McCarter & English looks to more growth as Indianapolis office expands

Founded in 1864 in Sussex County, New Jersey, the law firm McCarter & English LLP spent more than a century building its presence in the Northeast before deciding to branch out, opening two new offices in two years.

Both locations might have seemed surprising, given the firm’s existing offices in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York and Pennsylvania. But the firm’s leaders said they saw growth opportunities in Miami, where the firm opened an office in 2021, and Indianapolis, where it opened in 2022.

Now, led by local managing partners Katherine Althoff and Amy Fisher, McCarter & English is looking to grow its Indianapolis office even more.

“We’re very committed to that idea of being not just a Midwest office but a full-service office that our partners and clients and other offices can utilize,” Fisher said.

Last month, the firm announced the addition of three partners in the Indianapolis office. Attorneys Brent Huber, Amy Berg and Louie Jorczak joined the firm from Ice Miller, where the trio had built a collaborative practice focused on environmental contamination matters.

Each brought decades of experience helping clients manage and remediate environmental liabilities, and McCarter & English said they would help to expand the firm’s services in insurance coverage and commercial and environmental litigation.

Midwest moves

Last month’s moves weren’t the first from Ice Miller to McCarter & English. In fact, the Indianapolis office launched with more than a dozen former Ice Miller employees in May 2022, according to previous reporting by The Indiana Lawyer and IBJ. The departures then were the result of a consolidation of a client’s legal team in one of its mass tort cases, Ice Miller told IBJ at that time.

Among the Ice Miller attorneys to move were Althoff and Fisher, who had been with the Indianapolis-based firm for about 20 years each. The two were already familiar with McCarter & English before they joined the team, as they often worked with McCarter attorneys on mutual-client cases.

That’s what interested McCarter & English as well. Joseph Boccassini, McCarter’s firmwide managing partner, told The Lawyer at the time that the firm wanted to expand westward and found the perfect opportunity with the women at the helm.

Althoff and Fisher stressed that the change was never about fleeing Ice Miller; rather, they saw new opportunities to embark on with McCarter.

“We were interested in the entrepreneurial aspect that opening an office of an East Coast law firm in Indiana provided for us and all that that might bring,” Althoff said. “Given where we were in our career, it was exciting to us to have that opportunity to build something new.”

Growth within McCarter’s Indianapolis office has been consistent since taking root in the Hoosier state. Supported by the team back east, leaders in Indianapolis began searching for a permanent office location — eventually landing in Carmel and occupying a space in the city’s $47 million, 73,000-square-foot 1st On Main development, which was completed in 2024.

The firm now sits at the corner of Main Street and Rangeline Road in the heart of Carmel’s Arts & Design District.

The move was not only a physical representation of McCarter’s commitment to the Midwest, leaders said, but also a reflection of the overall growth happening in central Indiana, something Fisher said continues to appeal to the McCarter team.

“Indiana continues to attract manufacturing, life sciences, logistics, ag tech and technology investments across the board,” Fisher said. “We wanted to make sure that we helped McCarter grow something that was not just a satellite office and was not just something that would be attractive to potential Indiana lawyers but that would be a full-service office for our Indiana clients.”

Gaining momentum

The firm has nearly doubled its attorney team since 2023, with 15 attorneys and six office support staff as of June 2026. Firmwide, McCarter continues to see growth, boasting more than 850 attorneys and support staff in its 12 offices around the country.

For Fisher and Althoff, growth is about more than numbers. It’s also about the quality of the attorneys brought into the fold. Last year, the office welcomed Zachary Myers, a former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Indiana, to its business litigation group. Myers also co-leads the firm’s multidisciplinary cybersecurity and data privacy team alongside Erin Prest, who previously served as deputy general counsel for the FBI and operates out of McCarter’s
Washington, D.C., office.

“It’s not growth for the sake of growth,” Fisher said, reflecting on how the firm and its offices look to build the team.

According to her and Althoff, the firm considers not only those who show an interest in joining McCarter as their next career move but also how the firm can bolster practice areas where clients need additional depth. The purpose of expanding to the Midwest is not just to attract Midwest clients but to offer all clients well-rounded representation wherever they’re located.

The addition of Myers marked significant growth not just for the firm but for Myers himself, who was looking for a role where he could build a client base and serve them in much the same way he did with the Department of Justice.

One of the biggest challenges Myers said he faced at the U.S. Attorney’s Office was understaffing. The Southern District of Indiana serves 60 of Indiana’s 92 counties and currently employs 70 attorneys, paralegals and support staff, according to its website.

As a U.S. attorney, Myers helped build out the Indianapolis office’s team; he was responsible for hiring more than 35% of the staff during his time there, he said. When it came time to leave the position, he knew he wanted to build his client base but was stepping into unknown territory, having spent most of his career with the Justice Department.

McCarter appealed to Myers’ desire to build his book of clients and support the firm’s growth, and it offered the benefits of a larger firm with the aspirations of a smaller one.

“It had this blend of being a big law firm with a national presence, a national client base, and all the different sophisticated practices you would expect in all these different areas,” he said. “But because they were newer to the Indianapolis market and sort of growing intentionally in the Indianapolis market, it was a chance to get in pretty close to the ground floor on building something new and different.”

Myers said collaboration is at the heart of McCarter’s operations, allowing attorneys to work together to serve clients.

“Each of us might have clients we want to serve, but that we individually — either from a bandwidth standpoint or just specialties and capabilities — don’t necessarily alone have all of the resources that our clients need,” he said. “Being on a team like this, I’ve been able to both support my partners as we solve problems for the clients that they’re bringing in, as well as having some great support from my team across all the offices.”

Now entering their fifth year, Althoff and Fisher are celebrating the fact that the Indianapolis office is not only growing through lateral additions, but also by seeing current attorneys rise through the ranks. For example, Angela Della Rocco, who started in the Indianapolis office as an associate in 2022, is now a partner at the firm, Fisher said. The office is also building its team through law schools, building its efforts to recruit law students looking for their first job post-grad.

“It’s not just attracting partners who are midway or further into their career, but it’s also the young people who are joining that’s very exciting and [shows] healthy growth,” Althoff said.•