After 90 years: McNees, Harrisburg, and what comes next

As featured in the August 28, 2026, edition of TheBurg.

For generations, the Market Street Bridge has connected Harrisburg with the West Shore. Its stone arches have remained familiar even as the city, the riverfront, and the communities on either side of the Susquehanna have changed around it.

Just a few years after the bridge opened, in 1935, the law firm that would become McNees Wallace & Nurick was founded in Harrisburg during the Great Depression. More than 90 years later, McNees is changing again.

On Aug. 24, we introduced a refreshed brand and website, the most visible update to the firm’s identity in years. Another change will follow next summer, when McNees plans to move its local office from its longtime home at 100 Pine St. across the river to Camp Hill.

For a firm whose history is closely tied to Harrisburg, those developments raise a larger question: How does a nearly century-old institution continue to evolve without losing its connection to the place that helped shape it?

That question became increasingly relevant as we worked through the brand refresh. McNees today looks very different from the firm founded here in 1935. We have grown to more than 170 attorneys, added offices and capabilities, and followed clients into new industries, legal disciplines, and communities. The ways our clients work have changed, too, as technology and hybrid workplaces have made geography less defining than it once was.

Before deciding how McNees should look or sound differently, we spent time listening. We spoke with clients and people throughout the firm about what distinguished McNees and what had sustained relationships over time. Clients talked about practical advice, accessibility and responsiveness, steady judgment, and relationships built over years of working together.

We also heard something that shaped much of the work that followed: the McNees our clients experienced was not always coming through clearly in the way we presented ourselves. The firm had evolved, but our story had not always kept pace.

We did not need to invent a new McNees. We needed to make the McNees that people already knew easier to see and understand.

That thinking influenced the language we use, the way our new website is organized, and the visual identity itself. It also led us back to Harrisburg.

Look closely at the new McNees logo, and you can see that connection. The arched contours of the new logo were inspired by the historic Market Street Bridge, bringing a recognizable piece of Harrisburg into the firm’s new identity. The bridge offered a fitting visual idea for a firm built around connection and continuity, while still looking forward.

The timing carries an additional meaning we did not fully anticipate when we embarked on our brand refresh. The bridge that helped inspire our new identity has connected Harrisburg and the West Shore for generations. Next summer, McNees will make its own move across the Susquehanna.

That move is significant, and we do not want to suggest otherwise. By the time we leave our Pine Street headquarters, McNees will have spent 60 years in the building. Generations of attorneys and professional staff have worked there. Clients have walked through its doors. Careers, friendships, and professional relationships have taken shape there. Leaving Pine Street turns the page of McNees’ history to the next exciting chapter.

We believe an organization’s relationship with a community is larger than an address. It is built through people, clients, civic and charitable institutions, professional relationships, and decades of participation in the life of a region. Those connections do not disappear when an office moves.

Those connections are not abstract either. We have long been active in organizations working to strengthen the Greater Harrisburg region, through the United Way of the Capital Region, the Harrisburg Regional Chamber & CREDC, and countless other civic and charitable efforts that span both the East and West shores. Through servant leadership, volunteerism, sponsorships, and giving, we have invested in this community for decades. This is not just where we work. It is where we live, raise families, serve on boards, and show up for neighbors. That commitment will continue.

At the same time, connection should not become an argument against change. Harrisburg itself has never stood still. During McNees’ lifetime, the city and the surrounding region have experienced expansion, disruption, redevelopment, and reinvention. The way people commute, communicate, and work has changed. Downtown Harrisburg today is not the Harrisburg of 1935, or even 1967, when McNees moved to Pine Street.

McNees has changed alongside it.

The future McNees headquarters in Camp Hill is being developed for the way our people work today, including a hybrid workforce and greater emphasis on collaboration and flexibility. The refreshed brand responds to a similar reality. Today’s McNees has broader capabilities, a larger geographic footprint, and more ways of connecting with clients than it did even a generation ago.

The harder part is deciding what should not change.