Hart David Carson LLP is a corporate, M&A, and private-capital boutique for the decisions that don't get a second draft. We are in the business of getting it right, quietly and the first time, with none of the theatrics.
Hart David Carson LLP was founded in 2013 in Chicago’s western suburbs and works from River North and Oakbrook Terrace today. The premise is that the hardest decisions deserve senior judgment, applied early, by people who will still be in the room when the matter closes. The body of work has grown over the years, and the standard it is held to has not.
The firm began in June 2013 as Hart David LLP, in a storefront suite at Cameo Square in Downers Grove, Illinois, and opened a downtown Chicago address at 115 South LaSalle Street that November. It moved to Elmhurst in 2015 and stayed until 2023, then to Oakbrook Terrace, and in 2024 took its principal office at One East Erie Street in River North. Brandon Carson Hall joined in January 2015 and the firm took his name in 2017. Along the way it added meeting locations in seven further US cities, from New York to Miami, offices in London and Dubai held through partner firms, and a partner network of independent firms that now reaches about 51 jurisdictions. Today it is 63 attorneys practicing under one name.
In time a center of gravity formed around the transactions and the families behind them. Companies at the moment they buy, sell, raise, or restructure. Sponsors and family offices deploying capital and protecting it. Founders crossing from one stage of a business into the next. That is the work we know best, and it is the center of the practice today.
Most of what we do divides cleanly into two arcs of a single relationship, two chairs at one table. The company's chair is the corporate side: mergers and acquisitions, private capital, securities and capital markets, governance, and the on-demand general-counsel coverage that sits between a company's first outside lawyer and its first chief legal officer. The family's chair is the other side of the same table, the wealth, succession, and private-client work for the people who own and lead those companies.
The two are not separate practices. A transaction and the family behind it are rarely two problems; they are one problem seen from two chairs, and handling them together is most of the value we add.
Four times the firm went where other lawyers said the work would cost a license. International and offshore structuring from 2014. The practice predates the Panama Papers of 2016, did not pause when they broke, and has re-papered its clients' structures under every disclosure regime adopted since. Digital assets from 2014, when the category was dismissed as a fad: corporate-side work in the recovery of assets after the collapse of Mt. Gox, one of the first digital-asset fund structures in the Bahamas, and the funds, family offices, and exchanges that followed. Cannabis from 2015, the year Illinois's first medical dispensaries opened, and outside corporate counsel to Revolution and other licensed operators from 2016, through licensing in five states. Wellness and longevity from 2020, as peptide and metabolic-healthspan companies formed. Underneath all four sits the healthcare work the firm has done since its first year, for ambulatory surgery centers, physician groups, and the pain, neuro, and spine practices behind them.
Each bet was calculated, and each time the field arrived where the firm already stood. Entrepreneurs at heart, we understand calculated risk, and the record of being early is the clearest case for the firm.
You move first. You hold the line, with us behind it.
The history travels with us. It is in the file numbers, in the closings no one read about, and in the relationships that go back to the first year. The firm that took the call in 2013 is the firm that takes it now.
The name. Hart and David are the middle names of the two founding partners, Joel J.H. Funk and Jonathan D. Herpy, Sr. Carson is the middle name of Brandon Carson Hall, who joined the firm in January 2015 and whose name was added in 2017, when Hart David LLP became Hart David Carson LLP. The practice the name describes has narrowed to corporate, M&A, private capital, and private wealth.
A partner owns your matter from the first call to the closing. However large the team we deploy, one partner answers for all of it, and you can reach that partner directly. Senior judgment is the staffing model here rather than the closing argument.
We turn away work we cannot do cleanly. Clearing conflicts before we engage is how a boutique keeps the trust that lets clients tell us the hard parts early, when they still matter.
Three time zones, one standard. With reach across North America, Europe, and the Middle East, we structure cross-border matters without handing you off to strangers, and the same partner stays accountable as a deal crosses jurisdictions.
Before a deal goes out, we stress-test it the way the other side will, so nothing they find comes as a surprise. Adversarial diligence, run by your own counsel, is how we replace optimism with a documented position.
Behind the two partners sits a bench of focused counsel and a partner network of independent firms across compliance, regulatory, litigation, tax, and M&A, named to your matter at engagement. We build a senior team around your matter rather than slotting your matter into a team.
Most of this work is never seen. The matters that define a company, and the families behind them, are rarely the ones discussed. Discretion is a condition of the work rather than a courtesy we extend.
Two partners lead the firm: Joel J.H. Funk (Managing Partner) and Jonathan D. Herpy, Sr. (Senior Partner). Behind them sits a bench of focused counsel and a partner network of independent firms, named to your matter at engagement. Read more on our people and how we engage.
Chicago · London · Dubai | A partner network of independent firms across five continents.
For companies and the families behind them. A partner replies. Most of this work is never seen, and it starts with a conversation.