The firm was founded in 1982 as a merger of two Indiana-based firms: the Indianapolis-based Barnes, Hickam, Pantzer & Boyd (founded in 1940), and the
South Bend-based Thornburg, McGill, Deahl, Harman, Carey & Murray (founded in 1926). Since 2009, Barnes & Thornburg has opened offices in Boston, Dallas, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, Raleigh, San Diego, Salt Lake, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Columbus. In 2015, the
National Law Journal ranked Barnes & Thornburg as the 78th largest law firm in the United States. In 2015, the
American Lawyer released its AmLaw 100 rankings, and Barnes & Thornburg was listed at No. 90. In April 2019, a ground-breaking ceremony took place for the firm's new office building in
South Bend, Indiana. The 5-story mixed-use building designed by KTGY Architecture is called The Barnes and Thornburg building and consists of 32,839 square feet of office space and 6,720 square feet of retail and restaurant space on the ground floor. It was the first commercial development to break ground in the downtown business district in the past 20 years. The firm remained in the 1st Source Bank Center until summer 2021, when the South Bend branch relocated to their aforementioned current office at 201 S. Main Street.
2020 election fraud controversy On June 3, 2021, an attorney at Barnes & Thornburg filed a lawsuit in the
United States District Court for the District of Minnesota on behalf of
Michael Lindell, the CEO of
My Pillow, in which the firm alleged that the
2020 election was fraudulent due to the hacking of voting machines. The firm specifically alleged that there is evidence "showing voting machines were manipulated to affect outcomes in the November 2020 general election," In the complaint, Barnes & Thornburg claimed that the phrase "the Big Lie," which
Dominion referred to in its own lawsuit against Mike Lindell in the
United States District Court for the District of Columbia, was a term coined by
Adolf Hitler in
Mein Kampf. ==Practice areas==