Cooley is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, and while it provides the expected range of services across corporate, litigation, real estate, etc, the firm boasts particularly highly-regarded tech and life sciences practices, and is also well-known for advising start-ups. Which all makes perfect sense given its Silicon Valley roots.
Cooley was founded in 1920 in San Francisco, and as soon as visionaries in turtle necks appeared brandishing keyboards (or syringes), Cooley was there to facilitate the rise of the future. In the 1980s it took biotech companies Genentech and Amgen public, and in 1989 it ran the IPO of chipmaker Qualcomm.
Now it has ten offices across the States, and seven internationally. Cooley launched in London in 2015, facilitated by a hiring spree from MoFo, and a mass poach of Edwards Wildman Palmer's entire office. (When you're swimming with the likes of Zuckerberg and Jobs, you learn not to muck about.)
Cooley lawyers in London told RollOnFriday they rate the pay highly, which is no surprise since it is, well, very high. "Nearly top of the market. Outstanding", said a senior solicitor. Work life balance is "As you would expect for a US firm, but no worse than comparator firms and in many cases, much better", and the firm's Covid response was, according to its lawyers, "flawless".