Biglaw

The 500 Largest Law Firms In The United States

Plus interesting data about what percentage of their lawyers are equity partners.

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(Image via Getty)

Ed. note: This column originally appeared on Original Jurisdiction, the latest Substack publication from David Lat. You can learn more about Original Jurisdiction on its About page, and you can subscribe through this signup page.

Like many lawyers, I’m a sucker for rankings. In the world of Biglaw, some of the most notable rankings are the Am Law 100 and Am Law 200 rankings, which rank the nation’s largest law firms by total revenue (and also include data on such metrics as profits per equity partner), and the Vault 100 rankings, which rank firms by prestige.

Not to be overlooked, however, are the NLJ 500 rankings, in which the National Law Journal ranks the 500 largest firms in the United States by lawyer headcount — the firms that put the “big” in “Biglaw.” They might not be as sexy as rankings of firms based on profitability or prestige, but they still matter.

First, the NLJ 500 rankings remind us that large U.S. law firms, even if they’re not publicly traded, can be bigger than all but the biggest companies, generating billions in revenue and employing thousands of people, including not just lawyers but paralegals, legal assistants, and other professionals. Second, the rankings also reveal how many people’s careers and lives are tied to a particular firm, and in that sense they reflect a firm’s influence and importance within the Biglaw ecosystem.

As I’ve mentioned in these pages, I’ve been a bit distracted over the past few weeks by our family’s big move from Manhattan to the New Jersey suburbs. So I actually missed the latest NLJ 500 rankings when the National Law Journal issued them late last month. I’d like to take this occasion to double back and discuss them.

Here are the top 10 firms from the NLJ 500, i.e., the ten biggest firms in terms of headcount based on 2020 data. I calculated myself and added in two columns of calculations that I thought might be of interest — partners as a percentage of total attorneys at a firm, and equity partners as a percentage of total attorneys at a firm:

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Some brief observations:

  • The headcount of the largest firm, Baker McKenzie, is a staggering 4,699 — 700 lawyers more than second-place DLA Piper. And Baker McKenzie’s headcount actually decreased last year, by 2.3 percent, meaning that it was even bigger in 2019.
  • In the top 10, the firm where equity partners make up the smallest slice of total headcount is DLA Piper, where they amount to a little more than 10 percent of all attorneys.
  • I was surprised by how high the percentages were for partners as a percentage of total attorneys. The title of “partner” doesn’t mean as much as it used to, given the rise in the ranks of nonequity partners (a group that grew in size last year by 3 percent, even though overall lawyer headcount at NLJ 500 firms declined by 0.1 percent). But I was still surprised to see that at most of the top 10 firms, about a third of lawyers carry the “partner” title.
  • I wasn’t shocked to see that at Kirkland & Ellis, where you get the title of (nonequity aka “nonshare”) partner if you stick it out for six years or so, more than 40 percent of lawyers have the partner title. But K&E wasn’t even the highest in this regard; at Greenberg Traurig, more than half the lawyers are partners (or “shareholders,” in GT parlance).
  • In the top 10 largest firms, the only firm with a single-tier, all-equity partnership is Jones Day. So in one sense it’s easier to make equity partner at JD, but it might mean less once you do: profits per equity partner (PPEP) at Jones Day were just shy of $1.3 million in the latest Am Law 100 rankings, which is quite low by Biglaw standards in 2021. And under the firm’s “black box” compensation system, Jones Day can get away with paying many partners well below that average PPEP figure.

If you hop over to the National Law Journal, you can access the full rankings plus extensive color commentary. Here are a few other highlights from elsewhere in the NLJ 500, including the cities and states with the most NLJ 500 lawyers.

Continue reading over at Original Jurisdiction.

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David Lat, the founding editor of Above the Law, is a writer and speaker about law and legal affairs. You can read his latest writing about law and the legal profession by subscribing to Original Jurisdiction, his Substack newsletter. David’s book, Supreme Ambitions: A Novel (2014), was described by the New York Times as “the most buzzed-about novel of the year” among legal elites. Before entering the media and recruiting worlds, David worked as a federal prosecutor, a litigation associate at Wachtell Lipton, and a law clerk to Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. You can connect with David on Twitter (@DavidLat), LinkedIn, and Facebook, and you can reach him by email at davidlat@substack.com.

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