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Denver’s oldest law firm Sherman & Howard merges with another

Denver’s 130-year-old law firm Sherman & Howard will merge with another law firm Taft, the company announced.

The companies stated the merger would help the businesses expand their reach from the Mountain West to Washington D.C. with a firm of more than 1,000 attorneys. The deal is set to close by Jan. 1, 2025, according to a news release.

Sherman & Howard was founded in 1892 and is Denver’s oldest law firm with a presence in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico.

Sherman & Howard’s eight offices will push the number of Taft offices into a total of 10 states. Taft is a “non-headquartered” law firm that focuses on giving local leadership more autonomy, according to Taft.

With Sherman & Howard, Taft’s revenues would be projected to total $875 million in 2025, up from $810 million in 2024.

“While working with the same attorneys and staff with whom they have long-standing relationships, our clients can now leverage a deeper bench and expanded service offerings both regionally and nationally,” said Sherman & Howard CEO Stefan Stein in the release. “We’re looking forward to starting this new chapter in our history by combining with Taft, a future-focused firm like ours.”

The new firm’s Denver division, with more than 100 attorneys, will remain named Sherman & Howard. The rest of the offices will be Taft.

New data center to break ground in Parker

Construction is set to begin on a new data center south of Denver.

Data center provider Flexential announced it will break ground Tuesday for a 249,000-square-foot facility on a site with over 17 acres in Parker. The new site will be the company’s fifth and largest location in Denver, with a capacity of 22.5 megawatts.

“Flexential is expanding its data center presence across the nation, and our growth in Denver highlights our role in leading industry innovation and meeting market needs,” CEO Chris Downie said in a release in May when the project was first announced.

The company stated it wanted to open another location in the metro area as Denver is becoming a popular alternative for companies to store data as other hotspots in Silicon Valley and Ashburn, Va. are prone to power shortages.

The site is set to give businesses in multiple sectors — such as healthcare, finance and manufacturing — power resources from a location with “low risk of natural disasters,” according to Flexential.

“This new Denver facility is a cornerstone of our strategy, aimed at boosting Denver’s tech sector with cutting-edge, scalable computing solutions,” Downie said. “This project reflects our commitment to forward-looking, high-density, and sustainable computing infrastructures designed to support the evolving digital needs of enterprise businesses.”

Energy lab breaks ground on Golden campus

The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory broke ground on a new 127,000-square-foot laboratory in Golden.

Construction began Sept. 17 on the South Table Mountain Campus for the new Energy Materials and Processing at Scale lab to act as a collaborative research space between universities and industry partners to work on preparing energy innovations for the marketplace.

The lab will be built by JE Dunn Construction and was designed by SmithGroup. It’s set to be completed in 2027.

“The new capabilities we will gain from EMAPS will accelerate innovations in materials and processes that are essential to clean energy technologies, from lab-scale discovery to scale-up for commercialization, allowing NREL to dig deeper into our current research while also pursuing exciting new avenues,” said NREL Director Martin Keller in a release.

The budget for the project is $224 million.