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Global Projects Boost Cleary's Revenue Figures
The American Lawyer
January 16, 2009
It's not all doom and gloom on Wall Street. Based on Am Law Daily's reporting, it appears that Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton last year saw both revenue and profits per partner rise.
Gross revenue is up roughly 8 percent, to $965 million; profits per partner increased about 12 percent, to $2.4 million. Revenue per lawyer, however, was basically flat, down less than 1 percent.
Cleary has benefited from its global diversification. Nearly half the firm's lawyers are overseas, helping to cushion the blow from the dramatic slowdown in the United States. In France, the firm represented BNP Paribas and Credit Agricole in the French bank recapitalization program. In Germany, it is representing the German Savings Bank Association in connection with a 50 billion euro rescue package for the Hypo Real Estate Group. (For more on the firm's global diversification, see "this article from the Winter 2009 issue of Focus Europe.)
Closer to home, Cleary advised the SEC and Federal Reserve Bank of New York during the collapse of Lehman Brothers. It then advised Barclays in its acquisition of Lehman Brothers' North American investment banking and capital markets businesses.
As reported this week in The Am Law Daily, Cleary recently landed two major bankruptcy projects: Nortel Networks and Apex Silver Mines Limited.
This report is part of The Am Law Daily's ongoing Web coverage of The Am Law 100's 2008 financials, bringing you our own reports and those from our sibling publications at Incisive Media. Results are preliminary. In keeping with past practices, we do not reveal which firms cooperate in providing financial information and which do not. For more information, see The Am Law 100: A Work in Progress, a chart tracking the numbers.
Final rankings and full results for The Am Law 100 will be published in The American Lawyer's May issue and on AmericanLawyer.com. The Am Law Second Hundred will be published in the June issue. The final published results of last year's Am Law 100 ranking can be seen here.
This article first appeared on The Am Law Daily blog on AmericanLawyer.com.
