firm’s numbers under the Barden era, per Law.com data reported alongside the announcement: revenue up 5.4% to $2.46 billion, profit per equity partner up 9.8% to $3.09 million (The Global Legal Post). The company’s history had described the 2001 merger’s result as “one of the world’s largest law firms” — and its next chapter will be written by a Cuban-born litigator who runs the firm’s Dallas office (Encyclopedia.com; The Global Legal Post).

The Vice President’s first firm

Vance’s Sidley stint is the least exotic fact in his biography and one of the most telling about the firm: the Yale-to-Sidley pipeline is the establishment path, and Vance walked it. After graduating from Yale Law School in 2013, he spent 2014–15 as a litigator with Sidley Austin before moving on to the Senate and eventually the vice presidency (CNN). The firm that represented telegraph monopolies and savings-and-loan casualties across 160 years also employed, briefly, the man who would become vice president — a line in the company history nobody could have written in 2015.

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not state current lawyer or office counts — the ~2,300/21 figures in search leads were not verified from a fully-read source. It does not name Barack or Michelle Obama among the firm’s alumni: the summer-associate claim appeared in search leads only. It does not assert Mary Todd Lincoln as an early client or the 2007 IRS tax-shelter settlement — both search-lead-only items held back. The $7.5 million Lincoln Savings settlement is the company history’s account, not an independently corroborated fact. Ostolaza’s start is given only as “when Barden’s term concludes next April” in a September 2026 report. The firm’s post-2001 history in the Encyclopedia.com entry beyond the portion read in full this session is not cited.