Bracewell & Giuliani’s gross revenue improved 1.3 percent in 2010, compared to 2009, while the Houston-based firm’s net income was flat. However, the firm’s profits per partner surpassed the $1 million mark for the first time. Bracewell posted gross revenue of $280.6 million in 2010, which was slightly more than the $277.1 million the firm brought in during 2009. Net income was $92.7 million last year, down by .4 percent compared to $93.1 million in 2009. “We were pleased,” Mark Evans, the firm’s Houston-based managing partner, says of the firm’s financial results in 2010. “The real drivers for us were kind of a combination of our . . . practice diversification, but also the energy lending/energy finance area was very, very strong,” he says. Evans says the firm’s litigators were busy, particularly the intellectual property litigation team, and the firm’s transactional lawyers worked on a couple of large transactions in 2010, including representation of Apache Corp. in its acquisition of about $7 billion of BP assets in the Permian Basin of West Texas and New Mexico, Egypt’s Western Desert and Canada. Evans says the firm also worked hard on internal cost controls during 2010, a process that began in 2009. Average profits per partner were $1,019,000 in 2010, and revenue per lawyer was $638,000. PPP and RPL are calculated using a full-year average FTE (full-time equivalent) of 440 lawyers and 91 equity partners. In June 2010, Bracewell moved into the Pacific Northwest market with an office in Seattle.
See “Turning the Corner: The Worst Appears to Be Over for Texas Firms“
