Our firm was started in 1981 by John Parker, Paul Hudson, and Marbury Rainer, three big-firm attorneys looking for a better way to serve their clients. Ed Dobbs brought his practice to the firm in 1983. Since then, we’ve grown with the clients, industries, and communities we serve, and now number over 60 attorneys, with offices in Atlanta, Chicago, and Tallahassee.

Amidst this evolution, our firm has prided itself on stability, excellence, and continuity of vision. Our growth has never been “for growth’s sake,” but always in service to the needs of our clients – and our commitment to those clients to always “go beyond.” This has meant scaling to meet the increasingly complex legal challenges faced by businesses today, while at the same time maintaining the close relationships so critical to providing responsive and focused legal guidance.

It’s an approach that works well for us and our clients, and is in keeping with the client-centric values that are the firm’s bedrock. Let us know if you’d like to learn more about our background, and how we can help your business succeed.

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Founding Partners

John Parker

Although secure as young lawyers in established Atlanta firms, Paul, Marbury, and I pursued the vision of developing a regional firm specializing in the new and growing field of health law. We ventured out on our own to build not only a leading health law practice, but also to attract other successful and dynamic young lawyers to develop specialty practices for clients in other major industries in an environment of excellence, professionalism, entrepreneurial spirit, and collegiality. With the early addition of prominent attorneys such as Ed Dobbs and David Russell, who were leaders in their fields of commercial finance, bankruptcy, and complex business litigation, plus early success in attracting cream of the crop senior associates from several distinguished Atlanta firms, a solid foundation was laid for our future.

Paul Hudson

From our earliest days, I hoped that our firm would be, and remain, a collection of friends and colleagues practicing law as a profession, and not as a business. In my mind, the engine for growth of the firm would always come from the needs of clients, not from a business plan, and the standard for admission to the firm would be based on the highest level of intellect, legal ability, ethics, and integrity of the attorney, rather than the profitability of his or her practice.

Marbury Rainer

When I was invited to join John Parker and Paul Hudson in exploring the start of a new firm, I was excited about the prospect of being part of a new firm with good friends and great lawyers. My vision, if you can call it that, was to build a firm based on uncompromising excellence and relationships - the best, most ethical lawyers who enjoyed working together. If we could do that, I assumed our outstanding work product and firm culture would be valued by clients. I was right.

Ed Dobbs

Out of law school, I joined a young and energetic firm that was small but growing and excited about its future prospects. That firm ultimately merged with a national law firm, which provided significant opportunities for legal work, but lacked the entrepreneurial spirit of the firm I had joined. When my law school classmate (John Parker) and mutual friends (Paul Hudson and Marbury Rainer) asked me to team up with them in 1983, I was lured to the firm by their enthusiasm and entrepreneurial vision to build a quality law practice in a collegial environment.