How the chambers came to be.

Marshall & Benson was opened in 1986 by Cyrus Marshall and James Benson in Philadelphia. They were in their late thirties; both had spent a decade at large firms; both had reached the same conclusion. The model that had developed across the great American firms was efficient in some ways and admirable in others, but it had drifted from a proposition both of them held to be foundational: that the legal matters which most directly determine a client’s position deserved senior counsel from the first conversation to the last.

They opened the chambers with five practitioners and a small clientele. The conditions of the early years required them to make decisions about model, scale, and discipline that have, in retrospect, defined the institution. They decided that the bench would be small. They decided that the work would be substantive. They decided that operational discipline was the institution’s responsibility, not the practitioner’s. None of those decisions has since been revised.

Forty years on

The chambers has grown to six offices across three continents, but the proposition has not changed. Members are instructed on the matters they should be instructed on. Associates work on the matters they should work on. The bench is invited to grow only when there are matters to support it. The model is, in plain language, the work.

Why the two surnames remain on the door

We have considered, at intervals over four decades, whether the two surnames on the door should remain. The answer has always been the same: they stand for the proposition the chambers was built on, and that is the answer we have always returned to.