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Tips and Guide to Top 100 Law Firms:

About this book

The best and only annually updated career guide to the best law firms in the country. The guide is based on surveys of more than 15,000 associates at over 125 top law firms. It includes profiles of more than 150 of the nations' top law firms compiled for jobseekers, as well as exclusive Vault rankings of the Top 100 Law firms, the Best 20 to Work For, the Best 20 Law Firms for Diversity, and regional, practice area, and quality of life rankings.

Read an excerpt from the Vault Guide to the Top 100 Law Firms

Greed is good again

No need to brace yourself -- yet -- for the reappearance of the hostile-takeover sharpies of the 1980s or even the foosball-and-flip-flop gazillionaires of the late-'90s tech boom, but recently law firms have been gleefully watching their profits climb of late to levels not seen in years. Plumped up by healthy litigation practices, Sarbanes-Oxley work and an upswing in corporate and financial business -- including big mergers and bankruptcies -- law firm revenue grew 9.6 percent in 2004, according to a survey by consulting firm Hildebrandt International. The revenue increase translated into a 10.1 percent rise in profits per partner at the firms surveyed -- oops, make that profits per equity partner, and remember that the pollsters couldn't exactly talk to those firms that didn't survive the legal market's resurgence in mergers and consolidations.

There are now over 1 million lawyers in the United States. That's one lawyer for every 293 people, but surveys have indicated that anywhere from 40 to 52 percent of them are unhappy being lawyers, and those figures are likely only to worsen as mergers, dissolutions, poaching and outsourcing continue to erode employee loyalty. Sound like corporate America? BigLaw is big business now, baby, and it's only behind the curve not immune when it comes to such ills. But here's a development to cheer even the weariest associate's hardened heart: the billable hour may be losing its sway. Slowly but surely clients fed up with inefficiency and unpredictable legal bills are prodding law firms for alternative billing options. Don't go penning the billable hour's epitaph just yet (although "Here lies my dear departed personal life" would be apt), but the handwriting is on the wall.

Many of the big cases that filled law firm coffers over the last year aren't exactly new to the headlines: Enron (represented in its bankruptcy by Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP), WorldCom (ditto), Adelphia (Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP), Parmalat (Weil and Quinn Emanuel, Urquhart Oliver & Hedges LLP). Fortune has not been kind to disgraced CEOs, however: Adelphia's John and Timothy Rigas got 15 and 20 years, respectively, for committing securities fraud, Dennis Kozlowski was finally convicted of stealing from Tyco and Bernard Ebbers was sentenced in July 2005 to 25 years(!) for his role in the $11 billion accounting fraud at WorldCom.

Two superstars of the legal profession passed away in the spring of 2005, departing for the great courtroom in the sky. As different in style as chalk and cheese, Johnnie Cochran and Lloyd Cutler were nevertheless both bona fide legal celebrities, the flashy Cochran gaining fame for his defenses of O.J. Simpson and Michael Jackson, and the patrician Cutler wielding his clout behind the scenes as a Washington powerbroker, including serving as advisor to six presidents.

M&A spells C-A-S-H

Big mergers -- and not just their own -- have been cash cows for law firms as high stock prices, swollen balance sheets and greater comfort with Sarbanes-Oxley compliance have fueled a wave of corporate M&A activity. In the telecom sector, for instance, SBC is buying AT&T for $16 billion, Verizon is shelling out $8.5 billion for MCI and Sprint is set to vote in July on a $36 billion merger with Nextel. Elsewhere, Cadwalader Wickersham & Taft LLP is advising Proctor & Gamble on its planned $57 billion acquisition of Gillette, represented by Davis Polk & Wardwell, while Federated Department Stores is ponying up $11 billion for Mays. And those law firms involved in the planned $1.5 billion US Airways-America West merger (Arnold & Porter LLP for US Airways; Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP and Cooley Godward LLP for America West) get to deal with both bankruptcy and M&A -- double jackpot! Rumor has it that Airbus may help fund the merger in return for aircraft orders. Airbus archrival Boeing, meanwhile, hired Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP to dig up dirt on the European aircraft manufacturer; Wilmer attorneys unearthed documents showing that the German government planned to use U.S. Marshall Plan funds to help Airbus. Amazingly, Marshall Plan money is still around -- since Germany has charged interest on loans made from the funds -- thus paving the way for a request for World Trade.

Law firms are also expanding beyond national boundaries, opening 27 foreign offices in 2004. Ten of those were in China, where some 36 of the 250 biggest U.S. firms now have a presence. With China's financial sector set to open fully to foreign entry by 2006 (a condition of its joining the WTO) and banking reforms paving the way for the advent of securitization there, financial services law firms like Cadwalader -- which is gearing up to open a Chinese outpost -- are especially keen on getting in on the ground floor of one of those shiny new Shanghai skyscrapers. Taiwan, meanwhile, is a hot destination for IP powerhouses such as Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP and Shaw Pittman LLP, both of which have handled high-profile patent infringement suits against Taiwanese high-tech manufacturers. In an article in The Recorder, Orrick partner William Anthony Jr. called Silicon Valley, Taiwan and Shanghai "the new golden triangle" for IP tech groups.

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Pages: 756
Publication Date: July 2005

Vault is the ONLY career information source with our own staff of more than a dozen industry-focused editors and researchers. Our staff stays on top of the latest developments in their industries through research of all the vital industry trade publications and research tools, as well as our own network of insider contacts, surveys, ensuring that our readers have the best and most updated information possible.

Vault guides have been published since 1997 and are the premier source of insider information on careers. Vault surveys and interviews thousands of employees each year to give readers the inside scoop on industries and specific employers to help them get the jobs they want.