for global M&A by deal count. Goodwin has also been recognized as a “Best Place to Work for LGBTQ Equality” by the Human Rights Campaign for nine consecutive years, and the firm has been included on Seramount’s annual list of “Best Law Firms for Women” 11 times. History In 1912, lawyers and former Harvard classmates Robert Eliot Goodwin and Joseph Osborne Procter, Jr. ran into each other on the street and decided to start their own law firm, Goodwin & Procter, which opened its offices on July 1 that year at 84 State Street in Boston. That winter, Robert Goodwin and Amos Taylor represented Mary Newell against the Oceanic Steam Navigation Company for the sum of $110,400 resulting from the April 15, 1912 sinking of the RMS Titanic. Another case taken on in the firm's early days stemmed from the infamous pyramid scheme orchestrated in Boston by Charles Ponzi. After the scheme was exposed as fraud, Robert Goodwin served as the bankruptcy referee for Middlesex County amid thousands of recovery claims in the bankruptcy courts. When the United States joined the allied cause in World War I in 1917, Robert Goodwin joined the country's vanguard deployment in France, eventually rising to the rank of colonel and assuming command of the 101st Field Artillery. After the campaign, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal. Not long after, Samuel Hoar V, a litigator, was hired, followed by Fred Tarbell Field, a well-respected tax lawyer who was a friend of Procter's, and the firm became known as Goodwin, Procter, Field & Hoar. In early 1929, Field was appointed a justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts (and would later become its Chief Justice), and the firm was renamed Goodwin, Procter & Hoar, a name it would retain for the next 72 years. The Depression years proved pivotal for the firm's future diversification and growth. Liquidation cases, including the unwinding of the Boston Continental Bank, provided a surge of business, as did the proliferation of federal agencies and regulations brought on by the New Deal. Around the same time, Greater Boston's manufacturing and maritime industries faded and the financial management industry expanded, presenting new opportunities for work on highly complex financial transactions. Goodwin Procter also undertook matters involving public service and public policy, including public investigations of corruption and malfeasance, as well as cases with constitutional overtones. When the Massachusetts governor pardoned New