The Top 20 Most Profitable Law Firms (2024)

Last year was a great one for many Biglaw firms—including the new #1 firm in profits per equity partner.

Last year, Cravath Swaine & Moore moved to new digs at Two Manhattan West (photo by David Lat).

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Tired of talking about Trump stuff? You’ve come to the right place. Let’s turn our attention to another topic that people love to discuss: money—specifically, how much of it Biglaw firms made in 2024.¹

The answer: a lot. Here are the key financial metrics for Biglaw as a whole, from The American Lawyer’s 2025 Am Law 100 rankings (based on 2024 performance):

• Total gross revenue: $158.3 billion, up by 13.3 percent.

• Revenue per lawyer (RPL): $1.28 million, up by 5.2 percent.

• Profits per equity partner (PPEP): $3.15 million, up by 12.3 percent.

These numbers aren’t adjusted for inflation—which they handily outpaced, since inflation was around 2.9 percent in 2024. As Patrick Smith noted in his analysis of the Am Law 100, “[b]y the numbers, there is no other credible way to describe the overall performance of the 100 largest law firms by revenue: They crushed it.”

For purposes of comparison, here are the past five years of Am Law 100 performance:

So 2024 was Biglaw’s best year since 2021—which was its best year “in a generation,” per Am Law. Not too shabby!

In my analysis of last year’s Am Law 100 rankings, I predicted that 2024 would “end up being mixed—not as good as either 2021 or 2023, but better than 2022.” So I was two-thirds correct: while 2024 didn’t beat the banner year of 2021, it did come in ahead of 2023 (and of course 2022, which wasn’t pretty).

What about headcount? If you’ve been worried about the robots (or AI tools) taking lawyer jobs, I have good news for you: the attorney population of the Am Law 100 now stands at 123,953, after growing by 7.7 percent in 2024—much larger than the 1.8 percent increase in 2023. This fact makes the increases in revenue per lawyer and profits per equity partner even more impressive; when there are more lawyers around, RPL and PPEP can sometimes decline. (Why? Because there’s less work to go around, as to RPL, and because more lawyers means more in compensation costs, as to PPEP.)

That increase of 7.7 percent is a blend of multiple attorney populations. The ranks of equity partners increased at a slower rate, by 3.3 percent. But that’s still noteworthy because it means that in 2024, the Am Law 100 managed to increase PPEP by 12.3 percent even as the number of equity partners grew—no small feat. Compare this with 2023, where the number of equity partners actually declined slightly—meaning that the 9.3 percent increase in PPEP that year was achieved partly by shrinking the denominator. It’s more impressive to grow the entire pie, giving bigger slices to a bigger number of people, than to generate bigger slices by feeding a smaller number.

Meanwhile, the number of nonequity partners climbed by 10.1 percent in 2024—which means that there are now more nonequity partners in the Am Law 100 than equity partners, by a 51/49 percent ratio. I predicted last year that this would happen “in the next few years”; it actually took only one.

Now let’s take a closer look at three major metrics: gross revenue, revenue per lawyer, and profits per equity partner—where a new #1 firm narrowly beat out the usual leader in PPEP, Wachtell Lipton.

And you can probably guess who it is. Here’s a hint: $9.3 million goes really far at Costco….