Locke Lord Bissell & Liddell’s gross revenue was flat in 2010 compared to 2009, but the Dallas-based firm’s net income rose 8.5 percent in 2010. The firm’s gross revenue came in at $396.4 million in 2010, down less than 1 percent when compared to $399 million in 2009, while net income rose to $138.9 million last year, compared to $128 million in 2009. Jerry Clements, a partner in Austin who chairs the firm, says 2010 was a strong year for Locke Lord. “Our partners were very pleased about that,” she says about the 2010 financial results. “It was a challenging year and one that required close day-to-day attention to management of both expenses and revenues,” she says, noting that the firm focused on cross-selling, business development and marketing, and client service during 2010. Profits per partner averaged $978,000 in 2010, and average revenue per lawyer came in at $727,000. The PPP and RPL are calculated using a full-year average FTE (full-time equivalent) of 545 lawyers and 142 equity partners at Locke Lord in 2010. Clements says strong practice areas in 2010 were energy, REIT (real estate investment trust), white-collar crime defense, internal investigations, health care, appellate, insurance transactional and regulatory, and various sorts of litigation, including commercial, mortgage, intellectual property and pharmaceutical. “The good news about a firm like ours, that’s diversified, when some things are slowed, others are busy,” she says. “We saw a nice resurgence in the real estate practices, and that was good news because there’s more activity in real estate markets these days. Clients are beginning to make sales and do acquisitions of commercial properties,” she says. No practice area took a big hit during 2010, she says. “We really didn’t have anything that was causing us a great deal of consternation compared to 2009,” Clements says.
See ” Turning the Corner: The Worst Appears to Be Over for Texas Firms“
