The 20 Most Prestigious Law Firms In America (2024)

Litigation-focused firms fared well; tech-oriented firms, not so much.

Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, a longtime member of the Vault 20 (photo by David Lat).

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Lawyers love prestige, and lawyers love rankings. If you’ve spent any time on LinkedIn over the past few weeks, you’ve surely seen lawyers posting about themselves, their colleagues, or their law firms getting recognized in the 2024 Chambers and Partners rankings, which were released earlier this month. While I’m skeptical of certain other systems for ranking lawyers and law firms, I have a lot of respect for Chambers, which I regard as the real deal.

The Chambers rankings are partner-focused. For associates’ perceptions of firm prestige, the Vault prestige rankings are where it’s at. And while some observers might discount the views of associates, the Vault rankings matter because law students and young lawyers consider them when deciding where to work. Law is a talent-centric business, and top law firms need to focus on not just hiring great talent in the lateral market, but also entry-level hiring. Making it into the Vault 100, and then rising in the Vault rankings over time, will help a firm greatly in recruiting—which is ultimately the key to a firm’s future.

This morning, Vault announced the 2025 Vault 100—the nation’s 100 most prestigious law firms, based on a survey of 20,000 Biglaw associates across the country. Here are the top 10 firms, with change in rank from last year noted parenthetically (“—” means no change):

1. Cravath, Swaine & Moore (—)
2. Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz (—)
3. Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom (—)
4. Latham & Watkins (—)
5. Sullivan & Cromwell (—)
6. Kirkland & Ellis (+1)
7. Davis Polk & Wardwell (-1)
8. Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison (+1)
9. Simpson Thacher & Bartlett (-1)
10. Gibson Dunn & Crutcher (—)

For the seventh year in a row, the so-called “V10” firms remained the same, with only minor changes in order. It’s further proof that prestige is “sticky,” i.e., difficult and slow to change (as I recently discussed in the context of law-school rankings).

The top five firms didn’t change at all. In the rest of the top 10, Kirkland and Davis Polk traded places at #6 and #7, and Paul Weiss and Simpson swapped spots at #8 and #9. These shifts are small, so I wouldn’t read too much into them. But it’s worth noting that Kirkland and Paul Weiss made some major hires in the lateral partner space in recent years, and perhaps associates have noticed.

Let’s now look at the rest of the top 20, followed by the biggest gainers and losers in the latest Vault rankings—including my analysis of what trends these moves reflect.

Here are the firms ranked #11 to #20—and once again, there wasn’t a lot of change: