A Deep Dive Into The 2024 Am Law 200 Rankings
Profits per partner of $1 million might not be Wachtell or Kirkland money, but it’s also nothing to scoff at.
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Lawyers are addicted to rankings—not surprising, given the legal field’s (perhaps pathological) focus on prestige and hierarchy—so there are certain rankings that I aim to cover every year. They include the Am Law 100, the nation’s 100 largest law firms ranked by revenue; the Vault 100, the nation’s 100 most prestigious firms; and the U.S. News law school rankings.
While reviewing last year’s posts for purposes of compiling my list of the top 10 stories of 2024, I noticed something embarrassing: I forgot to write up the latest Am Law 200, The American Lawyer’s closely followed ranking of the country’s 200 biggest law firms, based on gross revenue. Oops!
Consistent with one of my life mantras, “better late than never,” I decided to go back and produce a deep dive into the 2024 Am Law 200 ranking, which was based on firms’ 2023 financial performances. Even if this post is very belated, I wanted to at least have it for the Original Jurisdiction archives. As someone who has been writing about the legal world for more than two decades, I often find it interesting to go back and look at Biglaw history. (This is also why I like to memorize the historical names of various Biglaw firms—which, along with reciting the addresses of the New York offices of top firms, is one of my favorite party tricks.)1
The American Lawyer focuses its Am Law 200 analysis on what it calls the “Second Hundred,” the nation’s #101 to #200 firms ranked by revenue. Here are the key metrics of the firms’ collective performance in 2023, noted by Patrick Smith in his write-up:
Total revenue: $25 billion, up 5.9 percent
Revenue per lawyer (RPL): $781,421, up 0.8 percent
Profits per equity partner (PPEP): $973,884, up 1.4 percent
Total headcount: 32,070, up 5.1 percent
By way of comparison, the Second Hundred’s comparable statistics for 2022 were a revenue increase of 4.1 percent, an RPL increase of 1.5 percent, a PPEP drop of 1.2 percent, and a headcount increase of 2.6 percent. So in 2023, the Second Hundred posted solid increases in revenue and headcount, but middling numbers in the metrics of RPL and PPEP—which led Marcie Borgal Shunk, law firm consultant and CEO of The Tilt Institute, to characterize 2023 as “an investment story” for the Second Hundred. They did a significant amount of hiring—reflected in the 5.1 percent increase in headcount, which no doubt contributed to the 5.9 percent increase in total revenue—but the additional headcount might have diluted RPL and PPEP.
And how did the Second Hundred’s performance compare to their Am Law 100 counterparts? In 2023, the Am Law 100 collectively grew revenue by 6.8 percent, RPL by 4.9 percent, PPEP by 9.3 percent, and headcount by 1.8 percent. So the Second Hundred’s performance in 2023 was much weaker than the Am Law 100’s in terms of financial metrics. But based on the Am Law 100’s small growth in headcount, perhaps these firms were restraining growth to keep profitability high (because hiring more associates increases expenses, and minting more equity partners lowers PPEP by raising the denominator).
Now let’s look at some individual firms. Here are the first 10 firms in the Second Hundred, i.e., the firms ranked #101 to #110 in gross revenue (for the full list, plus lots of other interesting data, check out The American Lawyer):
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