Skadden; Ropes & Gray; Jones Day; Davis Polk; Paul Weiss; Sullivan & Cromwell; Covington; Cleary Gottlieb; Debevoise; Wilmer; Wachtell; Arnold & Porter; Cravath; Schulte Roth; Ballard Spahr
But if you subtract the firms that have announced addition of a non-equity tier—Paul Weiss, Wilmer, and Cravath—you get 12 firms.
So how do we get to 14? Paul Weiss and Wilmer have announced that they WILL be making non-equity partners, but as of the latest Am Law 100 rankings, they haven't made any yet.*
So if you add PW and WH back in, that's 14. But really you should think of it as 12 single-tier firms, because we know that PW and WH are going to add NEPs eventually.
* Every Am Law 200 law firm has its own page on Law.com that lists financial metrics and headcount, including the number of equity and non-equity partners. If you go to the Law.com pages for Paul Weiss and Wilmer, you'll see "0" under the number of non-equity partners. (Cravath, interestingly enough, already has 11 non-equity partners—compared to 92 equity partners.)
Which are the 14 Am Law 100 firms that still have a single partnership tier?
An ATL post from 2022 (https://abovethelaw.com/2022/05/theres-only-one-type-of-partner-at-these-biglaw-firms-the-equity-kind/2/)—citing an Am Law piece that I now can't seem to access—listed the following 15 firms:
Skadden; Ropes & Gray; Jones Day; Davis Polk; Paul Weiss; Sullivan & Cromwell; Covington; Cleary Gottlieb; Debevoise; Wilmer; Wachtell; Arnold & Porter; Cravath; Schulte Roth; Ballard Spahr
But if you subtract the firms that have announced addition of a non-equity tier—Paul Weiss, Wilmer, and Cravath—you get 12 firms.
So how do we get to 14? Paul Weiss and Wilmer have announced that they WILL be making non-equity partners, but as of the latest Am Law 100 rankings, they haven't made any yet.*
So if you add PW and WH back in, that's 14. But really you should think of it as 12 single-tier firms, because we know that PW and WH are going to add NEPs eventually.
* Every Am Law 200 law firm has its own page on Law.com that lists financial metrics and headcount, including the number of equity and non-equity partners. If you go to the Law.com pages for Paul Weiss and Wilmer, you'll see "0" under the number of non-equity partners. (Cravath, interestingly enough, already has 11 non-equity partners—compared to 92 equity partners.)
Thank you!
“Judge Thapar is widely viewed as a top SCOTUS contender in a second Trump Administration”——from your lips to God’s ears!