Rob Klingler is in our Atlanta office and is a partner in our Financial Institutions group. Rob regularly counsels financial institutions, with an emphasis on regulatory compliance, mergers and acquisitions, and securities law issues. Rob has advised community banks, as well as their officers and directors, concerning issues related to the current difficult financial and regulatory environment.  Rob is a frequent public speaker about federal and state banking regulations, the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), and the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.  Prior to joining the firm, he was an assistant coach of the University of Florida Speech and Debate Team. In addition, Rob is the founder and primary writer for BankBryanCave.com.

Kim Civins is also in our Atlanta office and is a partner in our Private Client service group.  In addition to advising individuals and families in the areas of estate planning and estate administration, Kim regularly advises trust and wealth management departments of banks of all sizes with regard to compliance with federal and state laws. Prior to attending law school, Kim worked for seven years for a national sports marketing company.

The combined law firm will have more than 1,100 attorneys in over 30 law and professional service offices around the globe. It is expected to rank among the 25 largest in the world.  The combination with HRO will provide additional platforms for the continued expansion of Bryan Cave’s national community banking practice.

“Combining with HRO represents a unique opportunity for both firms to expand the resources we can offer to our clients while reinforcing a shared culture dedicated to superior client service,” said Don G. Lents, chairman of Bryan Cave. “Extending our geographic reach while expanding the range of our services in California are important steps in our firm’s long-term growth. We are very pleased to have as our colleagues lawyers coming from a firm with the stature of HRO, a name that has been synonymous with the highest-quality legal work in its region for more than a century.”

Based in Denver, HRO also serves clients from offices in Boulder, Colorado Springs, San Francisco and Los Angeles. For more than 100 years, the firm has had a tradition of developing lasting relationships with the entrepreneurial businesses which built the Rocky Mountain West, including numerous energy, mining, natural resource and telecommunications and technology clients. In more recent times, the firm has been a leader in providing counsel for complex business and securities transactions, emerging tech and environmental matters. In addition, HRO has developed a nationally recognized litigation group that has handled numerous multimillion dollar cases for some of the best-known companies in the United States. With the combination, the newly formed firm will be the only international firm with full-service capabilities on the ground in Colorado.

“Our clients will benefit significantly from the capabilities offered by Bryan Cave in the U.S. and internationally,” said Randy Miller, managing partner of Holme Roberts & Owen. “We are very pleased to now offer much greater resources across multiple legal specialties. It was clear to us from the beginning that Bryan Cave and HRO share common values, including a passion for building long-term relationships with clients. This combination allows for the unbroken continuity of those professional relationships while also permitting us to offer a wider array of legal services to existing and new clients. We look forward to serving Bryan Cave’s existing client base in our home markets.”

Both firms have long histories of serving clients across a broad spectrum of transactions, and business and dispute resolution matters. The increased depth, added experience, greater range of legal services and geographic reach create a firm that is positioned to handle an even wider array of client matters wherever located.

The combination with Holme Roberts & Owen follows Bryan Cave’s expansion in November 2011 when it announced the opening of a second German office in Frankfurt. The firm also practices in Hamburg, Germany, Paris, London, and through an affiliated office in Milan. Bryan Cave also has offices across Asia. Bryan Cave recently was ranked No. 2 among all major law firms for client service by BTI Consulting, an independent research organization.

Click here to read a message from Don Lents, Chairman.

As the parent of a human two year-old, I’m quite happy to at least have this site exit its “terrible twos.”  The site encountered some growing pains last year, but we’ve changed hosts, changed look, and driving forward.

Since its launch, BankBryanCave.com has hosted over 127 thousand visitors, and has delivered 277 thousand page views.  Included in those visitors are a significant number of bank regulators and policy makers, including over 900 visits from the FDIC, 360 visits from the Treasury Department, 350 visits from the OCC, 290 visits from the US Senate, 260 visits from the U.S. House of Representatives, 160 visits from the Federal Reserve Board and 140 visits from the U.S. General Accounting Office.

As we noted in the beginning…

There is no fee of any sort connected with this site or its usage – it is another example of the many ways we try to give back to the industry that has been so good to us in so many ways. We hope you expect this kind of effort and contribution from us, since we have always considered our clients to be our partners in our industry. We hope you will continue to look to us in good times and bad.

A central premise of our financial institutions group is that sharing information collected from all of our attorneys creates significant intellectual power and value for our clients and each other.  We look forward to continuing to share.

We still have several tweaks that we’re continuing to work on, and we’ve (temporarily) lost some functionality.  But we think we can get items resolved quickly.

Details to follow.

Most interestingly, we’ve added comments. All comments are moderated, but we would like to encourage further dialogue with our site’s visitors.  We don’t expect there to be a lot of comments, but sometimes our readers share interesting additional information that we would like to facilitate for broader distribution.

We’ve also vastly improved BankBryanCave.com’s search results.  Searches should now actually result in you being able to find whatever you were looking for.

The last change of any significance is that we’ve added options to easily share each post via Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.  (I can’t tell you how many readers have asked us to more easily share BankBryanCave.com posts with their Facebook friends!… probably because no one has ever previously had that thought.)

For those subscribed for e-mail subscription updates, we’ve added an “Email to a friend” option within the emails to allow you to share posts that you find may be interesting for others.

One item that I definitely broke was the old RSS feed for BankBryanCave.com.  If you are interested in following BankBryanCave.com in a newsreader, such as Google Reader, be sure to update to the new RSS feed.

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions (or simply want to complain bitterly that we’ve made any changes whatsoever), please leave a comment or, as always, send me an e-mail.

The latest and greatest information will continue to be posted directly on BankBryanCave.com, but if you’re looking for quick overview of the Act or easy links to our most popular posts on Dodd-Frank, please check our our new Dodd-Frank page.

In addition, we are now offering three subscription choices: instant alerts, daily emails and weekly emails.  Accordingly, you can now have as many (or as few) BankBryanCave.com emails as you desire.  To sign up, simply visit our Email Sign-up page and select the frequency of updates that you would like.

I’ve taken the liberty of converting everyone that had previously signed up into the new system, so if you were comfortable with your prior settings, you shouldn’t have to do anything.  If, however, you’d like to change anything, you should have a link at the bottom of each email you receive to change your subscription settings.

If you would like to sign up for a daily email (and you can always unsubscribe later), please enter your email address in the “Subscribe for Updates” box and hit the Subscribe button.  You should then receive an email with instructions to confirm your subscription.