[ News Article ]
Duane Morris Snags Corporate Practice From Bunting Legal
By Meredith Hobbs
March 8, 2007
The Legal Intelligencer
Kimberly S. Bunting has joined Duane Morris' corporate practice as a partner, along with three other lawyers from her firm, the Bunting Legal Group. Mona P. Maerz and Dale A. Bandy have joined as special counsel, while Daniel C. McClendon has joined as an associate. Kathleen Reed, a paralegal, also has made the move.
Bunting said she'd always planned to be an in-house lawyer after receiving a joint JD/MBA from Emory University in 1986. "I never anticipated going outside," she said. "This is my first time at a big private firm."
Bunting said she started her career in-house at Georgia-Pacific, then moved to Blue Circle North America, which was bought by Lafarge North America, the largest supplier of construction materials in the U.S. and Canada.
She opened her own firm in 2002 with her former employer, Lafarge, as a client, adding BlueLinx Corp., a large U.S. building products distributor that is a former subsidiary of Georgia-Pacific, and Cumulus Media, one of the largest radio station chains in the country, she said.
Bunting started talking to big firms because she wanted to grow her business.
"Typically, large companies do not hire small firms to do the kind of work I've been doing for them," she said, adding that her firm's size limited the work some clients could give her. She said she needed a national footprint to expand the scale of the work she does for her clients.
Bunting said she liked the culture at Duane Morris, explaining that the Philadelphia-based firm was founded by Quakers and operates on a collaborative model.
"I wanted to expand and grow and do larger deals, but I did not want to give up the positive aspects of not doing lots of office politics — or any, really — and of being treated fairly," she said.
The managing partner of Duane Morris' Atlanta office, Charles W. "Chuck" Whitney, said the addition of the Bunting lawyers continues his office's expansion of its corporate practice.
"More importantly, we're always looking for lawyers who have the opportunity to use our platform to grow our practice," he said.
With the addition of Bunting's group, Duane Morris now has 34 lawyers in its Atlanta office.
Duane Morris is a full-service law firm of more than 600 lawyers. In addition to legal services, the firm has independent affiliates employing approximately 100 professionals engaged in other disciplines.
This article originally appeared in the Fulton County Daily Report, a publication of ALM.
This article originally appeared in The Legal Intelligencer and is republished here with permission from law.com.