My friends at The American Lawyer went live earlier this week with their full Am Law 200 package replete with all the juicy numbers. I’m sure you’ll want to spend some time perusing the charts ranking firms by gross revenues, PEP, RPL and all the other three-letter acronyms that do an even better job of assessing Big Law’s financial performance in 2023. But let me point you this morning to two features by a couple of my colleagues focusing on what was going on in the Second Hundred firms.

First up is a piece of analysis by Patrick Smith who points out that after the Second Hundred firms outpaced Am Law 100 firms in most financial metrics in 2022, the normal pattern of the Am Law 100 outpacing the Second Hundred returned in 2023. The industry watchers that Patrick spoke with posited that the slower profit growth in the Second Hundred was linked to the investment mode that many firms in that cohort now find themselves in. The Second Hundred had a higher rate of total lawyer headcount growth (5.4% versus 1.8% in the Am Law 100), equity partner growth (0.8% versus a slight dip in the Am Law 100) and growth in the nonequity partner tier (7.3% versus 5.3% for the Am Law 100).