Our value per lawyer metric demonstrates how much, on average, each of a firm’s lawyers contributes to total partner compensation. On average, value per lawyer for the Am Law 100 increased 4 percent, up from 2.4 percent in 2016.
Looking to buy the report or leverage the Am Law 100 data with powerful data visualizations and expert analysis? Access Premium Content
A firm’s VPL is its compensation–all partners divided by its lawyer count. We express it two ways: as a dollar amount and as the number of lawyers needed to generate $10 million in partner compensation. Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz has led this ranking since the metric’s inception in 2005. At that firm, each lawyer contributed an average of $1.9 million in 2017, and it took an average of 5.3 lawyers to generate $10 million. For more on how we calculate these figures, see our methodology.
