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To find out which law firms represent America's largest corporations, we do the research. We went through public records to find information on the Fortune 100 for five different practice areas: corporate transactions, commercial law and contracts litigation, labor and employment litigation, torts/negligence litigation and intellectual property.

To find the most widely used firms for litigation in each of these areas, we turned to Thomson Reuters' Litigation Monitor database, which compiles information about lawyers, law firms, roles, representation and parties from Westlaw documents. Cases and opinions include Federal Circuit court dockets filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals; federal district court dockets on active and inactive civil and criminal cases; and federal case law decisions from the U.S. Supreme Court, courts of appeals, former circuit courts, district courts, bankruptcy courts, the former Court of Claims, Court of Federal Claims, Tax Court, related federal courts and military courts. At the time of our research, the database also contained information on 27 state dockets, although law firms are identified in only 15 of those states. Of those, nine did not cover all the counties in the state.

We used Thomson Reuters' IP Monitor to find out which firms represented the Fortune 100 for patent prosecution. IP Monitor utilizes documents filed with the Patent and Trademark Office. For corporate transactions, we turned to Thomson Reuters' Deal Monitor, which contains legal representation data for registrations, mergers and acquisitions. Thomson West compiles information about securities transactions, issuers, underwriters, lawyers and law firms, and their respective roles. For our litigation and corporate transactions research, we looked at data for 2007. For patent prosecution, we counted all patent applications and granted patents from January 2006 to December 2007.

We listed the top ten firms with two or more mentions in litigation and the top ten firms with one or more mention for corporate transactions and patent prosecution. "N/A" was used if no data was available. Law firm names are shortened for space.

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