AM Law 100 - Ten Year Trends

For 2008 AM Law 100, The American Lawyer looked back at 1998 to evaluate the trends. Over the past ten years:

• 12 firms died or disappeared into mergers.
• 20 improved their RPL rank by double digits
• 15 dropped by double digits
• 7 moved from the bottom half of the list to the top;
• 5 dropped from the top half to the bottom.
• 3 firms not on the 1998 list placed in the top 30 (Quinn Emanuel; Finnegan Henderson; and Fish & Richardson)
• Bigest winners: Dechert (up 35 places), Akin Gump (up 34), and DLA Piper (up 31).
• Biggest losers: Chadbourne (down 44), and Dewey Ballantine, (down 20) King & Spalding (down 20) and White & Case (down 20).