Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz continues to lead our value per lawyer rankings. The firm has held the top spot since the metric’s inception nine years ago. Value per lawyer ranks firms by how efficiently they generate profits. A firm’s value per lawyer is its compensation–all partners divided by its lawyer count.

The metric is intended to calculate how much, on average, each of a firm’s lawyers contributes to total partner compensation. We express it two ways: as a dollar amount and as the number of lawyers needed to generate $10 million in partner compensation. At Wachtell, for instance, each lawyer contributes an average of $1.6 million to partner compensation, and it takes an average of six lawyers to generate $10 million. For more details, ­see “A Guide to Our Methodology


* Vereins differ structurally from other Am Law 100 firms, especially in regard to profit sharing.
1 Includes lawyers from a Tokyo joint venture who were not included in 2011.
2 Fulbright & Jaworski will join with Norton Rose in June of 2013 to form the Norton Rose Fulbright verein.
3 Fiscal year ends on March 31. Results are projected in order to meet The Am Law 100's publication deadline.
4 Baker & Daniels joined with Faegre & Benson to form Faegre Baker Daniels in January 2012, so there is no year-over-year comparison.
5 SNR Denton joined with Fraser Milner Casgrain and Salans in March 2013, creating the Dentons verein. Results are for the legacy operation only.

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