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2024 Year-In-Review

Explore our year in review to see the highlights and what’s ahead.

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About Us

About us

Our History

In 1783, William Rawle founded Rawle & Henderson in Philadelphia, thereby establishing the oldest law firm in the United States. A plethora (yes, El Guapo, we know what a plethora is) of other law firms have been established since then, with their libraries full of leather-bound books, smelling of rich mahogany and white shoe partners ready to wax on with their war stories, ad nauseam.

DTO has nothing to do with any of those firms.

William Delgado, Megan O’Neill, and Mark Tarango launched DTO in May 2019 because, frankly, they wanted to build a different type of law firm. Will met Megan in 2002 at Quinn Emanuel, where they both commenced their careers. Both left Quinn (at different times) but joined forces again in 2016 at a Quinn-spinoff. Mark commenced his career at Baker Hostetler and Morrison & Foerster before joining the in-house team at Toyota, where he spent fourteen years. Mark and Will met in 2015 when they concluded that the best way to advertise the legal conference they were organizing was to shoot a short film that involved a parody of A Few Good Men and included a sword fight between a Jedi (Mark, in costume) and Jack Sparrow (Will, in costume). When all three of them finally met, they realized they shared a collective vision: There was a better way to practice law. So, together with two other attorneys, they decided to prove it and launched a law firm.

Were there road bumps? Of course. We launched the firm without any admin assistance, so the managing partner had to call in payroll, handle court filings and document productions, and solve our IT problems. We had to deal with the loud and obnoxious co-tenants at the WeWork that housed our first “office.” And the awesome “One Year Anniversary” party we were planning got derailed by a worldwide contagion called “covid.”

But the firm is still here….and it’s much bigger. Its growth is testament that the D, T, and -O had it right—there is a better way to do it. Clients have come because our value proposition is highly persuasive: We solve their problems by creating “superior work product” (one of our client’s words, not ours), as efficiently as possible. Associates have joined us because we view them as critical resources that should be trained and mentored so that they become amazing attorneys and not billable-hour producing vessels to be exploited until they burn out. Lateral partners have joined us because our platform is precisely what they need to service their clients—a tech savvy boutique firm, with amazing human capital, that can compete with any BigLaw firm for any project, anywhere in the United States.

We announced the firm’s launch with a mass email whose subject line read “Don’t Call It a Comeback” and ended with the line: “And to any obstacles that might stand in our way—Mama said knock you out..” Those words ring as true today as ever.