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).

AM Law 100 - Summary

Some interesting items in the AM Law 100 2008 report:

The recent run of growth and profitability among the AM Law 100 firms has been significant. Since 2003, average revenue per lawyer (RPL) has increased by $205,000. Profit growth was even more impressive. Since 2003, the average profit per partner (PPP) has increased from $860,000 to $1.3 million.

Why the increase? The American Lawyer study reached the follwoing conclusions:

• surging demand for high-end legal services
• unrelenting annual rate hikes.
• benefits of hard work
  
• dramatic slowdown in the naming of new equity partners

The Am Law 100 report also noted:

• Total revenues for this group was $64.5 billion
• Nineteen firms had profits per partner of $2 million or more (Wachtell, Lipton led with a PPP of $4.9 million)
• Average RPL of New York firms was $1.1 million, average RPL for firms born elsewhere was $780,000.
• Head count grew by 6.8 percent to 77,816 lawyers.
• The fastest-growing category of attorneys was nonequity partners, at 35 percent of all partners.