Stat Of The Week: The Rich Get Richer

Almost 30 years ago, profits per partner at Am Law firms averaged around $309,000 (or $623,000 in current dollars). The PPP for that same group in 2014?

onNovember 7, 2014 at 4:00 PM

According to the “Hawking Index” (in honor of A Brief History of Time being the “most unread book of all time”), this year’s best-selling book that pretty much nobody actually finished reading was Thomas Piketty’s Capital In The Twenty-First Century. Piketty’s 700-page doorstop is largely concerned with the trends of increasing economic inequality and concentration of wealth. It turns out that Biglaw is a microcosm of these broader trends.

Almost 30 years ago, profits per partner at Am Law firms averaged around $309,000 (or $623,000 in current dollars). The PPP for that same group in 2014?

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$1.5 million. As Jeffrey Toobin notes in The New Yorker: “These numbers hide an even greater disparity. Those at the very top of the pyramid—firms such as Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan; Cravath, Swain & Moore; and a handful of others—are thriving as never before, with annual profits per partner in the multimillions.”