Dorsey & Whitney

Dorsey & Whitney LLP is a law firm based in the United States with approximately 580 attorneys, located between 22 offices in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia as of 2025. The firm's headquarters is in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where it was founded. As of 2025, Dorsey is led by managing partner Peter Nelson. The firm's lawyers have included several prominent public figures, including former U.S. Vice President Walter Mondale.

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History

Dorsey was founded in 1912 by William Lancaster, a director of First National Bank of Minneapolis, and David F. Simpson, a justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court. The following year, they hired James Dorsey as their first associate. Dorsey left the firm in the 1920s to become an investment banker, but returned to the firm a few years after the 1929 stock market crash. Dorsey led the firm until his death in 1959. The name of the firm continued to change for most of its history, until it was shortened into its current, permanent name in 1981.
The firm has also endowed the Dorsey and Whitney Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School.

Notable alumni

Harry Blackmun, former U.S. Supreme Court justice
Amy Klobuchar, U.S. Senator
Walter Mondale, former Vice President of the United States
William Prosser, legal scholar
Tom Vilsack, former Governor of Iowa

Assistance to Guantanamo captives

Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, an attorney with Dorsey & Whitney prepared the habeas corpus petition for the six Bahraini citizens held in extrajudicial detention in the United States Guantanamo Bay detention camps, in Cuba.
Juma al Dossari, one of Colangelo-Bryan's clients, made a suicide attempt during Colangelo-Bryan's visit.
Charles "Cully" Stimson, then
Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs, stirred controversy when he went on record criticizing the patriotism of law firms that allowed employees to assist Guantanamo captives:
"corporate CEOs seeing this should ask firms to choose between lucrative retainers and representing terrorists."
Stimson's views were widely criticized. The Pentagon disavowed them and he resigned shortly thereafter.

Insider trading controversy

In 2008, police uncovered an insider trading conspiracy involving Dorsey & Whitney partner Gil Cornblum, who there and earlier in his career at Sullivan & Cromwell in New York discovered inside information and, with his co-conspirator, Stanko "Stan" Grmovsek– a former lawyer and Cornblum's law school classmate –was found to have gained over $10 million in illegal profits over a 14-year span. Cornblum committed suicide by jumping from a bridge as he was under investigation and shortly before he was to be arrested but before criminal charges were laid against him, one day before his alleged co-conspirator pled guilty.