It’s a good thing Legal Week likes a challenge. That is certainly one reason we decided to produce our ground-breaking financial ranking of America’s largest law firms nearly two months earlier than last year.
But it was also a reflection of the support of our US readers after the successful debut of the table last May. Not that there’s much mystery behind US firms’ willingness to help. As our results make clear, US firms posted another year of surging growth, with partner profits up an average of 10.2%. Underpinning that performance was the recovering US economy and the stream of major deals announced in the fourth quarter of 2003. This has reasserted the traditional balance between transactional and contentious work, as the flood of bankruptcy and securities litigation starts to ebb.
