The story
Cooley was founded by Arthur Cooley and Louis Crowley in 1920 in San Francisco. In 1958, Cooley formed Draper, Gaither and Anderson, the first venture capital partnership organized on the West Coast. In the 1950s, Cooley formed Raychem and National Semiconductor. In 1971 the firm (then Cooley, Crowley, Gaither, Godward, Castro & Huddleson) began representing Disney in the copyright and trademark infringement case Walt Disney Productions v. Air Pirates. In the early 1980s, the firm took both Genentech and Amgen public. In the late 1980s, the firm relocated its offices from San Francisco to Palo Alto. In 1989, the firm (then Cooley, Godward, Castro, Huddleson & Tatum) facilitated the IPO of Qualcomm. The firm incorporated NVIDIA in 1993 and later took the company public in 1999. In 1995, two former partners of the firm, Robert Gunderson and Scott Dettmer, formed the law firm of Gunderson Dettmer.
On October 31, 2006, the firm (then Cooley Godward) merged with Kronish Lieb Weiner & Hellman, which resulted in the firm growing from 440 lawyers to 550. In the announcement of the merger, The New York Times referred to Cooley as a "Leading Silicon Valley law firm".
Like many other law firms, Cooley laid off 114 people in 2009 from its offices, citing "the uncertain economy". After aggressive hiring to meet "soaring demand" in 2020 and 2021, Cooley concluded that several of its practices were "substantially overbuilt" as demand for the firm's services did not grow as much in 2022. Cooley responded by laying off 150 employees in late 2022, instituting a hiring freeze, and delaying the start date for incoming associates from November 2023 to January 2024. Cooley then offered incoming associate hires for its corporate practice the option to start in January 2024, or to delay their start date by another year in exchange for a $100,000 stipend.
From Wikipedia’s article on Cooley LLP, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5