If you’re in Biglaw, you probably know it. Oppressive hours? Ridiculously high pay and correspondingly ludicrous hourly rates? Soul-crushing work on behalf of evil corporations and partners you’ve never met? Check, check, check, you’re at a big firm.
Plus, you know, they actually publish lists of the largest firms in the country. If your firm is part of the Am Law 200, it’s pretty safe to say that qualifies as Biglaw (though it notably does not neccessarily mean you’re qualified to actually practice law).
Likewise, at the artisanal side of the spectrum, we have a class of lawyers who are just as easily defined: solo practitioners. These mavericks are carrying the world on their shoulders, running their own businesses, and never have to even attempt to get along with anyone else in the workplace if they don’t want to.
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Between Biglaw and solos, however, there is a lot of wiggle room. I would argue that two lawyers in an office is the OG version of a partnership. Then beyond that you get into small firms.
Somewhere, of course, between small firms and Biglaw you have the meat-part of the hamburger when it comes to the legal profession: midsize firms. The trouble is, no one seems to have consistent criteria to define just what makes a firm midsize.
Google’s AI overview is perhaps as good a place as any to start. That says midsize law firms “typically have between 20 and 100 attorneys.” On the other hand, Google’s AI also notes that some sources define midsize firms “as firms with 16 to 350 attorneys.” Hm, that is quite a discrepancy.
Is number of attorneys the best way to define the size of a law firm, though? I represented a law firm once against its biggest competitor in a case that was, in part, about which of them got to advertise being the “largest” or “biggest” firm in the state in their particular practice area, and I promise you, it was clear which one had the most attorneys, and that absolutely did not settle the matter.
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There are a lot of relevant factors above and beyond the number of attorneys a firm employs. As every lawyer knows, non-lawyer staff do most of the work anyway, so a firm with a lot more staff but fewer attorneys compared to a competitor might be legitimately considered to be a larger law firm. There are also revenue measurements, from total receipts to profits per partner.
And what about resources? It is hard to quantify what that means, but there is certainly some intangible form of value in the networks a firm has, from independent contractors it can call in to institutional knowledge about the local bench to a widespread geographic reach with multiple office locations.
We do know that midsize firms are tremendous workhorses within the legal profession. Perhaps this is no surprise considering that there are over 9,000 of them in the United States employing some 400,000 legal professionals.
Maybe it’s more about how firms want to self-define than anything else. There are certainly some law firms on the larger end of midsize that strive to climb into the Biglaw echelons, just as there are others that attempt to brand themselves as tiny service-orientated boutiques. I’ve always thought it’s more about embracing who and what you are than trying to be something else.
Midsize firms can reasonably tout a strong local presence at the same time they are highlighting their superior resources. They can be flexible and dynamic in the way bigger firms with a weeks-long conflicts check process never can be. At the same time, no midsize firms need to rely on the mental bandwidth of a single person. Being midsize doesn’t have to mean a firm is entrapped in a purgatory between one thing and another: it can be the sweet spot that feels like being right at home for its clients.
I guess I haven’t cleared much of the confusion about where Biglaw ends and midsize firms begin. But who cares how some writer on the internet defines it? If you feel like your firm is midsize, declare it loudly, and wear that label with pride.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at [email protected].