Pirical Data Insights

Q2 2026 | Which AM Law Firms Made the Most Lateral Partner Hires?

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 08:19:15 GMT

The second quarter of 2026 has wrapped up, so which firms started the year off with the most lateral Partner hires? We’ve taken a look, using publicly-available data tracked by Pirical Legal Professionals .

Ranked: Which Firms Made the Most Lateral Partner Hires in Q2 2026

Global, AM Law 200, Top 50 firms, April 1st 2026 - June 30th 2026

New York and DC Remain the Hottest Cities, But Texas Is Catching Up

The highest number of lateral Partner hires occurred in New York City ( 152 ) and Washington, DC ( 88 ) – together accounting for nearly a third of all Q2 moves.

London took third spot with 64 lateral moves, followed by Chicago with 47 . Dallas ( 37 ) and Houston ( 34 ) both posted strong quarters – the Texas legal market keeps growing even as the coastal hubs dominate headlines.

Litigation and Corporate Continue to Drive the Market

286 of the Partners hired by AM Law 200 firms in Q2 of 2026 have Litigation as their primary focus, more than the next two practice areas combined.

Corporate took second spot with 172 moves, followed by Real Estate with 83 – narrowly ahead of Banking & Finance on 81 .

Hires Sourced From Other AM Law 200 Firms Jumped to 75%

75% of the hires made in the second quarter of 2026 were sourced from within the AM Law 200 – up from 60% in Q1, suggesting firms leaned even harder on established BigLaw talent this quarter.

Kirkland & Ellis lost the most Partners ( 43 ), followed by K&L Gates ( 26 ) and McDermott Will & Schulte ( 24 ).

Of the remaining moves sourced from outside the AM Law 200, a notable share came from Taylor Duma, which closed its doors this quarter.

Note on methodology

Source: Publicly-available data tracked by Pirical Legal Professionals

Location: Global

Timeframe: April 1st 2026 - June 30th 2026

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WachTELLING: The Partner Losses Run Deeper Than A Single Day Exodus

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 09:09:00 GMT

3 minute read • Updated 30 July 2026

Gibson Dunn has hired six litigation partners from Wachtell Lipton . The group is led by William Savitt, Wachtell's litigation co-chair and a member of its executive committee.

Wachtell has been losing partners to its rivals over the last few years, but it has not lost this many at once from a single practice. Using Pirical data, we looked at what this team exit means for the firm, drawing on headcount changes and lateral moves since 2021.

Wachtell’s Partner Headcount Has Fallen by 7.7% in One Day

The firm's partner numbers were already falling before this move. Between June 2021 and June 2026, they dropped -13% , from 90 to 78. The Gibson Dunn exits take Wachtell's total partner headcount down to 72, a further -7.7% drop in a single day.

Wachtell’s M&A Practice Has Seen The Most Partner Departures, Before This Latest Exit

The Gibson Dunn exits are notable because they hit litigation, a practice whose headcount had stayed steady for years, down just -4% in five years. Prior to this wave, most exits came from Corporate/M&A. The team move alone takes litigation from 23 to 17, a 26% drop in a single day.

Wachtell Partner Departures Have Been Rising Year on Year

2026 has already been the busiest year for partner exits, with 6 departures. Including the Gibson Dunn exits, the total has risen to 12.

Gibson Dunn Has Overtaken Latham & Watkins as the Top Destination for Wachtell Partners

Over the last five years, Latham & Watkins has taken 5 Wachtell partners. With this six-partner team move, Gibson Dunn is now the top destination. The rest are spread across other top Am Law firms and tech companies.

Note on methodology

Source: Publicly-available data tracked by Pirical Legal Professionals

Location: United States

Timeframe: 2021 - July 2026

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The Deepest CLO Benches In The Am Law 200

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 14:53:35 GMT

4 minute read • Updated 29 July 2026

The collateralized loan obligation market has rarely been busier, and that keeps a particular kind of lawyer in steady demand. Private credit firms have leaned on CLOs as a funding engine, and the pace shows it. As Bloomberg reported in April 2026, private credit firms are issuing CLOs at a near-record pace, with issuance reaching $9.5 billion early in the year — just shy of 2024’s record first quarter. CLOs sell long-term bonds that can’t be pulled at short notice, so they ensure managers have cash to keep lending even if funding dwindles elsewhere. Behind every one of those deals sits a structured-finance team, and some firms field a lot more of them than others.

“Private credit firms are issuing CLOs at a near-record pace — $9.5 billion so far this year.”

Bloomberg, April 2026

So which firms carry the deepest CLO benches?

Pirical pulled the partner-level data across the Am Law 200, counting partners known to be active in CLO work. The picture isn't what you'd guess from the usual league tables. Dechert tops it with 25 CLO partners, well clear of the field. Sidley Austin follows at 21, then Mayer Brown at 17. After that comes a tight cluster — Alston & Bird at 14, Paul Hastings at 13, and a five-way logjam at 12 that mixes the expected (Kirkland & Ellis, Cadwalader) with specialists you might not have flagged (Chapman and Cutler, Polsinelli, McDermott Will & Schulte). That mix is the real story. Raw prestige doesn't predict CLO depth. Structured-finance specialism does, and several mid-market and securitization-focused shops out-bench the white-shoe giants here.

Am Law 200 Firms by CLO Partner Count

The Work That Stood Out

Numbers tell you who's deep, not who's doing the interesting stuff. So here's a tour weighted toward novelty, scale, and legal complexity rather than deal count.

Start with the structural firsts, most running through Michael Sweeney at Sidley Austin. He handled Greystone's first-ever 100%-healthcare-backed CRE CLO, collateralized entirely by bridge loans on healthcare and senior-living properties. He did Invesco Commercial Real Estate Finance Trust's inaugural CRE CLO, the largest in the U.S. in three years. And for Starwood Property Trust he built CLOs backed entirely by infrastructure loans plus the first-ever 100%-fixed-rate-loan CRE CLO. Three firsts, one practice.

Scale and engineering show up elsewhere. At White & Case, Elizabeth Devine launched Antares Capital's $2.1bn CLO platform, the largest post-crisis CLO. Howard Goldwasser at O'Melveny worked on the first CLO 2.0 transactions after 2008, some using collateral as exotic as airline-ticket receivables — work that helped rebuild the market from the rubble of the crisis.

Then the contentious end, rare in this deal-driven world. William Hao at Alston & Bird served as indenture trustee in the Zohar CLO Chapter 11 saga, one of the most litigated distressed-CLO messes around. Patrick Hayden, also at Alston & Bird, handled a $1.4bn CDO interpleader and a $375m synthetic CDO liquidation as trustee.

A few deals fit no neat box, and those are often the most telling. Jonathan Cho at A&O Shearman pairs securitization and CLO structuring opinions with digital-asset and crypto-custody insolvency work — bankruptcy-remoteness analysis colliding with crypto, which almost nobody was doing a few years ago. On the M&A side, the niche is buying and selling the managers themselves: Shawn Kodes at Paul Hastings advised Atalaya Capital on its acquisition of CLO manager Teles Asset Management. And Richard Shamos at Akin worked a $250m seed investment into a CLO equity manager through a bespoke fund structure — coming at CLOs from the capital-formation side rather than the deal side.

Where CLO Partners Come From, And What They Do

Step back from the deals and the people behind them start to rhyme. Look at where they trained and what they practice, and a clear profile emerges.

The pipeline runs through a handful of New York–anchored schools. NYU leads by a wide margin with 38 CLO partners, then Columbia at 30 and Fordham at 25 — three schools that have long fed Manhattan’s structured-finance desks. Georgetown, Harvard, Michigan, and George Washington fill out the rest, but the top three do most of the work.

On practice area, there’s no real contest. Capital Markets claims 112 partners, comfortably ahead of Banking & Finance at 71 and Corporate at 62. Real Estate’s 56 reflects how much CRE CLO activity drives this market, and the 49 in Litigation is a quiet reminder that distressed and defaulted deals eventually need someone to fight about them.

The Takeaway

The pattern is unmistakable: CLO bench strength belongs to the structured-finance specialists, the professional pipeline is anchored in a handful of New York schools, and the practice scope spans from standard issuance to the frontier of crypto-related insolvency analysis.

For those hiring, pitching, or tracking the market’s trajectory, this is the current landscape. The deepest teams aren’t always found where the traditional league tables suggest, and it’s in that divergence where the real opportunity is found.

Note on methodology

Source: Publicly available data tracked by Pirical

Timeframe: Partner-level data as of July 2026.

Scope: Partners across the Am Law 200 publicly identifiable as active in CLO work, counted at firm level. Counts capture partners visible enough in public sources to be tagged to CLO matters.

Caveat: Partner counts reflect publicly visible involvement in CLO work, not every lawyer touching a deal or confidential mandates that never surface. Treat the figures as the visible contour of the market rather than a census, and they may be slightly incomplete due to limited public information.

Want to run a similar analysis or firm ranking?

Book a 30-minute Pirical demo to search for market insights on specific regions, competitor firms, client data, peer groups, or practice areas more relevant to you

Pirical Legal Professionals seamlessly aggregates data from a wide range of public sources: law firm websites, bar associations, legal news, deals publications, legal rankings, LinkedIn and more. Our coverage is global, in-depth and constantly refreshed.

Which AM Law 100 Firms Have The Best Lateral Litigation Partner Retention?

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 13:32:18 GMT

3 minute read • Updated 28 July 2026

We recently looked at lateral Partner retention across the AM Law 100 . But how does retention vary by practice group?

This is the first in a new series looking at three-year lateral Partner retention in the AM Law 100 cut by practice. AM Law 100 firms made over 2,100 lateral Litigation Partner hires between 2020 and 2022, making it the largest practice by hire volume.

Lateral partner hires are one of the most significant investments a law firm can make, and retention is a key indication of whether the hire has worked. Based on input from a number of firms, a key window of initial success for a lateral Partner hire are the first 3 years.

Using publicly-available data tracked by Pirical , we've analyzed how many of the lateral Litigation Partner hires made by AM Law 100 firms between 2020 and 2022 remained at the firm within 3 years of joining.

Note on methodology

Each firm's retention rate is based on the cohort of lateral Litigation Partner hires made between Jan 2020 - Dec 2022, and how many of those hires subsequently left the firm within the first 3 years of joining.

Excludes firms that made fewer than 5 lateral Litigation Partner hires and moves as a result of mergers. Data is derived from tracked lateral Partner moves, numbers may be slightly incomplete due to limited public information. Exits include Litigation Partners that left but didn't lateral to another firm, eg. retired.

Ranked: Which AM Law 100 Firms Have the Highest Lateral Litigation Partner Retention Rates?

Lateral Litigation Partner hires and how many then left the firm within the first 3 years

Global, AM Law 100, Firms with >5 lateral Litigation Partner hires,

Hires made between Jan 2020 - Dec 2022

Firms With Above-Average Lateral Litigation Partner Retention Source Most Talent From Boies Schiller and AM Law Top 50 Firms

Among the firms with above-average retention (above 84% within the first 3 years), Boies Schiller Flexner was the most common source of the hire, accounting for 3.08% of moves. As a litigation focused firm, Boies stands out as a distinct pipeline for the best-retaining firms.

Reed Smith ( 1.98% ) was the next most common source, followed by the US Department of Justice ( 1.76% ). AM Law top 50 firms including Kirkland & Ellis ( 1.54% ), King & Spalding ( 1.32% ), Winston & Strawn ( 1.10% ), and Gibson Dunn ( 1.10% ) round out the top sources, alongside Stoel Rives ( 1.21% ).

Bankruptcy Lateral Partner Retention Sits Well Above the 81% Litigation Average

Bankruptcy & Restructuring Litigation has the strongest lateral Partner retention within the first 3 years at 92% , well above the 81% litigation average. Securities Litigation ( 86% ) and Antitrust Litigation ( 84% ) are the next highest.

Banking Litigation is the practice with the lowest retention at 69% , meaning nearly one in three lateral Banking Litigation Partners left within 3 years. IP Litigation ( 77% ) and Insurance Litigation ( 78% ) also show higher than average rates of early exits.

Los Angeles Has the Lowest Lateral Litigation Partner Retention Among Major Legal Hubs

Houston ( 87% ), London ( 86% ), and Salt Lake City ( 85% ) show the strongest lateral Litigation Partner retention rates.

In contrast, Los Angeles ( 75% ), Dallas ( 75% ), and San Francisco ( 78% ) have the lowest retention. Texas splits sharply: Houston tops the cities on retention, while Dallas is the second-lowest, suggesting that the two Texas markets pull lateral Litigation Partners in very different directions.

Note on methodology

Source: Publicly-available data tracked by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP).

Excludes: Firms with fewer than 5 lateral Partner hires and moves as a result of direct mergers.

Timeframe: Jan 2020 - Dec 2025.

Each firm's retention rate is based on the cohort of lateral Partner hires made between 2020 - 2022, and how many of those lateral hires subsequently left the firm within the first 3 years of joining.

Data is derived from tracked lateral Partner moves, numbers may be slightly incomplete due to limited public information. Exits include Partners that left but didn't lateral to another firm, eg. retired.

Analysis powered by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Pirical Legal Professionals is the largest attorney database built with the most comprehensive data on the market. Specifically designed for legal recruitment and legal market research.

Pirical seamlessly aggregates data from a wide range of public sources, tracking over 850,000 attorney profiles worldwide. Our data helps law firms source lateral talent quicker, identify candidates with key client relationships, map competitor firm strategies & team structures, and much more.

How Hodgson Russ Builds Attorney Pipelines and Plans Hiring Strategy With Pirical

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 10:34:34 GMT

We spoke to Amanda Townley, Director of Attorney Recruitment and Integration at Hodgson Russ, about how her team uses Pirical to run targeted candidate searches, build practice area pipelines, and take a more strategic approach to lateral hiring.

Hodgson Russ is an AM Law 200 firm with over 230 attorneys across offices stretching from Toronto to Palm Beach. The firm's key practice areas include corporate and securities law, business litigation, intellectual property, and a notable state and local tax practice.

3 Ways Pirical Helps Hodgson Russ

From reactive to proactive hiring

Amanda joined with a mandate to move the firm away from backfilling departures and toward building practice area pipelines ahead of need.

Targeted candidate searches at every stage

The team uses Pirical's filters to build precise shortlists for specialized and time-sensitive searches.

Competitive attrition benchmarking

Amanda can compare Hodgson Russ's attrition rates against key competitors, data that can be used as a selling point when speaking to potential hires.

The Challenge

Replacing a Manual Process and Shifting to Proactive Recruiting

When Amanda joined Hodgson Russ from Ropes & Gray, the firm's approach to lateral hiring was largely reactive. Positions were backfilled after attorneys left and the firm hired for the immediate need, rather than the longer-term pipeline. Finding candidates also meant combing through individual law firm websites one by one.

"Technology here is perhaps five years behind what it is in big law," Amanda said. "So it's about taking the knowledge and foundation that I have, bringing it here and helping the firm get with the times at a much quicker pace."

The firm's structure added another layer of complexity. Hodgson Russ is partner-heavy, with a smaller associate cohort. Amanda's mandate was to fill practice area pipeline gaps, identify where the firm's service offerings had holes, and build an associate bench to support partners going out and generating new business. A more systematic approach to candidate sourcing was essential.

"It has been fantastic working with Yoanna and the Pirical team!

You have stepped in whenever I needed help. You understand the tool so well and all the different ways to manipulate it, so when I'm doing my filters I copy what you've shown me. It's been smooth and very seamless."

Amanda Townley

Director of Attorney Recruitment and Integration, Hodgson Russ

The Solution

Building Shortlists for Targeted and Strategic Searches

Once a hiring need is identified, Amanda partners with the relevant practice group leader to define the role.

Using Pirical, Amanda will run searches filtered by location, job title, firm size, and revenue band, often using AM Law or NLJ rankings to bracket the results. Candidate bios then get reviewed, looking at factors like career history, how recently someone moved, and whether their background is a close enough fit. Selected profiles are added to a shortlist before being exported and circulated to partners for prioritization. The partners rank the candidates and outreach begins.

Not every candidate comes from a Pirical search. Roles are also posted externally, through the firm's website, LinkedIn, and local bar associations, and applications come in directly. For partner-level roles, Amanda uses Pirical to do a second pass on these applicants before deciding who moves forward.

Using Competitor Attrition Data to Sharpen the Pitch

Pirical's Market Intelligence data has revealved helpful use cases beyond direct sourcing.

Hodgson Russ competes with a defined set of local firms for lateral talent. Seeing those firms' attrition rates in Pirical gives Amanda a concrete talking point when candidates are weighing their options.

The data also supports forward planning. Amanda is working toward modeling expected departures and retirements by practice area, so that pipeline gaps can be identified and addressed before positions officially open.

"To look at that data and be able to say, their attrition rate is a hell of a lot larger than ours , that's a fantastic selling point. It shows that we're doing something right!"

Amanda Townley

Director of Attorney Recruitment and Integration, Hodgson Russ

The Result

A More Strategic Recruiting Operation, With Less Manual Work

In just over a year, Amanda has moved Hodgson Russ's recruiting operation from largely reactive to pipeline-first. The firm now runs targeted searches before positions open, uses market data to benchmark against competitors and support office expansion plans.

The efficiency gain is real. Searches that previously required manual website-by-website research are now run in Pirical in a fraction of the time. "It's definitely quicker," Amanda said. "Whenever I have a new search come up, that's when I'm using Pirical the most."

Join AM Law 200 firms already directly sourcing lateral hires

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GLP-1 and the Law: Mapping the Legal Market Behind Ozempic and Mounjaro

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 10:50:34 GMT

3 minute read • Updated 8 July 2026

A Pirical client-intelligence analysis of the law firms behind the legal work for GLP-1's market leaders.

Developed to treat type 2 diabetes and now prescribed widely for weight loss, GLP-1 drugs have become one of the most valuable franchises in pharmaceuticals, and the market is dominated by two companies: Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly .

Lilly's flagship products, Mounjaro and Zepbound, alone brought in more than $36 billion in 2025 , and its chief executive has estimated that 20 to 25 million patients are now taking the two companies' medicines. Novo saw similar figures to Lilly, with its GLP-1-based medicines reaching 35.6 billion in revenue in 2025 .

Both franchises bill a significant amount of legal work given their size, so which law firms are leading the numbers?

Using publicly available data tracked by Pirical Legal Professionals , we mapped publicly disclosed matters linking law firm Partners to the two companies. Three kinds of work stand out: the deals, the patents, and the growing body of product liability work.

Kirkland & Ellis Leads a Field of 113 Firms on Total Public Matters For Novo and Lilly

Eli Lilly accounts for the larger share, 395 matters to Novo Nordisk's 129. One firm sits well clear of the rest.

Global, Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly public matters, Partners, top 20 firms, data as of June 2026

Kirkland & Ellis leads on 92 matters and is the only firm that spans every front, from M&A through patent litigation to product liability defense. Other firms are more specialized, which is what the three key areas below make clear.

Deals Make Up a Third of Novo and Lilly Matters

The largest of the three areas is corporate and finance work: the collaborations, licensing deals, and capital markets activity that build and fund the franchises.

Kirkland & Ellis leads the way, having advised Eli Lilly across numerous deal matters, including their acquisition of Versanis Bio to investigate Bimagrumab’s potential for use alongside glp-1 drugs in retaining muscle .

Morgan Lewis, in third place, notably advised Eli Lilly on its In-license agreement with Chugai for Orforglipron in 2018, which just recently hit US markets as a weight loss glp-1 pill - the new alternative for injections.

Global, Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly public matters in corporate/finance, Partners, top 5 firms, data as of June 2026

Finnegan Dominates the Patent Front

Patent work accounts for 101 matters, and it is the most concentrated area on the board.

Finnegan handles 33 of those 101 matters, almost all of them patent litigation for Eli Lilly. No other firm comes close. It is the clearest case of a specialist bench built around protecting one client's products.

Global, Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly public matters in patent IP/patent litigation, Partners, top 5 firms, data as of June 2026

Patents are not the only intellectual property work these companies generate. A further 94 matters sit in trademark and general intellectual property work.

Ropes & Gray and Paul Weiss lead the advisory side with 10 each, and it is also where Pattishall sits: eight of its nine matters are trademark disputes, including Novo Nordisk's oppositions against copycat brands, which is what lifts the boutique into the overall top 10.

Covington Leads the Manufacturers' Product Liability Defense

The third part of the story is the product liability and personal injury defense. Patients allege that the manufacturers' drugs, including Novo Nordisk's Ozempic, Wegovy, and Rybelsus and Eli Lilly's Mounjaro and Trulicity, cause gastrointestinal injuries such as gastroparesis, and that the risks were not adequately disclosed.

The gastrointestinal claims were consolidated into a federal multidistrict litigation (MDL) in Pennsylvania in 2024 , with a separate proceeding covering claims of vision loss. To run the gastrointestinal cases, the court appointed a nine-firm plaintiffs' leadership committee including DiCello Levitt, Motley Rice, and Morgan & Morgan.

On the defense side, Covington & Burling leads with 5 tracked product liability and personal injury matters, just ahead of DLA Piper and Kirkland & Ellis with 4 each. These counts span the companies' product liability work broadly, not the GLP-1 dockets alone. But with both MDLs still active and the patient population expanding, GLP-1 specific defense matters are likely to grow.

Global, Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly public matters in personal injury/product liability, Partners, top 5 firms, data as of June 2026

Hiring of Partners with GLP-1 Experience Splits Between New Entrants and the Front-Runners

The list splits two ways. McDermott Will & Schulte, Blank Rome, and Buchanan don’t feature in the rankings above, so their hiring is likely about building a bench rather than deepening one.

Kirkland & Ellis and Arnold & Porter are the opposite case: both already rank, and Kirkland, top of the overall table and still the joint-second most active hirer, is extending a lead rather than closing a gap.

The Next Wave is Not in These Numbers Yet

These rankings capture today's market, which Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly still overwhelmingly define. However, A line of challengers is advancing GLP-1 and related obesity candidates, among them Amgen, Roche, Pfizer, Viking Therapeutics, Structure Therapeutics, Boehringer Ingelheim, and Zealand Pharma. Most are still pre-launch, with market entries expected from 2027 onward, and it’s uncertain whether Novo and Lilly will continue to dominate the market in the future.

For now, the legal work stays concentrated on Novo and Lilly. As the challengers reach approval and the deals, patents, and disputes follow, the field of firms will widen.

Note on methodology

Source: Publicly available data tracked by Pirical

Timeframe: Client matter data as of June 2026; lateral hire data covering May 2023 - May 2026.

Scope: Recorded legal matters for Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly across all firms and practice areas, limited to Partners.

Caveat: Matter counts reflect publicly visible involvement, not audited market share or billings, and may be slightly incomplete due to limited public information.

Want to run a similar analysis or firm ranking?

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The Texas Legal Market Leaderboard

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 14:17:35 GMT

3 minute read • Updated 8 July 2026

In our US state leaderboard series, we look at the law firms with largest partner headcount and strongest recent headcount growth in each US state. Here are the firms that have lead the way in the Texas legal market over the last 12 months.

Texas Is One Of The Fastest Growing States

Texas' partner headcount rose +3% over the last 12 months, putting it second only to New York ( +4.2% ) among the major US legal markets. It came in just above Florida ( +3.1% ) and well clear of California, Washington, DC ( +2% ) and Illinois ( +1.6% ).

Ranked: Which Law Firms are Leading Growth in Texas?

United States, Texas, Partners, Firms with >20 Partners, May 2025 - May 2026

Partners with multiple locations have been evenly distributed across each

Corporate Drove Texas Practice Growth As Intellectual Property Declined

Corporate posted the strongest practice growth over the year at +6% , ahead of Insurance ( +5% ) and Tax ( +3% ). Intellectual Property ran against the trend as the only major practice to shrink, falling -5% .

New York Was Texas' Busiest Partner Exchange In Both Directions

Over the past year, no state exchanged more partners with Texas than New York, in either direction. Six partners relocated from New York into Texas, around 29% of all arrivals, and New York was also where departing Texas partners most often headed ( 18% of all exits).

California and Illinois were the next common departure destinations, each pulling 5 partners ( 15% of all exits) while sending only 2 the other way. Overall, more partners left Texas than moved into it.

Energy Dominated The Leading Firms' Client Work, With Kirkland & Ellis Handling The Bulk Of It

Energy was the single largest source of client work for the top 10 firms, ( 24.1% of publicly disclosed matters), ahead of financial services ( 8.6% ) and investment funds ( 7.6% ).

That pattern mirrors the Texas economy. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas ranks energy and mining among the state's dominant industry clusters, alongside financial services and business services.

Kirkland & Ellis was behind a large share of this activity, handling 24% of all public matters among the top 10 Texas firms.

Note on methodology

Source: Publicly-available data tracked by Pirical Legal Professionals

Location: Texas, United States

Timeframe: May 2025 - May 2026

Score weightings:

50% headcount growth
50% current headcount size

Want to run a similar analysis?

Book a 30-minute Pirical demo to search for market insights on specific regions, competitor firms, client data, peer groups, or practice areas more relevant to you

200,000+ In-House Lawyers Are Now Searchable on Pirical

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 14:27:58 GMT

2 minute read • Updated 3 July 2026

The in-house market has always been the hardest part of the legal world to see clearly. Lawyers leave firms for companies, their careers continue out of public view, and the people who decide which firms get hired are often the hardest to find. This update closes that gap.

You can now search for 200,000+ US in-house and government lawyers in Pirical Legal Professionals !

What’s Changed?

Our new data covers government legal teams and in-house lawyers across every Fortune 500 company, companies in every industry, and the fastest-growing unicorn startups.

This feature is built into the Pirical interface you already use. The same filters that work across law firm data now work across the in-house market, so there’s nothing new to learn!

Below are three unique use cases, showcasing how Pirical’s customers can make the most of this huge data boost.

Who's This For?

Business Development Teams: Reach The People Who Choose Outside Counsel

General Counsel and their teams decide which firms get the work. PLP now lets you find the GC at your target clients, review their background the same way you would review a law firm profile, and check for any existing connections to your firm.

The historical law firm data carries through to in-house profiles too, so you can see the practice areas a GC worked in earlier in their career. That gives you a clearer read on what they might be handling now at a target client.

Ahead of a pitch, you can export the relevant in-house data or brief your partners with a clear picture of the legal team they are about to meet, including who covers what and how to reach them.

Client Intelligence Teams: See Relationships As They Move

A new General Counsel means new relationships are in play. Old loyalties reset, panels get reconsidered, and the firms in the running can change. PLP lets you spot newly hired GCs early, including spotting when your own alumni move to a target client, so you can identify the new opportunities this creates.

It also helps you see the threats. If a direct competitor's partner joins one of your key clients as General Counsel, that is something you want to know about quickly.

There’s also an opening that is easy to miss. When a partner moves in-house, their clients do not move with them. You can search for partners who have recently moved in-house, cross-reference their client work against your targets, and identify the relationships that are now at risk at their former firm.

Recruitment Teams: Find In-House Lawyers Open to a Return

Use Pirical's filters to identify lawyers with BigLaw origins who might consider a return to private practice. Because the historical law firm data carries through to each in-house profile, you can see where someone trained and practiced before they moved in-house.

You can also track the connections these lawyers have to your firm, so outreach can start from an existing relationship rather than a cold approach.

Explore For Yourself

Our in-house data is live now, book a demo to explore how you and your team could utilise this data

The Illinois Legal Market Leaderboard

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 11:05:15 GMT

3 minute read • Updated 24 June 2026

Illinois' Partner Headcount Growth Has Lagged Behind Similarly Sized Legal Markets

Illinois' growth lands at the lower end of US legal markets of a similar size, growing +1% in the past year compared to Florida's +3% .

Ranked: Which Law Firms are Leading Growth in Illinois?

United States, Illinois, Partners, Firms with >10 Partners, May 2025 - May 2026

Partners with multiple locations have been evenly distributed across each

Banking & Finance Practices Have Seen The Highest Headcount Growth, While Intellectual Property Decreased

Banking & Finance topped the chart with +3% growth in the last year. This was followed by Corporate ( +2% ) and Insurance ( +2% ) practices.

Texas Is By Far The Most Popular Destination and Source For Partner Moves

17 Partners made the move from Texas to Illinois in the past year, accounting for 27% of all incoming Partners. Likewise, 21% of all Partner departures were Texas-bound ( 12 Partners).

New York was the second most common source ( 7 Partners), and the destination for 3 departing Illinois Partners. Washington DC and Michigan were the second most common destination for leaving Partners ( 5 Partners each).

Investment Funds Has Seen The Most Public Client Matters From the Top 10 Firms

13.8% of publicly disclosed client matters in the top 10 ranking firms were in the investment funds industry, followed by 10.8% in healthcare & life sciences and 10.4% in financial services.

This tracks with the wider Chicago economy. World Business Chicago ide ntifies finance and professional services as core industries in the region, alongside healthcare and life sciences and fi ntech as key growth sectors.

Kirkland & Ellis drove a large proportion of these matters, with 33% of Illinois public matters in the top 10 firms belonging to them.

Note on methodology

Source: Publicly-available data tracked by Pirical Legal Professionals

Location: Illinois, United States

Timeframe: May 2025 - May 2026

Score weightings:

50% headcount growth
50% current headcount size

Want to run a similar analysis?

Book a 30-minute Pirical demo to search for market insights on specific regions, competitor firms, client data, peer groups, or practice areas more relevant to you

The $3 Trillion IPO Wave: Which Law Firms Will Win the Work?

Thu, 11 Jun 2026 23:24:58 GMT

5 minute read • Updated 11 June 2026

The scramble to represent the biggest technology IPOs in history is not coming. It is already here. Within a single 12-month window, SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI, and a long tail of AI, defense, fintech, and design companies are all moving toward public listings worth a combined estimated value above $3 trillion . Pirical has already mapped which firms are winning Big Tech’s AI clients more broadly; the contest to take these companies public is where those relationships pay off. The legal mandates that follow will rank among the most lucrative in BigLaw history. So who is best placed to win?

IPO mandates are earned over years of embedded deal work: the financing rounds, the multi-billion-dollar acquisitions, the strategic transactions that place a partner in the room with the chief financial officer. Using public matter data from Pirical , we can see some of those relationships before they are announced.

This analysis looks at the client-firm relationships behind three companies that have already named their IPO counsel, then applies the same read to the companies expected to list next. It also tracks which firms are making capital markets hires to handle the work these listings will bring.

Litigators Lead on Volume, Dealmakers Win the IPO

Three of the world’s largest tech/AI companies have recently publicly confirmed who is running their IPOs. In each case, the winning firm was not the one with the most matters overall, which is usually a litigation specialist, but the one holding the financing rounds, M&A, and strategic corporate work. That is the signal that predicts issuer's counsel: the firm a company trusts with its most important transactions is the firm it trusts to take it public.

SpaceX → Gibson Dunn

Gibson Dunn is SpaceX's confirmed issuer's counsel . It holds the two largest transactions in our matters dataset, the $1.25 trillion xAI acquisition and the $19 billion EchoStar spectrum deal. A capital markets partner already sat on the xAI matter, the clearest sign the firm was being lined up for the listing.

Anthropic → Wilson Sonsini

Anthropic confirmed Wilson Sonsini as issuer's counsel. Susman Godfrey and Arnold & Porter record more matters, but theirs is copyright litigation. Wilson Sonsini holds the corporate work, headlined by the multi-billion-dollar Amazon Web Services (AWS) deal. The right kind of work won the mandate, not the highest volume.

OpenAI → Cooley + Wachtell Lipton

OpenAI split issuer's counsel between Cooley and Wachtell Lipton: Cooley runs the IPO mechanics, Wachtell the governance and public benefit corporation conversion. Keker, Van Nest leads on matter count, but that work is litigation. The mandate went to the firms holding the corporate and governance work, not the highest volume.

Who Will Win Next? The Five Mandates Still Up for Grabs

The five companies below are all expected to go public, several as soon as 2026 or 2027, with private valuations ranging up to $134 billion. They span data infrastructure (Databricks), payments (Stripe), design software (Canva), defense tech (Anduril), and enterprise AI (Cohere). None has yet named its IPO counsel. For each, the firm ranking by recorded matters points to the likely issuer’s counsel, with financing-side work signaling the underwriters’ counsel role.

Databricks → Fenwick & West

Fenwick & West is the clear predicted issuer's counsel. It records 46 matters, more than every other firm combined, spanning every financing round through the $4 billion Series L and all significant M&A: the strongest issuer-counsel signal in the data.

Stripe → Fenwick & West

Fenwick & West is again the predicted issuer's counsel. It holds 36 of Stripe's matters, the same embedded, full-service pattern it shows at Databricks.

Canva → Latham & Watkins / Allens

Latham & Watkins is the predicted issuer's counsel: its eight matters span M&A, banking, and tax across the US and UK, the global platform an Australian company needs for a Nasdaq listing. Allens, Canva's Australian home counsel, is the natural local co-counsel.

Cohere → Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt

Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt is the predicted issuer's counsel, holding 18 of 20 matters including every tracked financing round. As Canada's leading capital markets firm, it is embedded at every level of Cohere's legal function.

Anduril → Gunderson Dettmer / Cooley

Gunderson Dettmer is the predicted issuer's counsel, holding the full spread of Anduril's pre-IPO groundwork. Cooley is the likely co-counsel: its capital markets credit on the $1.5 billion Series F is a direct IPO-preparation signal, and it is already confirmed on OpenAI.

Which Firms Are Making the Most Capital Market Hires?

An IPO is, at its core, a capital markets transaction, and lateral Partner hiring in the practice has not been steady.

Capital markets lateral moves at AM Law 200 firms globally fell to 99 in 2023, then rebounded +11% in 2024 and a further +25% in 2025, the strongest year in the period. That late surge, concentrated in the run-up to the current listings, is the clearest sign that firms are staffing up for the IPO wave.

Over the past 12 months, Orrick has been the most active with 8 capital markets hires, followed by DLA Piper (7).

Cadwalader (-13) and A&O Shearman (-11) were the most common sources across the market, and both also run a net loss in capital markets partners, a sign that the talent leaving them is going straight to the firms building for the listings ahead.

Capital Markets Lateral Partner Moves, Global, AM Law 200, May 2025 - May 2026

Note on methodology

Source : Publicly available data tracked by Pirical

Timeframe: Client matter data covering Jan 2021 to June 2026; lateral hire data covering May 2025 to May 2026.

Scope: Recorded legal matters for the eight companies analyzed (SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI, Databricks, Stripe, Canva, Cohere, and Anduril) across all firms and practice areas, and global capital markets lateral Partner moves at AM Law 200 firms.

Caveat: Confirmed mandates are based on public reporting cross-referenced against the matter data; predicted mandates are derived from the depth, value, and type of recorded work and have not been announced. Data is derived from tracked client matters, lateral Partner moves, and public reporting; numbers may be slightly incomplete due to limited public information.

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The Defense Never Rests: FIFA's Global Legal Bench

Thu, 11 Jun 2026 11:06:51 GMT

3 minute read • Updated 11 June 2026

A Pirical client-intelligence analysis of the law firms, lawyers and practice areas behind football's most-investigated institution.

When the 2026 FIFA World Cup kicks off on 11 June across the United States, Mexico and Canada, it will be the largest tournament in the sport's history. The tournament will feature 104 matches, 48 teams, and three host nations. It will also be the first World Cup staged, in large part, in the very country whose prosecutors once turned FIFA's leadership into a perp walk.

That irony is not lost on the lawyers.

The Fédération Internationale de Football Association governs the world's most popular sport from Zurich, sets the rules of the game through the International Football Association Board, and commands a commercial empire built on media rights and sponsorship. It is also one of the most litigated and investigated sporting bodies on earth. In the run-up to 2026 alone, FIFA has been subpoenaed by the New York and New Jersey attorneys general over World Cup ticket pricing, hit with a European Commission complaint by fan groups alleging monopoly abuse, targeted by a US class-action investigation over allegedly misleading stadium seat maps, and threatened with litigation over a ban on Iran's pre-revolution flag. In March, Swiss prosecutors finally abandoned their decade-long pursuit of former president Sepp Blatter after a second acquittal, closing one chapter of a corruption saga that began with the 2015 indictments out of Brooklyn.

Behind every one of those fights stands a lawyer. And a new analysis of FIFA's outside counsel, drawn from Pirical's client-intelligence data on publicly disclosed engagements, reveals the architecture of football's legal defense in unusual detail.

37

Law firms

55

Lawyers

58

Public Matters

17

Countries

The picture that emerges is not that of a sports league. It is that of an organization that has spent the better part of a decade managing criminal exposure. It is now lawyering up on home soil.

Why This Matters Now

The most striking finding is what FIFA's lawyers actually do. Sorted by practice area, the single largest category of FIFA's public legal work is Crime, Fraud & Investigations: 12 of the 58 matters, more than intellectual property (8), M&A (6), or general litigation (6). A governing body's choice of counsel is a confession of its anxieties, and FIFA's roster reads like a corporation that has spent years in the government's crosshairs rather than one selling broadcast rights.

The geography reinforces the point. Nearly half of FIFA's disclosed matters, 29 of 58, are based in the United States, concentrated in New York City, the seat of the US Department of Justice (DOJ) prosecution that detonated the 2015 scandal. The United Kingdom and Switzerland follow with six matters each. As the tournament arrives in North America, FIFA's legal center of gravity has already shifted there.

A Small Group of Firms Dominates FIFA's Engagement List

Paul, Weiss towers over the field, logging nearly double the public matters of its nearest competitor and fielding more individual FIFA lawyers than any other firm in the dataset.

Ranked: The Law Firms With More Than One Public FIFA Matter

The tiering tells its own story. Paul, Weiss is FIFA's lawyer of first resort, its seven matters clustering around the high-stakes US fallout from the corruption scandal and the resulting remission fund. Quinn Emanuel, the litigation powerhouse, brings four matters weighted heavily toward DOJ and Swiss bribery investigations. The presence of Onside Law, a boutique sports-law specialist, alongside white-shoe giants like Latham & Watkins and Cleary Gottlieb shows a barbell strategy: elite generalist firepower for the criminal and commercial fights, niche specialists for the sponsorship, licensing, and rights work that is the day-to-day of running a tournament.

Below the multi-matter firms sits a long tail of 28 firms with a single disclosed engagement each, scattered across Doha, Seoul, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Auckland, and beyond: the local counsel that a genuinely global tournament requires.

The Lawyers FIFA Turns to Most are Concentrated in Two Buckets

At the individual level, the pattern holds. White-collar criminal defense and sports-commercial work lawyers dominate the list.

On the investigations side, the dataset is thick with crime-and-fraud specialists, among them lawyers at Quinn Emanuel who represented FIFA across the DOJ and Swiss bribery probes, a Cravath partner tied to the original investigation of corruption in international soccer, and a Simpson Thacher partner connected to the DOJ matter. Several of these lawyers are former prosecutors, the classic profile of an organization buying defense expertise from the same system that pursued it.

On the commercial side, a different cast appears: Onside Law advisers handling sponsorship, licensing, and milestone commercial deals (one having spent a year on secondment with FIFA's own commercial legal team), Latham & Watkins partners working the host-city selection for 2026, and intellectual-property litigators worldwide protecting the World Cup brand against ambush marketing, illegal streaming, and trademark infringement.

The most-used practice areas, in order: Crime, Fraud & Investigations (12 matters), Intellectual Property (8), M&A (6), and Litigation (6). It is, in miniature, a portrait of FIFA's twin realities: a brand to protect and a past to defend.

The 58 Matters Range From the Mundane to the Remarkable

$201m: The largest matter by disclosed value

The sum FIFA recovered from the US Department of Justice, remission for losses the organization suffered as a victim of the corruption schemes its own officials ran. The figure appears three times in the data, tied to Paul, Weiss lawyers who handled the DOJ compensation and the establishment of the resulting World Football Remission Fund. It is the rare matter where FIFA sits on the plaintiff's side of its own scandal.

The most recent work points squarely at the tournament now arriving: host-city selection for the 2026 World Cup (Latham & Watkins, Los Angeles), establishing operations in Mexico for 2026 (White & Case, Mexico City), and evaluation of the successful North American bid (Cleary Gottlieb in New York; McCarthy Tétrault in Calgary). The legal groundwork for 2026 was laid years ago, firm by firm, jurisdiction by jurisdiction.

The most colorful matters reveal the sheer variety of FIFA's legal life: a landmark trademark battle against PUMA before the Swiss courts; a gender-discrimination suit that ultimately drove increased prize money for women players; the defense of youth-soccer concussion claims; an injunction fight against MasterCard in New York; litigation over a copyright claim to the iconic World Cup symbol in Seoul; and enabling-legislation drafting for Qatar 2022 in Doha. The throughline running beneath all of it remains the DOJ and Swiss bribery investigations: the matters that, more than any sponsorship deal, defined the modern FIFA legal era.

The Caveat That Keeps the Story Honest

This is a portrait drawn from public matters. It does not capture confidential arbitration before the Court of Arbitration for Sport, sealed settlements, or the in-house work of FIFA's own legal department, which notably relocated from Zurich to Coral Gables, Florida, in the buildup to the US-hosted tournament. The true scale of FIFA's legal spend is almost certainly larger, and quieter, than 58 line items suggest.

What the data does show, with unusual clarity, is the shape of the defense. As football's showpiece returns to the country that once put FIFA in the dock, the organization arrives with a bench built for exactly that contest: heavy on criminal-defense firepower, anchored in New York, led by Paul, Weiss, and ready for a tournament that, between the ticket subpoenas, the antitrust complaints, and the consumer suits already piling up, will keep the lawyers as busy as the players.

Note on methodology

Source: Publicly-available data tracked by Pirical Legal Professionals

Scope: 37 firms, 55 lawyers, and 58 matters across 17 countries.

Exclusions: confidential Court of Arbitration for Sport arbitrations, sealed settlements, and in-house FIFA legal work are not captured; figures reflect public matters only.

Data caveat: data is derived from tracked public legal engagements; numbers may be slightly incomplete due to limited public information.

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Pirical Pioneers NYC 2026: Why Data-Driven Decisions Matter More Than Ever

Wed, 10 Jun 2026 13:16:08 GMT

For the first time, we brought our flagship customer conference to New York City. Hosted at Crowell & Moring's offices, it was a great morning of insights, product updates, and networking with our community of recruitment, strategy, business development, and client intelligence leaders.

We had a fantastic line up of speakers from a number of leading law firms and organizations, including Crowell & Moring, Mintz, Proskauer, and of course Pirical. They shared how recruitment and strategy teams are using data to inform hiring, growth, and client development. It was a morning of networking, candid conversations about AI, and sessions that dug into the trends reshaping the US legal market.

Here's a recap of the day!

What The Highest-Growth Firms Are Doing Differently

Jason Ku (Pirical)

The opening session laid out a stark picture of where the US legal market is heading. In 2015, the top 10% of firms earned 24% of market revenues, with a Gini coefficient of 0.41. By 2025, that share had climbed to 40% of revenues and a coefficient of 0.55. On current trajectory, the top 10% of firms are on track to earn 60% of all legal revenue by 2035, with recent mega-mergers accounting for roughly 30% of consolidation to date.

So how are the top firms pulling away? The analysis broke revenue growth into its component parts. Revenue growth equals revenue per lawyer multiplied by number of lawyers. The leading firms are compensating for slower headcount growth with higher revenue per lawyer. Upper mid-tier firms, by contrast, are growing fastest, but from a smaller base. The mathematical takeaway is striking: the top half of the mid-tier is on course to surpass the bottom half of the AM Law 100 within five years.

Focus and pricing power emerged as the clearest differentiators. Firms concentrating on two core practices saw the strongest results at 9.5% growth, outperforming both single-practice firms and those spread across three or more. Pricing power mattered just as much: firms able to raise rates above inflation grew 10.8% versus 7% for those without, a 3.8% differential. The contrast in revenue retention was just as sharp, with focused firms holding 98% of revenue while unfocused firms without pricing power retained just 60%, losing 40% annually.

The session also reframed how firms should think about lateral partner hiring. In reality, only a third of lateral partner hires prove profitable, with the other two thirds generating negative returns averaging -4.6%. That makes lateral hiring look less like a venture capital model, where one big hit pays for the misses, and more like private equity. But done right, it works: hiring into focused practice areas with pricing power yields 1.7x returns versus 0.57x for unfocused areas.

On AI, the early findings were nuanced. Hours per matter are beginning to decline, but so is revenue per matter, with the revenue drop less steep than the hours drop, suggesting efficiency gains are being shared with clients. There is no evidence yet of increased matters per lawyer, and the team is now tracking token usage per lawyer to better understand adoption patterns across seniority levels.

The Human Behind The Hire

Shannon Callington (Crowell & Moring), Shannon Gallagher Davis (Mintz), Susan Schonfeld (Proskauer), and Yoanna Dimitrova (Pirical)

Our recruitment panel explored how data and human judgment work together, and where each has its limits. A recurring theme was using data for expectation management: leadership often sets growth targets that don't reflect what the market can actually deliver, and Pirical data helps set realistic baselines for partner conversations. When only a handful of groups have moved in a target space over twelve months, the conversation shifts from "find more candidates" to smarter, more targeted strategy, and partners can maintain focus without the fear of missing out.

The panel was candid that the ask is sometimes flawed, and the job is to do what partners mean rather than what they literally say. One memorable example: a request to grow Boston litigation was really about capturing Boston-based company work, which opened up a far broader candidate pool once the underlying business question was reframed. Search parameters that surface only three people are too tight; ones that surface 800 are not specific enough. The data constantly redirects the search.

On individual versus group moves, the panel noted that a series of moves is often more telling than any single hire, and group moves typically start with one senior "driver" who brings others along. That's where relationships with search firm partners become essential, supplying the anecdotal intelligence that doesn't show up in the data. As one panelist put it, you can't have one without the other: data plus people on the ground.

The panel also shared practical tools for getting hires right, from building a business case grounded in year-over-year client growth trajectories to coaching candidates with realistic, ten-year expectations. A consistent finding: first-time movers are often the least successful hires, because they underestimate the difference between their business and their portable business. As the panel reminded us, people move with their hearts, not their heads, and using AI to handle the menial work simply frees up more time for the human connection that closes a hire.

On AI in the workflow, the panel was enthusiastic but clear-eyed. Tools are now used to screen high volumes of resumes against criteria, synthesize documents such as extracting PE deals from hundreds of bio pages, and act as a thought partner in evaluating candidates. Different platforms serve different needs, with secure tools reserved for confidential candidate information and others used for professional development and scheduling. Hallucination remains a real risk, so verification and savvy use are essential, and the consensus was that AI's edge is temporary and will equalize as adoption spreads. Human connection remains the irreplaceable differentiator.

First Look: Pirical In-House

Chris Griffiths (Pirical)

Chris gave the room a first look at a major product launch: our in-house lawyer database, releasing more than 150,000 US-based in-house and government attorneys as searchable profiles.

The dataset spans every industry from startups to the Fortune 500, covering roles from junior in-house counsel through general counsel, and includes company, role, location, and historical private practice background. Built from multiple sources to account for the varying ways US states register their bars, the infrastructure is designed to scale further over time.

The use cases resonated immediately with the room. For recruitment teams who have exhausted the law firm market, in-house counsel are now a targetable pool, filterable by expertise such as BigLaw plus securities experience, with connection data surfacing mutual contacts for warm introductions. For business development, teams can find general counsel at target companies, search practice areas in natural language, and target based on a lawyer's historical private practice specialization. And for tracking movement, teams can monitor when in-house counsel change roles, spot new opportunities, and flag client relationship vulnerabilities the moment outside counsel leaves.

What's On The Mind Of Law Firms' Strategy Teams

Camille Beignon (Pirical)

Camille worked through some of the most common questions we hear from law firm strategy teams.

On the long-term impact of AI on graduate intakes, the data shows first-year associate numbers have stayed stable since 2018, and because only 22% of graduates remain at the same firm after seven years, reducing graduate intake has only a minor short-term impact on the partner pipeline, though it sets up a likely war for 5–8 PQE (post-qualification experience) lawyers in the early 2030s.

On AI and headcount, half of the AM Law 25 have announced reductions over the past twelve months, and while every one of them grew revenue, not all grew headcount; the fastest revenue-growing firms actually increased partner headcount, while those cutting headcount rebalanced toward partners.

The session also covered merger modeling, from geographic presence mapping and post-merger global ranking projections to Chambers analysis by practice area and client overlap identification for acquisition targets.

An exciting development from this session was the announcement of our brand new Pirical connector to Claude !

Users of Claude can now query Pirical data in plain English and receive automated analysis, visualisations, and interpretations. Connectors to other AI tools are already being planned, as we aim to meet you and your teams where you already work. Reach out to learn more!

Final Thoughts

The thread running through the day was the same one that has defined Pirical Pioneers since its inception: the firms that win are the ones that make decisions with evidence rather than instinct.

What’s changed is the urgency and scale of information available. AI is rapidly overhauling certain processes, the market is consolidating, talent is moving faster, client needs are evolving, and competitor intelligence is easier to access than ever.

There’s plenty of data out there, but knowing exactly what to do with it is a common challenge faced by many of our attendees and speakers. Pirical Pioneers tries to answer questions like these and show law firms how to make data-driven decisions that drive real impact.

The Partnership Track: Where Law Firms Keep (and Lose) Talent

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 15:46:39 GMT

Not all paths to partnership are created equal. Some firms promote in six years. Others take two decades. Some lose a quarter of their workforce annually. Others barely crack single digits.

Using Pirical Legal Professionals data, we analyzed retention and promotion metrics across leading national and international law firms to see where lawyers actually build lasting careers.

The Fast Track: Shortest Time to Partnership

Kirkland & Ellis: 6.1 years
Honigman: 8.6 years
Polsinelli: 9.7 years
Susman Godfrey: 9.5 years
Foley Hoag: 9.4 years

The Marathon: Longest Time to Partnership

Thompson Coburn: 20.3 years
Clark Hill: 17.1 years
Troutman Pepper Locke: 17 years
Buchanan Ingersoll: 17.5 years
Wilson Elser: 16.9 years

The Keepers: Lowest Overall Attrition

FBT Gibbons: 1%
Cox, Castle & Nicholson: 4%
Honigman: 5%
FisherBroyles: 6%
Bond, Schoeneck & King: 6%

The Revolving Door: Highest Overall Attrition

Cravath: 25%
Wachtell Lipton: 23%
Winston & Strawn: 22%
Lewis Brisbois: 20%
WilmerHale: 20%

The Gender Gap: Where It's Widest

Firms with the largest female-male attrition spread:

Brown Rudnick: 21 percentage points (33% female vs. 12% male)
Thompson Coburn: 12 percentage points (15% female vs. 3% male)
Vinson & Elkins: 11 percentage points (27% female vs. 16% male)
Snell & Wilmer: 12 percentage points (17% female vs. 5% male)
Bradley Arant: 6 percentage points (11% female vs. 5% male)

Key Findings

Industry averages: 12.4 years to partnership | 12% firm attrition | 14% female attrition vs. 11% male attrition
The gender attrition gap is real: Female lawyers leave at higher rates than male colleagues at 80% of firms analyzed
Elite firm paradox: Cravath and Wachtell have among the highest attrition rates (25% and 23%) despite prestige, the up-or-out model remains brutal
Associates are where firms bleed talent: Non-partner attrition averages 17% vs. just 6% for partners
Outlier alert: Steptoe's 60% non-partner attrition rate suggests severe retention challenges

The Gold Standard: Best Firms to Build a Career

Balancing fast partnership tracks with low attrition and gender equity:

Honigman: 8.6 years to partner, 5% attrition, minimal gender gap (9% female vs. 4% male)
Taft: 12.3 years to partner, 7% attrition, small gender gap (9% female vs. 7% male)
Bradley Arant: 10.2 years to partner, 7% attrition (though watch the gender spread)
Barnes & Thornburg: 11.9 years to partner, 7% attrition, tight gender metrics (8% female vs. 7% male)
Holland & Hart: 14.3 years to partner, 7% attrition, near-perfect gender equity (8% female vs. 7% male)

The Bottom Line

The data reveals what recruiting brochures don't: where you start your career matters as much as where you want to end up. Firms like Honigman and Taft combine realistic partnership timelines with actual retention, while prestigious names often churn talent at unsustainable rates. For lawyers evaluating offers, the numbers tell a clearer story than the brand.

Note on methodology

We tracked five key metrics across major US law firms:

Time to Partner: Average tenure before partnership elevation (last 36 months)
Firm Attrition Rate: Overall turnover (last 12 months)
Gender-Specific Attrition: Female and male lawyer turnover rates (last 12 months)
Non-Partner vs. Partner Attrition: Separate tracking for associates/counsel and partners (last 12 months)

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The Law Firms Powering The Nuclear Energy Revival

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 14:44:46 GMT

3 minute read • Updated 8 June 2026

The nuclear energy sector is moving faster than it has in decades. Nuclear plant revivals, construction of small modular reactors (SMRs), and a national target to expand US nuclear energy capacity to 400 GWe by 2050 have pulled the industry back into growth.

A large part of the demand is coming from power-hungry data centers fueling the boom in AI technology. We covered the firms powering data center growth , and nuclear is increasingly the other side of that same story. Hyperscalers like Meta and Amazon are securing nuclear deals to provide around-the-clock power for their facilities.

Using publicly available data tracked by Pirical Legal Professionals , we identified which law firms hold the deepest benches of nuclear talent, and which are focusing their lateral hiring most heavily in this space.

Lateral Hiring of 'Nuclear Partners' Increased by +40% in 2021/2022 and Has Remained Steady Since

Lateral hiring of partners with nuclear experience rose sharply after 2020, with the clearest jump (+40%) between 2020/2021 and 2021/2022. It has held at that higher level over the past five years.

Given the recent acceleration in ‘data center’ lateral hiring ( +65% from 2024 to 2025 ), we may see these numbers climb higher.

Ranked: Which Firms Have the Largest Teams of Partners With Nuclear Energy Experience?

These firms hold the largest benches of Partners with nuclear experience, leaving them best positioned to capture the work as demand from restarts, new reactor projects, and data centers continues to grow.

Global, AM Law 200, >10 Partners, data as of June 2026

Ranked: Which Firms Have Been Targeting Partners With Nuclear Energy Experience?

Looking at the share of each firm's lateral Partner hires that have nuclear experience reveals which are betting most heavily on the space. Vinson & Elkins leads the way, reflecting a focused push into nuclear from an already energy-heavy base.

Global, AM Law 200, >5 Partner hires, May 2020 - May 2026

Texas Is Emerging as a Nuclear Hiring Hub, With Houston 4th for Lateral Hires and Dallas Ranking Highly

The largest legal markets lead nuclear lateral hiring, with Washington, DC (39), New York City (31), and London (29) at the top. But, more telling are the locations that sit just behind them.

Houston ranks 4th on its own (17), but combined with Dallas (6) and Austin (2), Texas saw 25 'Nuclear Partner' moves. The state has recently invested significantly into nuclear energy, and firms are positioning Partners to capture work from its growing pipeline of reactor projects.

Note on methodology

Source: Publicly-available data tracked by Pirical

Timeframe: May 2020 - May 2026

Scope: AM Law 200, Global

Caveat: Data is derived from tracked lateral Partner moves and firm profiles; numbers may be slightly incomplete due to limited public information.

In this analysis, Partners with experience in or surrounding nuclear energy were identified using keyword searches across PLP data. Profiles were included where nuclear energy, or related phrasing, featured in a Partner's biography or matter history with enough prominence to indicate genuine relevant experience.

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The Missouri Legal Market Leaderboard

Thu, 04 Jun 2026 14:26:03 GMT

3 minute read • Updated 9 June 2026

In our US state leaderboard series, we look at the law firms with largest partner headcount and strongest recent headcount growth in each US state. Here are the firms leading the way in the Missouri legal market.

Missouri’s Partner Headcount Growth Has Fallen Behind Similarly Sized Legal Markets

Missouri growth lands at the lower end of US legal markets of a similar size, having seen overall stagnant growth in Partner headcount at +0% . Only Michigan fell below Missouri at -1% .

Ranked: Which Law Firms are Leading Growth in Missouri?

United States, Missouri, Partners, Firms with >10 Partners, May 2025 - May 2026

Partners with multiple locations have been evenly distributed across each

Most Larger Practice Areas Have Had Stagnant Growth or are Losing Partners

Real Estate ( -3% Partner headcount), Corporate ( -1% ) and Insurance ( -1 % ) come just behind Litigation ( +1% ) as the most populated practice areas for law firms in Missouri. Yet, they have all seen a decline in headcount.

Tax ( +4% ) practices saw the highest percentage growth.

Movement Into and Out of Missouri Has Been Concentrated in Neighboring States

Illinois was the most common destination for Partners leaving Missouri, making up 45% of departures from the State. Illinois was also the second most common source of Partners moving into Missouri, with 3 Partners making this trip in the last year.

Kansas was the most popular source and second most popular destination for Partners in Missouri, with 4 moving out to Kansas and 5 moving in from the state.

Missouri's Leading Firms Share a Core of Major Clients, With Names Like Ford and Monsanto Worked by Multiple Top Ten Firms

Missouri, top 10 ranked firms

Note on methodology

Source: Publicly-available data tracked by Pirical Legal Professionals

Location: Missouri, United States

Timeframe: May 2025 - May 2026

Score weightings:

50% headcount growth
50% current headcount size

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The Pennsylvania Legal Market Leaderboard

Thu, 04 Jun 2026 13:59:05 GMT

3 minute read • Updated 11 June 2026

Pennsylvania Partner Headcount Growth Holds Steady in the Middle of Peer Legal Markets

Pennsylvania growth lands in the middle tier of US legal markets of a similar size, having seen modest growth in Partner headcount at +1.1% .

While Pennsylvania outpaced regional neighbors like New Jersey ( +0.6% ), Ohio ( +0.5% ), and Massachusetts ( -0.1% ), it trailed just behind Illinois ( +1.2% ) and fell further behind high-growth markets like Georgia ( +1.5% ) and Florida ( +2.8% ).

Ranked: Which Law Firms are Leading Growth in Pennsylvania?

United States, Pennsylvania, Firms with >10 Partners, April 2025 -April 2026

Insurance Practice On the Decline, Whilst Labor & Employment Grows

Labor and Employment ( +3.6% ) and Tax ( +2.8% ) practices saw the highest percentage growth, while Insurance ( -1.6% ) experienced the steepest decline.

Movement Into and Out of Pennsylvania Has Been Close to Home

New Jersey accounted for the largest share of lateral partner departures from Pennsylvania, attracting 31% of the state's outbound talent. The state was also the primary source of incoming talent, with 7 partners relocating to Pennsylvania over the past year.

New York was the second most popular source and destination for Partners in Pennsylvania, with 6 moving out to New York and 4 moving in from the state.

Note on methodology

Source: Publicly-available data tracked by Pirical Legal Professionals

Location: Pennsylvania, United States

Timeframe: April 2025 - April 2026

Score weightings:

50% headcount growth
30% number of lateral hires
20% number of partner promotions

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Which AM Law 200 Firms Have Had The Busiest Recruitment Teams?

Wed, 03 Jun 2026 14:35:39 GMT

It’s been a record-breaking year for lateral hiring across the AM Law 200. But which firms have been the most active in the lateral partner market in recent months?

Using publicly available data from Pirical , we've ranked firms with the busiest in-house recruitment teams over the last 12 months.

AM Law Lateral Partner Hires Jumped by 13.2% in 2025, Mainly Driven by the Top 50 Firms

Over 3,000 AM Law p artners switched firms in 2025. The 13.2% increase compared to 2024, marks a peak year for lateral partner moves.

The AM Law 1-50 firms were the primary engine behind this growth, with lateral partner hires skyrocketing by 24.5% . In contrast, firms in the AM Law 51-100 and 101-200 experienced more gradual increases of 7.5% and 5.9% , respectively.

Ranked: Which AM Law Firms Have Recorded the Highest Rate of Lateral Hiring In the Last 12 Months?

United States, AM Law 200, Partners, April 2025 - April 2026

Lewis Brisbois, Kirkland & Ellis, and Gordon & Rees Have Made the Most Lateral Partner Hires

Lewis Brisbois ( 126 hires ) and Kirkland & Ellis ( 118 ) made over 100 lateral hires in the last 12 months. However, both firms recorded a net loss in headcount as departures outweighed new arrivals.

In contrast, firms like Barnes & Thornburg ( 70 hires ) and Paul Hastings ( 47 ) made a significant number of hires while also achieving a net gain in partner headcount. This indicates they are actively hiring to grow, as opposed to replacing lost talent.

Barnes & Thornburg, Simpson Thacher, and Goldberg Segalla Have Been Growing Their Partner Benches The Most

Barnes & Thornburg ( +32 ) and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett ( +23 ) led the market in lateral Partner headcount growth, both securing a massive overall net gain.

Even though these two firms made fewer total hires than the industry giants, they kept their departures low. This strong retention allowed them to expand their partner benches instead of just filling empty seats.

Seattle and Texas Have Been the Hottest Markets for Recent Lateral Partner Moves

While New York and D.C. have the highest number of moves, recruitment intensity shows where the competition is the most intense. This metric compares the number of hires to the total Partner population in each city.

By this measure, Seattle is the most active market in the country with a mobility rate of 12.3% . Texas is also a major hotspot; with Dallas ( 8.7% ), Houston ( 8.2% ), and Austin ( 8.0% ) all in the top five, it is the most consistently "hot" region for Partner moves in the U.S.

Note on methodology

Source: Publicly-available data tracked by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Timeframe: April 2025 - April 2026

To identify the most aggressive recruiters, we looked at the gross hiring rate - calculated by taking the number of lateral partner hires made by a firm and dividing it by the firm's starting headcount.

Analysis powered by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Pirical Legal Professionals is the largest attorney database built with the most comprehensive data on the market. Specifically designed for legal recruitment and legal market research. It is used by over 100 law firms worldwide including 75% of the AM Law 20 and 80% of the UK top 50 law firms.

Pirical seamlessly aggregates data from a wide range of public sources, tracking over 700,000 attorney profiles worldwide. Our data helps law firms source lateral talent quicker, identify candidates with key client relationships, map competitor firm strategies & team structures, and much more.

Which AM Law 101-200 Firms Have The Most Chambers Ranked Lawyers?

Wed, 03 Jun 2026 14:12:15 GMT

3 minute read • Updated 3 June 2026

This ranking looks at which AM Law 101-200 firms have the highest density of Chambers ranked lawyers. Bracewell and Stoel Rives took top positions, and just 3 firms possessed more than 1 lawyer ranked 'Star Individual.'

Just 3 AM Law 101-200 firms have more than one "Star Individual"

The "Star Individual" rank sits above band 1 and is awarded only to lawyers with " exceptional recommendations in their field. "

Across the AM Law 101-200, only 19 firms have one at all, and just three have more than one: Munger Tolles & Olson (4), Shook, Hardy & Bacon (3) and Dickinson Wright (2) . On average, Star Individuals make up just 1% of Chambers ranked AM Law second hundred lawyers. Lawyers ranked in bands 2-3 account for more than half (55%) .

Our analysis found no meaningful correlation between a firm's proportion of Chambers ranked lawyers and its Revenue per Lawyer (RPL). Firms that increased their proportion of ranked lawyers the most saw no corresponding rise in RPL.

Ranked: Which Firms Have the Highest Density of Chambers Ranked Lawyers?

Global, AM Law 101-200 firms, May 2023 - May 2026

Note on methodology

Source: Publicly available data tracked by Pirical Legal Professionals

Timeframe: May 2023 - May 2026
Scope: AM Law 101-200 firms only.
Caveat: Numbers may be slightly incomplete due to limited public information.

In this analysis, a lawyer is classified as ‘Chambers ranked’ if they were awarded a ranking in the year prior to, or the year of the measurement. For example, A lawyer ranked in either the 2023 or 2024 USA Chambers rankings would be classed as ‘Chambers ranked’ in the May 2024 measurement.

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How Fox Rothschild Sources Candidates Directly With Pirical

Fri, 29 May 2026 14:26:51 GMT

We spoke to Natalie Quinn, Director of Legal Recruitment at Fox Rothschild , about how her team uses Pirical to run proactive candidate searches across the firm's 30 US offices at both associate and partner level.

Fox Rothschild is an AM Law 100 full-service firm with over 1,000 attorneys across the United States, focused primarily on middle market clients. The firm has nearly doubled in size in the last 20 years, growing from 16 offices to where it stands today.

3 Ways Pirical Helps Fox Rothschild

Proactive candidate sourcing at scale

Fox Rothschild has run proactive associate recruiting for over 12 years and now does partner-level searches too. Pirical helps the team identify the right candidates by practice area, seniority, location, and more.

Evidence to sharpen search criteria

When a hiring partner's search is too narrow to yield enough candidates, the team uses Pirical to show how many people meet the criteria. That snapshot helps start a productive conversation about whether to expand the search.

Seamless customer support

Whenever the team has had an issue or needed to bring someone new onto the platform, Pirical's support has been quick and easy. Getting new recruiters trained up and productive is always straightforward.

The Challenge

Having the Right Tools to do More Direct Sourcing and Rely Less on Agencies

Fox Rothschild has always maintained a preference for direct sourcing. The firm's policy is to use its own resources first before turning to recruitment agencies, using them as "the backup plan," Natalie said.

Proactive associate recruiting has been a focus for the team for over twelve years. In the early days, that meant using LinkedIn to try and find relevant candidates.

As Fox Rothschild grew, adding offices and entering new geographic markets, the limitations of a general-purpose tool became more apparent. This led the team to explore attorney search databases like Pirical that had filters precise enough to match the complexity of a legal search.

"We've always had a policy that we don't work with agencies right away, we try to use our own resources first. Whether it's a niche practice or a national search, we do our own proactive searches.

An attorney search database makes it so much easier to find people that match what you're looking for."

Natalie Quinn

Director of Legal Recruitment, Fox Rothschild

The Solution

Precise Searches Across a National, Multi-Office Footprint

Fox Rothschild's geographic spread across the US means that the recruitment team needs functional search filters with strong national data coverage.

With Pirical, the workflow is straightforward. A recruitment coordinator receives a new opening, takes the details from the hiring partner, then crafts a search using precise filters like practice area, years of experience, and location. The resulting list becomes the basis for outreach.

Searches can be tailored to match the exact criteria required. The firm has a main Philadelphia office but also a cluster of suburban offices in the surrounding area. Using the location search radius, the team can set a location and expand outward, meaning candidates based in smaller suburban markets are also captured. Excluding candidates who've made a move in the past two years, or filtering out practice areas they don't want to see in a profile are also useful. This keeps the candidate lists clean and relevant.

Using Pirical to Build Consensus With Hiring Partners

One of the more practical uses of the platform has been as a tool for managing hiring partner expectations. When a search specification is particularly narrow, the team will pull the Pirical results for exactly those criteria and share the snapshot with the hiring partner.

If there are only a handful of people in the market who fit the brief, that's a productive conversation starter, and often the catalyst for expanding the geography, years of experience, or the definition of relevant practice. "Your search is not producing anybody," as Natalie puts it. "Let's try to expand."

The team also checks in with hiring partners before starting outreach to understand which firms they'd like to target and which they'd prefer to avoid. That kind of dialogue, grounded in actual market data, keeps the process collaborative and reduces wasted effort.

"Each of our recruitment coordinators use Pirical once they have a new search."

Natalie Quinn

Director of Legal Recruitment, Fox Rothschild

The Result

A Direct Sourcing Model That Shows a Clear Return on Investment

Each year Natalie tallies the placements made via direct sourcing, referrals, and agencies. Search firms form a very small percentage of hires, emphasising the saved costs from focusing on direct sourcing and referrals. The numbers make the case internally for continuing to invest in the direct sourcing model.

At NALP's 2026 Annual Conference, Natalie was joined by two other recruiting directors on a panel about lateral associate recruiting. The session covered the platforms their teams use to run proactive searches, highlighting the value in-house teams can get out of tools like Pirical.

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Pirical Pioneers 2026: Why Data-Driven Decisions Are More Important Than Ever

Wed, 20 May 2026 15:40:15 GMT

Last week, at our biggest customer conference yet, we hosted a great group of Recruitment, Strategy, Business Development, HR, and Diversity leaders for Pirical Pioneers 2026!

We had a fantastic line up of speakers from a number of law firms & organisations, including Clifford Chance, Linklaters, Norton Rose Fulbright, Bevan Brittan, Stephenson Harwood, Thomson Reuters Institute, Progress Together, and of course Pirical.

It was a fun morning of networking, conversations around AI, sessions that delved into some of the latest trends reshaping the legal market, as well as practical ways in-house recruitment and strategy teams are using data to inform hiring and growth strategies.

Here’s a recap of the day!

The Legal Market Is Consolidating Faster Than Most Firms Appreciate

Jason Ku (Pirical)

In 2015, the top 10% of firms claimed 24% of market revenue. This jumped to 41% in 2025. Recent mega-mergers have also led to ~30% market consolidation. All in all, the top firms are on track to earn half of all legal revenue by 2035!

So how are the top firms winning? Jason's analysis ran through a number of hypotheses around practice focus, revenue per lawyer, pricing power, and partner hires, revealing some interesting trends between different sizes of firms.

A systematic focus on core practices with high pricing power can grow revenue and revenue per lawyer faster. Practice and industry selection is also important: rates in corporate work for banking clients outpaced inflation, whereas corporate work for transportation clients saw falling prices.

Some mid-market firms have achieved growth through partner hires, but does this work? In reality, lateral hiring is a break-even game where the profits of the top-third cover the losses of the bottom two thirds. But lateral hiring can return a profit when done right. Hiring laterally into focus practices with high pricing power yields mid-market firms a 28% return on lateral hires.

How Recruitment Teams Can Move From Talent Acquisition to Talent Intelligence

Sam Larkins (Norton Rose Fulbright), Danielle Owens (Bevan Brittan), Sarah Manning (Stephenson Harwood), Sarah Langton (Clifford Chance), and Chris Griffiths (Pirical)

Our in-house recruitment panel discussed how hiring teams are shifting from order-takers to strategic advisors. As HR's only external-facing function, recruitment has a unique market viewpoint, but earning strategic influence requires using data to build credibility with firm leadership.

To be successful, recruitment teams need to first understand the firm’s strategy and priorities. Having access to the right data allows recruitment leaders to really understand the market, which then informs decisions and conversations with hiring partners and firm leadership.

Using data to understand the market is also vital to working with recruitment agencies. Assessing how challenging a role will be to fill helps decide when to spend time direct sourcing vs working with an agency. Sarah Langton pointed out that if a direct hire takes seven months to fill, it ultimately costs the firm far more in lost revenue than the agency fee.

AI has also started to play a key role in the recruitment function. Day-to-day processes can now be automated or sped up and research capabilities have evolved rapidly. This means hiring teams have more time and more tools to work strategically, ultimately shifting towards talent intelligence. "It's an exciting time to be in legal recruitment", said Sarah Manning.

Law Firms Aren’t Focused Enough on Client-Led Growth

Eve Starks (Thomson Reuters)

Eve presented some fascinating research that should give managing partners pause. Worked rates alone do not support firm growth.

Given larger headcounts, shifting leverage models, and AI-driven workflow efficiency, rate increases actually deliver diminishing returns. Most leadership discussions about growth remain heavily focused on supply-side levers: lateral hires, M&A, and brand positioning. But talent-led growth is “fragile without deliberate integration.”

So what's missing from the conversation? Clients. There’s a lot of opportunity in the market, but the issue is that client relationships are shallow. The session introduced a practical framework for identifying growth opportunity: rather than defaulting to the biggest spenders, focus on clients currently sitting at 10–24% of wallet share. These are engaged clients spending below industry benchmark, the easiest candidates for structured cross-selling and account development.

Eve ended with a few proven mechanisms that can help drive success in growing client relationships and account management. Having diverse lawyers and collaborative teams can help strengthen client relationships, while accountability and integration with firm strategy have proven to impact account management.

How Strategy Teams Are Turning Data Collection into a Competitive Advantage

Xiao Mei Li (Linklaters) and Camille Beignon (Pirical)

Xiao gave a practical example of how the financial analysis team at Linklaters use Pirical’s public dataset to maintain an in-house Power BI dashboard for competitor benchmarking and market entry.

While building the dashboard was fairly straightforward, it was important to get the data right by mapping practice areas to internal terminology, for example. Now automated quarterly, the dashboard provides firm leadership with clear directional data that shows how the market has moved over time, where the firm sits in the market relative to peer groups, and where there is white space and opportunities in certain practices or regions.

Looking ahead, the team plans to monitor billable hours instead of headcount, anticipating a 40% AI-driven volume reduction in research-heavy areas like due diligence. Having access to this data helps define Linklater's growth strategy and keep the firm competitive in core markets.

Camille followed up by answering some of the most common questions we get from law firm strategy teams. There were plenty of revealing insights on the long-term impact of AI on graduate intakes, tech-driven headcount reductions, predicting post-merger global rankings, identifying boutique M&A targets through shared client relationships, and mapping competitor depth to expose open white spaces.

An exciting development from this session was the announcement of our brand new Pirical connector to Claude !

Combating The Social Mobility Progression Gap Requires Transparent, Data-Driven Promotion Processes

Sophie Hulm (Progress Together) and Johanna Kurien (Pirical)

By looking at both Progress Together and Pirical data, this session compared visibility around social mobility in the worlds of financial services and law firms. In fact, both sectors follow similar trends relating to social mobility and fair career progression opportunities in the UK.

Progress Together has found that at the senior level, 61% of financial service workers come from higher socioeconomic backgrounds. At the junior level, that figure drops to just 51%. The legal sector mirrors this trend, with 78% of partners from high socio-economic backgrounds and 73% at the junior associate level. This often means that workers from lower socio-economic backgrounds are not being given the opportunity to progress into senior roles.

The barriers to those from lower socio-economic backgrounds are well documented: lack of networks, "fit" pressures, opaque promotion processes, and limited access to sponsorship from senior leaders who naturally gravitate toward people with similar backgrounds. From a business perspective this matters. Without a socio-economically diverse workforce, businesses miss out on untapped talent pools, opportunities for innovation, retention of talent, and resilient workers.

So how do we combat unfairness for people from lower socio-economic backgrounds in the workforce? Among other things, it's important to use transparent processes and utilise data to address disproportionality in promotions, as well as review progression criteria to ensure certain groups are not excluded.

Final Thoughts

The thread running through the day was the same one that has defined Pirical Pioneers since its inception: the firms that win are the ones that make decisions with evidence rather than instinct.

Q1 2026 | Which AM Law Firms Made the Most Lateral Partner Hires?

Fri, 01 May 2026 16:20:29 GMT

The first quarter of 2026 has wrapped up, so which firms started the year off with the most lateral Partner hires? We’ve taken a look, using publicly-available data tracked by Pirical Legal Professionals .

Ranked: Which Firms Made the Most Lateral Partner Hires in Q1 2026

Global, AM Law 200, Top 50 firms, January 1st 2026 - March 31st 2026

Most Partner Moves Took Place in NYC and DC, but London and Chicago Were Also Active

The highest number of lateral Partner hires occurred in New York City ( 203 ) and Washington, DC ( 126 ) .

London took third spot alongside Chicago with 62 lateral moves. Firms like Sullivan & Cromwell and DLA Piper appear to have made growth in London a high priority, both making 6 London-based Partner hires in Q1 2026.

Litigation and Corporate Practices Dominated Lateral Moves in Q1

388 of the Partners hired by AM Law 200 firms in Q1 of 2026 have Litigation as their primary practice focus. Corporate took second spot with 217 moves, followed by Banking & Finance with 136 .

Most Hires Were Sourced From Other AM Law 200 Firms

60% of the hires made in the first quarter of 2026 were sourced from within the AM Law 200. McDermott Will & Schulte lost the most Partners ( 37 ), with McGlinchey Stafford in second, with 35 Partner exits as it closed its doors in January this year.

Note on methodology

Source: Publicly-available data tracked by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Timeframe: Jan 2026 - March 2026

Analysis powered by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Which AM Law 101-200 Firms Have The Best Lateral Partner Retention?

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 10:48:08 GMT

Lateral Partner retention is a vital metric for law firms. "Each year, law firms invest countless hours, money, and resources in their lateral hiring efforts" , so the success rate of each lateral hire has significant implications to any firm.

Based on input from a number of firms, a key window for a lateral Partner hire is the first 3 years from joining. Within that timeframe, most firms will have a sense of whether the hire is going to be a success, or not!

Following our recent analysis of lateral Partner retention in the AM Law 100 , we're now shifting our focus to the AM Law second hundred.

Using publicly-available data tracked by Pirical , we've analyzed how many of the lateral Partner hires made by AM Law 101-200 firms between 2020-2022 exited the firm within 3 years of joining.

Note on methodology

Each firm's retention rate is based on the cohort of lateral Partner hires made between Jan 2020 - Dec 2022, and how many of those hires subsequently left the firm within the first 3 years of joining.

Excludes firms that made fewer than 5 lateral Partner hires and moves as a result of mergers. Data is derived from tracked lateral Partner moves, numbers may be slightly incomplete due to limited public information. Exits include Partners that left but didn't lateral to another firm, eg. retired.

Ranked: Which AM Law 101-200 Firms Have the Highest Lateral Partner Retention Rates?

Lateral Partner hires and how many then left the firm within the first 3 years

Global, AM Law 101-200, Firms with >5 lateral Partner hires, hires made between Jan 2020 - Dec 2022

Atlanta is the Only City to Boast Above Average Retention

At 94% , Atlanta tops the chart for highest Partner retention rates in the AM Law second hundred and is the only US City to surpass the 86% average retention rate.

Boston and Houston saw the lowest retention rates at 80% , both far below average.

Intellectual Property Has Seen Particularly Low Lateral Partner Retention

Private Client and Labor and Employment practice areas had the highest rates of lateral Partner retention at 87% and 86% respectively, surpassing the average retention rate of 84% .

However, Partners practicing in Intellectual Property law were significantly more likely to leave within the 3 year timeframe. Retention in this practice area fell below average at 79% .

Note on methodology

Source: Publicly-available data tracked by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP).

Excludes: Firms with fewer than 5 lateral Partner hires and moves as a result of direct mergers.

Timeframe: Jan 2020 - Dec 2025.

Analysis powered by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Pirical Legal Professionals is the largest attorney database built with the most comprehensive data on the market. Specifically designed for legal recruitment and legal market research. Tt is used by over 100 law firms worldwide including 75% of the AMLaw 20 and 80% of the UK top 50 law firms.

Big Law's Tariff Litigation Power Rankings: Exclusive Analysis Reveals Market Leaders in Massive Refund Battle

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 08:41:32 GMT

A landmark Supreme Court decision just invalidated presidential tariff authority. Big Law firms are now racing to capture what could become one of the most lucrative litigation waves in recent memory.

More than 2,000 refund lawsuits have already been filed. The stakes exceed $100 billion in potentially recoverable duties. An exclusive analysis by Pirical identifies which law firms are best positioned to capitalize on the tariff litigation boom. The analysis weighs three factors: client representation, practice investment, and specialized expertise.

Kirkland & Ellis emerges as the clear market leader. The firm represents 12 major companies seeking tariff refunds. That's double the client count of its nearest competitor. Kirkland's 74.8 composite score in Pirical's three-pillar analysis significantly outpaces Akin Gump (58.9) and Latham & Watkins (51.3), which round out the top three.

The Litigation Landscape

The surge in tariff cases follows the U.S. Supreme Court's February 2026 ruling. The court found the Trump administration lacked statutory authority to impose sweeping global tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Courts invalidated duties that generated more than $170 billion in government revenue. This created an unprecedented refund scenario.

Companies ranging from FedEx and Costco to Lululemon, Dyson, and Dollar General have filed suit. They want reimbursement from the U.S. Court of International Trade. Court filing analysis shows Crowell & Moring filed approximately 200 cases, the highest volume. Sidley Austin filed approximately 160 cases. But case count alone doesn't determine market leadership.

Methodology: Three Pillars of Tariff Excellence

Pirical's ranking methodology weighs three distinct measures of law firm capability in tariff litigation.

Pillar 1: Client Representation in Tariff Lawsuits (40% weight)

Measures actual representation of 15 major companies filing Trump-era tariff refund suits. The companies include publicly traded corporations and household-name brands. Data comes from court filings and public disclosures.

Pillar 2: International Trade Practice Strength (35% weight)

Combines two sub-metrics. The first is starting headcount in international trade practices as of February 2023 (60% of pillar score). The second is growth rate through February 2026 (40% of pillar score). The approach rewards both established scale and strategic investment in trade capabilities.

Pillar 3: Overall Trade & Government Work Profile (25% weight)

Measures breadth of public trade and government-related legal matters across all practice areas. It demonstrates institutional expertise beyond tariff litigation alone.

Scores were normalized to a 100-point scale within each pillar, then weighted to produce composite rankings.

The Top Tier: Elite Performers

Tier 1 - Market Leader (70+ composite score)

Tier 2 - Premier Practices (50-69 composite score)

Tier 3 - Strong Capabilities (40-49 composite score)

The Middle Pack: Established Players

Tier 4 - Solid Capabilities (30-39 composite score)

Tier 5 - Emerging/Specialized (Under 30 composite score)

On the 21st-25th Ranked Firms: Steptoe has four clients and a stable 19-lawyer practice. Cooley has six clients only. Gibson has five clients only. Wiley shows infrastructure only with 16 lawyers and 25% growth. Skadden has four clients only.

Strategic Archetypes: Different Paths to Tariff Market Position

The pillar-by-pillar analysis reveals distinct strategic approaches. The composite ranking alone obscures these differences.

The Infrastructure Giants (High Pillar 2, Low Pillar 1)

Baker McKenzie , Hogan Lovells , and Wiley Rein have built or maintained substantial trade practices. These range from 16 to 43 lawyers. Yet they show minimal to zero visible tariff client representation. These firms either serve clients not captured in public data, or they focus on non-litigation trade work. Or they're banking that infrastructure precedes business development in emerging practice areas. The approach represents a long-term bet. When tariff litigation expands or evolves, these firms will have ready capacity.

The Client Capture Specialists (High Pillar 1, Low Pillar 2)

Morgan Lewis , McGuireWoods , Morrison & Foerster , and DLA Piper have significant client rosters (7-9 companies) despite lean or invisible practice infrastructure. This suggests several possibilities. The firms may have exceptional expertise allowing small teams to punch above their weight. Or they may have pre-existing client relationships from other practice areas. Or they pursued aggressive business development. The approach maximizes current revenue but may face scalability challenges if litigation volume surges.

The Balanced Competitors (Moderate across all pillars)

Kirkland , Covington , and Mayer Brown show strength across multiple dimensions without dominating any single category. This diversified profile likely indicates sustainable, institutionalized practices. These firms don't rely on individual rainmakers or temporary market positioning.

The Trade Powerhouses Without Tariff Focus (High Pillar 3, Low Pillar 1)

Paul Weiss (51 trade matters), Cleary Gottlieb (29 matters), Jones Day (26 matters), and Weil (22 matters) demonstrate substantial government and trade work. But they have limited tariff refund client visibility. These firms may specialize in regulatory work, trade policy, or government investigations rather than tariff litigation. Or their tariff work may involve smaller companies or confidential matters not tracked in public filings.

The Growth Stories (High Pillar 2 growth rates)

WilmerHale (62% growth), King & Spalding (47% growth), Covington (44% growth), and Akin Gump (45% growth) combine rapid practice expansion with emerging or established client work. These firms are making explicit strategic bets. They believe tariff and trade litigation represents a long-term growth area worth significant investment.

The Road Ahead

Key procedural questions remain unresolved following the Supreme Court decision. Courts must still determine how refunds will be administered. They must decide whether relief applies broadly across similar claims. And they must set the timeline for repayment. The U.S. Court of International Trade is considering streamlined approaches to manage the massive caseload.

Many companies are filing lawsuits as a protective measure. Administrative refund processes through U.S. Customs and Border Protection remain unclear. One company reported filing costs between $20,000 and $30,000. The company views litigation as insurance against potentially missing refunds.

The Justice Department has indicated the refund process will take time. The department cited precedent from 1998 harbor maintenance tax cases that required seven years to resolve. But those cases involved far smaller sums.

The firms that have built both client relationships and practice infrastructure appear best positioned to sustain long-term market leadership. This has rapidly become one of Big Law's most significant new practice drivers. Yet the pillar-specific analysis reveals no single winning formula. Firms are placing distinct bets on client acquisition versus capacity building. They're choosing between immediate revenue versus long-term positioning. And they're deciding between litigation versus broader trade work.

The ultimate winners may depend less on current positioning than on how tariff litigation evolves. Will it remain concentrated among major corporations? Will it expand to mid-market importers? Will it shift toward class-action structures? Or will it transform into administrative refund processing that requires different expertise entirely? The answers will determine which strategic bets pay off.

Note on methodology

Source: Publicly-available data tracked by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Firm rankings based on proprietary Pirical PLP analysis combining public court filings, disclosed client representations, and lawyer headcount data from February 2023 to February 2026 across Am Law 200 firms. Composite scores weight client representation (40%), practice infrastructure and growth (35%), and overall trade and government work profile (25%).

Analysis powered by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

The Hormuz Legal Gold Rush: 20 Firms Ranked by Who's Actually Positioned to Win

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 12:11:11 GMT

The Strait of Hormuz handles about a fifth of the world's oil supply. Right now it's generating something else at scale: legal work. Maersk, Hapag-Lloyd, CMA CGM, and MSC have all suspended transits. Tankers have been struck by drone fire. QatarEnergy has paused LNG production. Over 400 vessels are anchored outside the strait waiting to find out what happens next.

Every one of those vessels represents charter party clauses, war risk premiums, force majeure notices, and cargo claims. The dispute pipeline heading toward London arbitration panels and P&I desks is enormous. The question is which law firms get the call.

We ranked 20 firms using Pirical Legal Professionals data across three dimensions. Here's what the numbers say.

How We Scored Them

Pillar 1 — Client Relationships (40% weight).

We tracked publicly recorded legal matters across ten shipping companies with the highest Hormuz exposure: Maersk, Hapag-Lloyd, CMA CGM, MSC, Dynacom, Angelicoussis, Frontline, Cosco, Shipping Corporation of India, and QatarEnergy/Nakilat. Existing relationships determine who gets the first call when a vessel is struck. That's why this pillar carries the most weight.

Pillar 2 — Capacity Investment (35% weight).

Net lawyer headcount growth across insurance litigation, international arbitration, and transport/shipping practices between February 2023 and February 2026. Firms needed a baseline of at least 20 lawyers to qualify. Net negative growth scores zero. This pillar rewards firms that actually invested in the practices this crisis activates.

Pillar 3 — Maritime Expertise Concentration (25% weight).

Total public mentions of firm involvement in shipping and transport matters, drawn from partner profiles. This reflects institutional depth and market reputation. It carries the lightest weight because expertise without relationships or capacity is only a partial advantage.

Scores normalized to 100 within each pillar, then blended at the stated weights into a composite.

The Rankings

Tier 1 — Market Leaders

Tier 2 — Premier Practices

Tier 3 — Strong Capabilities

Tier 4 — Established Players

The Three Types of Winner

Capacity builders

Wilson Elser , Kennedys , and DWF .

These firms have added the most lawyers in the relevant practices. They are not traditional maritime houses. But claims volume at this scale will overflow boutique capacity, and these firms exist to absorb it.

Relationship holders

Willkie , Freshfields , A&O Shearman , and White & Case .

These firms carry the strongest client matter records with the most exposed operators. They win mandates from existing clients. They are less equipped to capture new inquiries from operators with no prior connection to the firm.

Maritime specialists

HFW , Clyde & Co , Watson Farley & Williams , Stephenson Harwood , and Hill Dickinson .

These firms are the first call when a vessel is struck. Their expertise-driven reputations attract the most immediately activated work: war risk, P&I, LMAA arbitration, casualty response. Modest client matter records reflect how the practice actually works, not how much work these firms are likely to receive.

This analysis was built using Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP) matter data and headcount tracking across the insurance litigation, international arbitration, and transport/shipping practice areas.

Want to run your own version?

The methodology above is fully replicable. Whether you're building a pitch, running a competitive analysis, or tracking market share across a practice group, Pirical's data lets you weight the pillars to fit your own question. Book a session with Pirical to learn how to pull and structure the analysis yourself.

Note on methodology

Source: Publicly-available data tracked by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

What the data can't capture: Confidential retainers don't appear in public matter records. Firms advising sovereign fleet operators, state-linked entities, and Gulf-region clients on Hormuz matters may have exposures that Pirical's data cannot see. That caveat applies most directly to Al Tamimi & Co, Rajah & Tann, and Allen & Gledhill, all of which have regional positioning that likely understates their actual standing with state-linked operators.

Analysis powered by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Law Firm Mergers & Market Growth: Key Insights from Our Latest Webinar

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 10:44:05 GMT

In our most recent webinar, Francesco (Account Executive) and Ruiz (Product Manager) walked attendees through a data-driven analysis of law firm mergers.

From the headline-grabbing mega-deals of 2025, to the wave of announcements and consolidations already reshaping the industry in 2026, here's a quick summary of the key insights shared.

2025: Record-Breaking Deal Value

2025 saw 47 major completed M&As, a 31% increase over 2024.

And while 2023 held the record for sheer volume of M&A deals, 2025 emerged as the highest year on record for total deal valuation (over the past five years). Three mergers in particular stood out:

Post merger revenue $2.0 billion
Affected 2.7k lawyers
Landmark transatlantic growth, establishing a significant foothold in the US

Post merger revenue $2.85 billion
Affected 1.7k lawyers
Significantly expanded their NY private capital and hedge fund practice

Post merger revenue $1.0+ billion
Affected 1.1k lawyers
Boosted their presence in Colorado & Illinois

2026: A New Record Year in the Making

Even before the end of Q1 2026, four major mergers had already been announced or completed. These are collectively expected to affect 8,200 lawyers . For context, the eight mega-mergers of 2025 affected approximately 10,000 lawyers across the full year.

The four deals to watch:

AI Investment and the Merger Wave: Coincidence or Correlation?

Running in parallel to the surge in M&A activity is a rapid increase in AI investment across the legal sector. According to data from the Thomson Reuters Institute , law firm spend on legal technology has nearly tripled in the past three years , driven largely by the rise of generative AI.

Are these two trends connected? AI investment may not be direct cause of increased merger activity, but there is a compelling case for why firms might pursue both strategies simultaneously:

1. Scale and economics

As agentic AI systems become more powerful and more expensive, smaller and mid-sized firms may find it increasingly difficult to compete. Last year, a Harvard Business School article highlighted that tools like Harvey and Leya could price out firms that lack the budget or scale to integrate them effectively. Mergers can enable firms to pool their innovation budgets and accelerate AI adoption.

2. Proprietary data advantage

Mergers also allow firms to consolidate their internal datasets across practice of law and business services. This means firms can reach the critical mass required to train and refine custom AI systems.

This intersection of M&A strategy and technology investment is a trend worth watching closely.

A Framework for Understanding Legal Market Consolidation

Looking across the deals of 2025 and early 2026, Pirical's analysis identifies four distinct types of consolidation happening in the market:

1. Transatlantic Bridge

Firms previously established in the UK and Australian markets are using mergers to build or deepen their US presence. The HSF / Kramer Levin merger is the most prominent example, and the anticipated Taylor, Akin, and Skooi mergers appear to follow a similar logic.

2. National Footprint Expansion

Firms such as Taft, Troutman Pepper, and Knights plc are using M&A to extend their reach within their home market. Taft, for example, significantly expanded its presence in Colorado and Illinois through several deals in 2025. Knights plc pursued a similar strategy in the UK.

3. Practice Group Reinforcement

Some firms are using mergers to deepen specific practice areas. Womble Bond Dickinson's merger with Lewis Roca is a clear example: already strong in IP and real estate, the combined firm saw a further increase in IP partners.

4. Portfolio Rebalancing

Certain firms are using consolidation to fortify practice areas that were previously underrepresented. The Hogan Lovells / Cadwalader combination, for instance, is expected to produce a firm with a significantly larger and more specialised complex finance capability, combining capital markets and banking finance practice groups.

The Reshuffling of the Global 200

The current wave of mergers is set to redraw the global legal rankings significantly. Three merged firms are expected to be in the Global top 20 by gross revenue:

The Ashurst / Perkins Coie merger is expected to produce the largest gains in gross revenue ( +92% ).

Beyond the headline movers, Womble Bond Dickinson and FBT / Gibbons are also projected to climb approximately 30 positions each in the global rankings.

Organic Growth Is Still Possible, But Harder

Not every firm growing its headcount is doing so through M&A. When Pirical analysed headcount growth across global law firms from January 2025 to February 2026, 70% of the top growers had done so through merger activity .

However, in this timeframe, three firms demonstrated that meaningful organic growth remains achievable:

Without any merger activity, Gordon Rees grew from the 11th to the 5th largest firm in the US .

Had M&A activity been excluded from the rankings, they would have been the top firm for headcount growth in 2025.

Simpson Thacher climbed to become the 15th largest firm in the US, having previously been 22nd , through recruitment alone.

Greenberg Traurig showed comparable organic growth at the global level, moving from the 15th to the 10th largest firm globally.

A Word of Caution: Mergers Come With Risk

For firms considering M&A as a growth strategy, one data point from Pirical's internal research is worth keeping front of mind: mergers have historically triggered an average partner headcount loss of around 6% from the point of announcement to completion.

This is not a reason to avoid mergers, but it is a reason to plan carefully, particularly around partner retention and communication during the transition period.

Explore the Data Yourself

One of the highlights of the webinar was a live walkthrough of Pirical's Market Growth tool, which allows users to analyse headcount changes, merger activity, and partner movement at both firm and individual level.

Book a free demo with our team to see how to explore the data behind merger activity and more!

Watch the full webinar

Private Equity Ranking: Who's Building, Who's Bleeding, and Why BigLaw May Be PE's Next Acquisition Target

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 17:16:29 GMT

Pirical intelligence data tracking 50,000+ lawyers across PE and capital markets practices reveals a three-year talent reshaping more dramatic than the numbers indicate, and a looming ownership question that BigLaw's most powerful PE advisors are uniquely positioned to answer.

There is a firm that served more than 5,000 publicly tracked private equity matters between 2023 and 2026, deployed nearly 2,800 PE-adjacent lawyers to do it, and still recorded net positive lateral movement in its PE practices. That firm is Kirkland & Ellis. And understanding why Kirkland sits where it does, and what every other firm in this dataset is doing to close the gap, hold ground, or quietly retreat, is the story of how BigLaw's relationship with private equity has fundamentally matured.

Pirical's proprietary platform intelligence, which tracks lawyer movement, headcount, and matter activity across PE and capital markets adjacent practices, captures that story in granular detail. What follows is the most comprehensive data-driven analysis of private equity's imprint on BigLaw yet published, covering matter volume, talent flows, headcount trajectories, practice-level trends, and the regulatory frontier that may soon make law firms themselves the subject of the same ownership calculus their PE clients have applied to every other professional services sector.

Decoding the PE Client Universe

Before mapping which law firms serve private equity best, it is worth being precise about who private equity actually is. Headline AUM figures for the industry's largest managers are deeply misleading as a proxy for legal work. Blackstone manages over $1 trillion in total assets, but the majority sits in real estate and credit; Apollo is primarily a credit firm by AUM. The legal mandates that flow to BigLaw's PE practices (buyout transactions, fund formation, portfolio company work) derive from PE-specific equity portfolios, not the broader platforms.

Pirical has sought to isolate PE-specific AUM across the top 20 managers, stripping out credit, real estate, and infrastructure where segment-level disclosures permit. The resulting ranking differs meaningfully from industry headline figures and provides a more accurate picture of who actually drives the mandates that define BigLaw's PE practices.

Figures reflect PE-specific portfolios; credit, real estate, and infrastructure excluded where disclosed.

Source: PEI 300, disclosed segment data. Figures approximate; Q3 2025.

The Matter Intelligence: Who Is Actually Doing the Work

Pirical's matter-level data (cross-referencing publicly disclosed engagements across PE-adjacent practices against the top 20 PE organizations) provides the most granular available picture of which law firms have built durable, high-volume PE relationships. The table below ranks firms by aggregated public PE-adjacent matter count alongside total lawyer deployment. The ratio between the two figures is itself analytically meaningful: a high matter-to-lawyer ratio reflects deal intensity and practice concentration rather than simple headcount scale.

Matters tied to current firm affiliation of lawyers. Practice areas reflect current lawyer designations. Counts reflect unique lawyer-location-matter associations.

Kirkland's dominance is not a surprise, but its magnitude is. At 5,024 tracked matters, K&E produces more than three times the matter volume of its nearest competitor, Latham & Watkins (1,488). The gap between first and second place is larger than the gap between second and twenty-fourth.

Paul, Weiss presents the sharpest matter-intensity ratio in the dataset: 1,088 matters served by 456 lawyers. That concentration reflects the firm's deliberate positioning in high-value, complex PE transactions rather than volume-based market coverage, a strategy whose commercial logic the Barshay-era buildout has validated.

Freshfields at #7 with 910 matters and 581 lawyers is the most significant international firm in the ranking, reflecting both the globalization of PE deal flow and the firm's sustained US practice investment. The presence of Vinge (#19) and Roschier (#22) confirms that Nordic PE (which has produced outsized deal activity relative to market size) is increasingly registering in global matter counts.

Top 10 individual law firm–PE client pairings by public matter count.

The concentration of Kirkland mandates from Francisco Partners, Apax, and Advent reflects the kind of exclusive-channel dynamics increasingly common among the most sophisticated PE buyers. More surprising: Clifford Chance's ranking as the primary legal partner to Partners Group by matter count (appearing above both Ropes & Gray and Latham & Watkins serving the same client) challenges conventional assumptions about which firm wins European PE mandates.

The Talent Wars: Three Years of Movement

Headcount and matter volume reveal market position; lateral movement reveals strategic intent. Pirical's tracking of all lawyer joiners and leavers across PE and capital markets adjacent practices from January 2023 to January 2026 surfaces the clearest picture yet of which firms are genuinely building, which are churning, and which are contracting while managing the optics. The table below combines both columns into a net movement view, a framing that exposes firms whose joiner numbers mask significant underlying instability.

All joiners and leavers across identified PE and capital markets adjacent practices. Net = Joiners minus Leavers. Ranked by net movement.

Simpson Thacher & Bartlett's net +79 is the dataset's most consequential finding. STB has historically been among the most selective and culturally conservative elite PE firms, not known for lateral hiring at scale. 149 joiners against 70 leavers over three years signals a deliberate capacity build, not replacement churn. Paired with a 52% absolute headcount expansion (detailed below), STB appears to be executing a strategic expansion that has received remarkably little market attention.

Goodwin Procter's net -14 tells a very different story. With 88 joiners and 102 leavers, Goodwin was simultaneously recruiting aggressively and losing talent at high volume during a period when its core VC and growth equity market suffered one of its worst multi-year contractions in recent memory. The firm was running a replacement treadmill at precisely the wrong point in the cycle.

Sidley Austin's net -52 is the dataset's most troubling signal for an established PE practice. Sidley is not typically described as a firm people flee, and its PE and funds practices have historically been substantive. 103 departures against 51 joiners over three years points to either systematic poaching by competitors with superior compensation structures (Kirkland and Paul Weiss being the most likely) or internal practice pressures not visible in the public narrative.

Latham & Watkins' net -48 is significant given the firm's matter volume (#2 overall) and brand strength. The combination of high matter activity and meaningful net talent loss could reflect a firm where demand is outpacing its ability to retain the lawyers servicing it, or a firm whose talent is being harvested because of its PE client proximity.

Skadden's net -26 should be read in context: given the firm's historical struggles to hold talent against Kirkland-level compensation pressure, the contained leaver number relative to its market position indicates a degree of stabilization that the conventional narrative underweights.

“There’s a lot of focus on lateral movement as a proxy for success, but what matters is what you’re actually building. Private equity clients need teams that can move faster, think more clearly, and execute across increasingly complex deals.

We’ve been deliberate about bringing in people with the judgment and strategic instinct to be true partners to our clients, and investing in how we develop them so that shows up in the work. The goal isn’t just to grow with the market, it’s to think ahead of it.”

Sarah Stasny

Head of Proskauer’s Private Equity Transactions Group – US

Absolute Growth: Who Built the Most Capacity

Pirical's three-year tracking of PE-adjacent lawyer populations identifies both the most aggressive capacity builders and the practices that contracted, whether by market force or strategic choice.

Simpson Thacher's 52% growth (from 398 to 605 PE-adjacent lawyers) is the most dramatic documented expansion among elite PE firms in the Pirical dataset. To put the scale in context: STB added more PE-adjacent lawyers in three years than the total current PE-adjacent headcount of Cleary Gottlieb or Fried Frank.

Dentons' -32% contraction and Wilson Sonsini's -30% decline reflect distinct dynamics. Dentons' global verein structure makes its PE practice difficult to assess as a unified entity; the contraction may reflect strategic rationalization as much as genuine client attrition. Wilson Sonsini's decline maps far more directly onto the VC and growth equity market collapse. The firm's identity and geographic concentration left it maximally exposed to precisely the segment that suffered the most severe compression between 2022 and 2025.

Practice-Level Trends: Where the Lawyers Actually Are

Pirical's breakdown across granular practice designations reveals that PE-adjacent legal headcount growth is concentrated in specific areas, and that some practices conventionally assumed to be thriving are in measurable decline.

All lawyers in identified PE and capital markets adjacent practice designations across Pirical dataset.

The divergence between Corporate – Investment Funds (+7%) and Capital Markets – Equity (-6%) is the single most consequential finding in this table. Fund formation has been the most resilient PE-adjacent legal revenue line across this cycle: as PE firms continued to raise successor funds even during lean deployment periods, the lawyers who structure those vehicles held their ground. Equity capital markets work, by contrast, has been directly squeezed by IPO market suppression. The -6% decline in ECM headcount is a precise reflection of deal market reality.

The near-zero aggregate capital markets figure (-0.3%) conceals this split entirely. Analysts who cite flat capital markets headcount as evidence of stability are missing a meaningful divergence within the category.

Geographic Shifts: Where PE Legal Work Is Moving

Pirical's office-level data (filtered to offices with above-average PE-adjacent headcount) identifies the fastest-growing and fastest-contracting markets for this practice cluster.

Growth and decline among offices with above-average PE-adjacent lawyer populations.

Nashville (+42%), Berlin (+31%), Dubai (+30%), and Munich (+28%) reflect distinct but coherent dynamics. Nashville and Austin confirm the migration of PE portfolio companies (and the fund managers that own them) into lower-cost US jurisdictions. Berlin and Munich reflect genuine growth in European PE activity, particularly mid-market buyout activity driven by German Mittelstand succession transactions. Dubai's emergence as a growth office reflects the Gulf's expanding dual role: LP capital source and increasingly active direct investment market.

Hong Kong's -13% contraction (from 895 to 775 PE-adjacent lawyers) is the most consequential geographic finding in the Pirical dataset. Both the absolute scale of the decline and its concentration in PE practices confirms what practitioners have reported anecdotally: geopolitical friction, regulatory uncertainty, and reduced cross-border deal flow between China and Western PE have materially reduced demand for Hong Kong-based PE legal capacity.

The Software Repricing: A Reckoning Flowing Through PE Into BigLaw

Software stocks have clearly entered a bear market in 2026, but the equity selloff may not be the most consequential development. The IGV software index is down more than 23 percent year to date, stock valuations have compressed significantly, and hundreds of billions in market value have evaporated. As recently noted in SaaStr's analysis of the 2026 software downturn, the more systemic risk may sit beneath the equity layer. Private credit funds are estimated to have $600 to $750 billion in exposure to software companies, much of it structured during peak-valuation years. If repayment stress spreads across sponsor-backed portfolios, the consequences extend beyond PE returns. Credit tightening would affect venture debt, growth rounds, and sponsor-led M&A, directly influencing the deal pipeline that sustains BigLaw's private equity and capital markets practices.

The repricing of enterprise software valuations is already a private equity story, and it is beginning to flow into BigLaw.

The IGV software ETF has shed more than 23% year-to-date. Salesforce and Workday are each down over 40% across the past twelve months. Software company valuations have fallen dramatically, with buyer pricing dropping from roughly 30x earnings in 2022 to approximately 16x today, and revenue-based valuations falling from 10-12x to 4x. The cause is not purely sentiment-driven: enterprise CIOs are actively redirecting budgets away from traditional software and toward a $600B+ AI infrastructure buildout, while AI-powered automation is beginning to threaten the subscription-based licensing model that justified a decade of premium valuations.

For PE firms, the practical consequences are severe in ways that will flow directly into legal market demand. Thoma Bravo executed 28 software acquisitions since 2023; Blackstone followed with 24. Many of those transactions were financed at peak valuations. At current valuations, debt payments are increasingly difficult to support; exit windows are frozen; losses are not hypothetical. The posture split is telling: Thoma Bravo and Vista are publicly framing the dislocation as a buying opportunity, while KKR and Apollo are characterizing their software exposure as limited. Goldman Sachs draws the uncomfortable newspaper industry analogy: structural decline dressed as cyclical dip. JPMorgan and Wedbush push back, calling the selloff an overshoot. Both positions can be simultaneously defensible.

For BigLaw's capital markets practices, the downstream effect is real and underappreciated. Frozen exits and refinancing risk mean fewer IPOs, fewer sponsor-to-sponsor transactions, and more restructuring pressure across leveraged software portfolios. Pirical's ECM headcount data (already down 6% across the dataset) may be the leading indicator of a more significant contraction if the software repricing proves structural. Firms like Goodwin, whose VC and growth equity practices were built for a specific market cycle, are most exposed. Firms with diversified PE relationships across sectors (Kirkland, Paul Weiss, Weil) are most insulated.

The Ownership Question: Is BigLaw PE's Next Target?

Private equity has long identified US law firms as one of the last unconsolidated, high-margin professional services sectors: reliable cash flows, low capital intensity, fragmented market, inelastic demand. The obstacle has been singular: ABA Model Rule 5.4, which prohibits fee-sharing between lawyers and non-lawyers, has functionally barred outside equity ownership of law firms across nearly all US jurisdictions. As Berkeley Law's The Network has noted, this same capital wall contributes to the US ranking 109th out of 128 countries in access to affordable civil legal services, giving reformers a powerful access-to-justice argument alongside PE's financial one.

That obstacle is eroding. Arizona eliminated its version of Rule 5.4 in 2021 and now licenses Alternative Business Structures allowing full nonlawyer equity ownership. 136 entities were approved by mid-2025, 59% of which are wholly nonlawyer-owned. Puerto Rico introduced a 49% nonlawyer ownership rule in 2025.

Where outright equity ownership remains prohibited, investors have adapted the Management Services Organization model, borrowed from PE's playbook in healthcare and accounting. The MSO structure separates a law firm's legal practice from its administrative infrastructure, allowing outside investors to own and profit from the latter while the law firm nominally retains exclusive control over legal work. As Sidley Austin's November 2025 analysis details, the MSO's upside is structurally constrained. Investors capture management fees rather than legal revenues, making returns inferior to the accounting firm model where PE has taken direct equity stakes at significant multiples in firms like Grant Thornton and Baker Tilly. Reed Smith's February 2026 market update reports that lenders are now underwriting MSOs based on the durability of long-term management services agreements, with platform acquisitions and multi-firm rollups becoming standard transaction templates.

The Pirical data raises a question that legal market observers have not yet fully engaged: the firms most deeply embedded in PE advisory relationships (Kirkland, Simpson Thacher, Weil, Paul Weiss) are simultaneously the most sophisticated interpreters of PE ownership structures, the most valuable as acquisition targets given their matter volume and client depth, and the most culturally resistant to outside ownership given their partnership-first identity. The legal architects of PE's healthcare rollups and accounting firm investments are now the logical subject of the same playbook.

There is no near-term evidence that any elite firm is actively pursuing or welcoming non-lawyer ownership. But the ABS infrastructure being built in Arizona and the MSO platforms accumulating contractual relationships with smaller firms may be the scaffolding upon which larger-scale consolidation eventually rests, particularly if a major jurisdiction like New York or California moves on Rule 5.4 reform. The medium-term outlook points toward continued incremental state-level reform, MSO platform consolidation, and a horizon within five to seven years where equity ownership in large US law firms becomes a question of corporate strategy, not regulatory theory.

Methodology

This analysis is produced from Pirical's proprietary platform intelligence, which aggregates and structures publicly available and disclosed professional data on lawyers, law firms, matters, and market movement. PE-adjacent practices were identified using Pirical's classification taxonomy, covering Corporate – Private Equity Transactions, Corporate – Investment Funds, Corporate – Investment Funds – PE Funds, Capital Markets, Capital Markets – Equity Capital Markets, and related crossover designations.

Headcount figures reflect January 2023 and January 2026 snapshots. Lateral movement data covers all identified movements within those practice designations between those dates. Matter data reflects publicly disclosed matters and is subject to the following limitations: (1) matters are tied to the current firm affiliation of the lawyers involved; (2) practice areas reflect lawyers' current designations; (3) locations reflect lawyers' current locations; and (4) counts reflect unique lawyer-location-matter associations, not unique matters.

PE-only AUM figures reflect estimates based on disclosed segment breakdowns and fundraise data through Q3 2025. Most firms do not publish granular PE-only AUM consistently; figures should be understood as directionally accurate. Office-level data reflects aggregated headcount filtered to offices above the dataset mean at the January 2023 baseline.

Note on methodology

Source: publicly-available data tracked by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Timeframe: Jan 2023 - Jan 2026

Analysis powered by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Pirical Legal Professionals is the largest attorney database built with the most comprehensive data on the market. Specifically designed for legal recruitment and legal market research.

Which AM Law 101-200 Firms Have The Strongest Organic Growth?

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 10:32:18 GMT

Big Law mergers have been on the rise in recent years and many firms have grown significantly through combinations. Merger-led growth often makes the headlines, but what can sometimes go under the radar are the firms growing significantly but steadily through lateral hires and promotions.

So we've taken a look, focusing on the AM Law Second Hundred this time! Here's the Pirical Ranking of the AM Law 101-200 firms that have recorded the most organic Partner headcount growth over the last 12 months.

Using publicly available data tracked by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP) .

Which AM Law 101-200 Firms Have Had the Most Organic Partner Headcount Growth?

United States, excluding Partners hired through mergers or acquisitions, February 2025 - February 2026

Note on methodology

Source: Publicly-available data tracked by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Timeframe: Feb 2025 - Feb 2026

Firms who grew significantly through major mergers have been excluded from this analysis.

Analysis powered by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Pirical Legal Professionals is the largest attorney database built with the most comprehensive data on the market. Specifically designed for legal recruitment and legal market research.

Secrets of Associate Productivity 2: Do Higher Salaries Increase Productivity? What’s the Right Combination of ‘Carrot’ and ‘Stick’?

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 16:31:24 GMT

Productivity is a hot topic for law firms. Uncovering what the most productive firms are doing differently promises to help firms maximize their revenues, without needing to hire more people or increase prices for clients.

Pirical has been working with customers to diagnose their current state of productivity and to test ideas about what really drives productivity across the market. We recently hosted a webinar chatting through these ideas, covering salary, bonuses and more. Here’s some of what we learned.

Case study: Firm X is a Mid-Market National Firm in the UK

Firm X’s Associates Are 20% Or £10m Per Year Less Productive Than Peer Firms’, Despite Having Similar Chargeable Hours Targets.

What can Firm X learn from the market to increase productivity?

�� If Firm X increases their salary, will they get more?

No. Higher salaries are not correlated with higher productivity at any seniority.

They are, however, correlated with higher targets (or the expectation of more work). This means: if I ask for more, I must pay more.

��The correlation between targets and salary is not linear. Above ~1750 hours, each incremental 50-hour increase corresponds to a disproportionately larger salary adjustment - needed to pay for more significant trade-offs.

At 1,800 hours , you’re working flat out. ��

At 1,850 hours , you need to pay for convenient exercise, so you buy the expensive gym membership closer to your house. ��

At 1,900 hours , you need to pay for convenient food, so you buy a meal delivery service. ��️

At 2,000 hours , you need to pay for convenient childcare, so you hire a nanny. ��‍��

But salary is only part of the story. To really understand how lawyers are incentivised, it is important to look at bonus structure.

�� If Firm X increases their bonuses, will they get more?

Bonus structure differs notably between the most productive firms (leaders) and the least productive firms (laggards) in two main ways.

1. Laggards pay out more individual bonuses to associates who have not hit their target. Leaders pay out fewer bonuses to this group.

2. Laggards also cap off bonuses, whereas leaders don’t. This means leading firms provide an incentive to keep working marginal hours after the target has been hit. Laggards don’t.

�� Besides carrots, should Firm X use sticks to increase productivity?

Leaders and laggards respond to their 25% least productive associates differently, suggesting differences in their performance management practices.

Leaders have 2x-3x higher involuntary exit rates of the least productive associates compared to Laggards, suggesting more decisive action around underperformance.

But leaders also had stronger performance one year later of the least productive associates who were retained. In other words, when leaders choose not to exit a bottom-quartile performer, that individual is significantly more likely to improve.

These findings suggest that Leaders are more likely to actively manage underperformance, rather than just tolerate it.

Bonuses and performance management were both actionable opportunities identified by Pirical for Firm X. Together they will help close the £10m revenue gap between Firm X and peers and help Firm X better compete in today’s legal market.

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Which AM Law 100 Firms Have The Best Lateral Partner Retention?

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 17:15:49 GMT

3 minute read • Updated 8 July 2026

Using publicly-available data tracked by Pirical , we've analyzed how many of the lateral Partner hires made by AM Law 100 firms between 2020-2022 exited the firm within 3 years of joining.

Note on methodology

Ranked: Which AM Law 100 Firms Have the Highest Lateral Partner Retention Rates?

Lateral Partner hires and how many then left the firm within the first 3 years

Global, AM Law 100, Firms with >5 lateral Partner hires, hires made between Jan 2020 - Dec 2022

Partner Retention Rates Are Lowest in Texas, Where the Lateral Market is Particularly Competitive

The major European and US legal hubs of Paris ( 90% ), London ( 82% ), and New York City ( 82% ) show the strongest lateral Partner retention rates.

In contrast, the legal markets of Los Angeles ( 75% ), Dallas ( 74% ), and Houston ( 74% ) have the lowest retention. As a particularly competitive lateral market, Texas appears to be the trickiest state to hold onto lateral Partner hires within the first 3 years of joining.

Cybersecurity Lateral Partner Retention Falls Below the 79% Practice Average

Looking at the data by practice, Labor and Employment ( 84% ) practices have the strongest lateral Partner retention within the first 3 years. Project Development ( 82% ) and Litigation ( 81% ) practices are the next highest.

Cybersecurity, Privacy & Data Protection is the practice with the lowest retention at 68% , well below the 79% average. I nsurance ( 77% ) and Capital Markets ( 77% ) practices also show a slightly higher than average rate of early exits.

Firms With Lateral Partner Retention Rates Greater Than 90% Source a Lot of Talent From The AM Law 50

Among the firms with over 90% retention within the first 3 years, Kirkland & Ellis was the most common source of the hire, accounting for 5.2% of moves.

Latham & Watkins (2.6%) was the next most common source of the hire, followed by a number of AM Law top 50 firms and Magic Circle firm Linklaters.

Note on methodology

Source: Publicly-available data tracked by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP).

Excludes: Firms with fewer than 5 lateral Partner hires and moves as a result of direct mergers.

Timeframe: Jan 2020 - Dec 2025.

Analysis powered by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Pirical Legal Professionals is the largest attorney database built with the most comprehensive data on the market. Specifically designed for legal recruitment and legal market research.

Which AM Law 101-150 Firms Hire The Most Partners From The Top 50?

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 16:05:03 GMT

The Volume of Lateral Moves From AM Law 1-50 to 101-150 Firms has Increased by +45% Over the Last 3 Years

Ranked: Which AM Law 101-150 Firms Have Hired the Most Partners From Firms Ranked 1-50 ?

Global, AM Law 101-150, All Lateral Partner Hires From AM Law 1-50, January 2023 - January 2026

Benesch and Honigman Have Made the Most Lateral Partner Hires From Top 50 Firms

For Benesch, hiring from the AM Law top 50 is a key part of their growth strategy. Over the last 3 years, the firm has recruited over 20 Partners from 1-50 firms. These joiners account for 35% of all lateral Partner hires.

Honigman also seem to actively target lateral hires from the AM Law top 50. Over the last 3 years, almost 50% of all Partner hires have come from firms ranked 1-50.

"Benesch's growth strategy has always been intentional. We are focused on attracting high-caliber attorneys whose experience aligns with the needs of our clients and the trajectory and culture of our firm."

Gregg Eisenberg

Managing Partner, Benesch

"Our ability to recruit significant talent from the Am Law 50 reflects the strength of our culture , our collaborative model and the opportunity we offer laterals to build and expand practices in a way that is both entrepreneurial and fully supported . Lawyers are looking for a firm where they can do sophisticated work, grow with intention and feel genuinely invested in. We are proud to be that destination."

Lauren Tapper

Chief Talent Officer, Benesch

Which AM Law 1-50 Firms do the 101-150 Firms Target the Most for Lateral Hires?

Perkins Coie has lost the most Partners to 101-150 firms over the last 3 years, this includes a 7-Partner team move to Dorsey Whitney in 2025.

Reed Smith ( 14 ) and Kirkland & Ellis ( 13 ) have been the next most common source of lateral hires.

Most of the Lateral Hires Made by 101-150 Firms Have Been Litigation Partners

34% of the lateral hires from AM Law top 50 firms were Litigation Partners. Corporate (16%) was the next most common practice focus.

Note on methodology

Source: Publicly-available data tracked by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Timeframe: Jan 2023 - Jan 2026

Analysis powered by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Private Equity's Law Firm Arms Race

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 13:47:36 GMT

Pirical tracked 50,000+ lawyers across PE and capital markets practices over three years. The talent reshaping we found is more dramatic than the headline numbers suggest — and a looming ownership question may soon make BigLaw itself a PE target.

By the Numbers

5,024

PE matters tracked at the top-ranked firm over 3 years

+52%

Largest PE practice headcount growth seen at any elite firm

24

Law firms ranked by PE matter volume and lawyer deployment

–13%

PE lawyer decline in Hong Kong over the same period

Matter Intelligence

Who is Actually Doing The Work

Pirical's matter-level data cross-references publicly disclosed engagements across PE-adjacent practices against the top 20 PE organisations. The ratio between matters and lawyers is analytically meaningful on its own: high matter-to-lawyer ratios reflect deal intensity and practice concentration, not just headcount scale.

The gap between first and second place is larger than the gap between second and twenty-fourth.

Ranks 11–24 are in the full report — s ign up below to get the complete table, including Sidley, Skadden, A&O Shearman, Gibson Dunn, Davis Polk, and more.

Three-Year Talent Movement

Who is Building, Who is Bleeding

Headcount tells you market position. Lateral movement tells you strategic intent. Pirical tracked all PE and capital markets lawyer joiners and leavers from January 2023 to January 2026. The net figures below expose firms whose joiner numbers mask significant underlying instability.

Biggest Net Gain

+79 net lawyers

One elite PE firm — historically selective, not known for lateral hiring at scale — ran 149 joiners against 70 leavers. That is a deliberate capacity build, not replacement churn. It has received remarkably little market attention.

The Treadmill Problem

88 in, 102 out

One firm was simultaneously recruiting aggressively and losing talent at high volume — running a replacement treadmill at precisely the wrong point in the cycle for its core practice.

Biggest Net Loss

–52 net lawyers

The most troubling signal for an established PE practice in the dataset. 103 departures against 51 joiners over three years. This is not a firm people typically flee.

Where PE Legal Work is Moving

Pirical's office-level data identifies the fastest-growing and fastest-contracting markets for PE legal work. Nashville and Austin reflect the migration of PE portfolio companies into lower-cost US jurisdictions.

Berlin and Munich point to real growth in German Mittelstand succession transactions. And one major market is contracting faster than most practitioners acknowledge.

Most Significant Contraction: Hong Kong: –13%

From 895 to 775 PE-adjacent lawyers. Both the absolute scale of the decline and its concentration in PE practices confirms what practitioners have reported anecdotally: geopolitical friction and reduced cross-border deal flow have materially reduced demand for Hong Kong-based PE legal capacity.

Practice-Level Trends

The Split That Aggregate Numbers Hide

Capital markets headcount looks broadly flat across the Pirical dataset. But flat aggregates can conceal a meaningful divergence. Fund formation has been the most resilient PE-adjacent legal revenue line across this cycle. Equity capital markets work has been directly squeezed by IPO market suppression.

Analysts who cite flat capital markets headcount as evidence of stability are missing this split entirely.

+7%

Corporate – Investment Funds headcount growth, 2023–2026

–6%

Capital Markets – Equity headcount change, same period

–0.3%

Aggregate capital markets figure that hides both trends above

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Note on methodology

Source: publicly-available data tracked by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Timeframe: Jan 2023 - Jan 2026

Analysis powered by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Pirical Legal Professionals is the largest attorney database built with the most comprehensive data on the market. Specifically designed for legal recruitment and legal market research.

The $100 Billion Question: Which BigLaw Firms Already Own the Venezuela Gold Rush?

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 15:35:26 GMT

When Venezuela’s oil sector reopened to U.S. companies in January 2026, news coverage focused on sanctions relief and Trump’s executive orders. Those headlines were predictable. One question went largely unasked: which law firms had already positioned themselves years earlier to capture what may become the largest energy legal market since post-invasion Iraq?

We asked that question. The answer surprised us.

Using public matter data from Pirical , we tracked more than 2,400 lawyer-matter associations between major oil and gas companies and their outside counsel. The dataset draws from law firm websites, news coverage, and IFLR deal records. It shows which firms already hold the deepest relationships with the eleven companies most likely to invest in Venezuela.

Not the companies that could go. The ones that will.

The market is already concentrated. Firms that bet early on Chevron, ExxonMobil, and ConocoPhillips now sit in pole position. The data also shows a sharp divide. Firms that dominate M&A do not necessarily control the litigation and arbitration work that Venezuela’s legal disorder will generate at scale.

Why Venezuela Matters, and Why This Time Is Different

Venezuela holds roughly 20 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves. That fact has not changed. What changed in January 2026 was the legal framework.

First, the U.S. Treasury issued General License No. 46. The license allows American companies to transact with PDVSA, Venezuela’s state oil company. At the same time, Venezuela’s National Assembly reformed its oil laws. The reforms allow foreign companies to control production, manage cash flows, and resolve disputes outside Venezuelan courts.

That combination unlocked activity.

The legal complexity remains extreme. Companies must determine who their counterparty really is, since the U.S. still recognizes the 2015 National Assembly as Venezuela’s legitimate government. They must comply with Executive Order 14373, which places Venezuelan oil revenues under U.S. government custody. The order shields those revenues from billions in creditor claims, including ExxonMobil’s $1.6 billion arbitration award and ConocoPhillips’ settled $2 billion claim.

Sanctions compliance still matters. The license continues to bar dealings with Chinese, Iranian, and Russian entities. Infrastructure risk also looms large. Industry estimates put the cost of restoring production at roughly $100 billion over ten years.

This is not simple deal work. It spans international arbitration, sovereign debt, sanctions, energy regulation, and political risk. Firms will not win this work through RFPs. They will win it through existing client relationships.

The Eleven Companies That Actually Matter

We identified likely participants using three filters: existing Venezuelan presence or claims, financial capacity measured by market capitalization, and public strategic signals. That produced eleven companies across four tiers.

Tier 1: Already There or Coming Back

Chevron ($282B market cap) remains the only U.S. major operating in Venezuela under Treasury license. ExxonMobil ($515B) and ConocoPhillips ($135B) exited in 2007 after nationalization. Both still hold arbitration leverage that matters in any re-entry discussion.

Tier 2: Opportunistic Players

Occidental Petroleum ($48B), Marathon Petroleum ($52B), and Hess Corporation ($45B) fit this category. Each has signaled interest in distressed assets, operates heavy-oil refineries, or runs assets in neighboring countries with transferable expertise.

Tier 3: Service Companies

Schlumberger ($63B), Halliburton ($31B), and Baker Hughes ($33B) provide the technology and equipment that make production possible. They maintained varying degrees of Venezuelan presence through 2020. They will follow operator clients back in.

Their risk profile differs. They bill for services rendered, regardless of who owns the oil. Their legal work centers on service contracts, licensing, and liability allocation.

Tier 4: Refining-Focused Buyers

Phillips 66 ($46B) and Valero Energy ($42B) are downstream refiners with heavy crude capability. They are buyers, not producers. Their legal needs skew toward commercial contracts and sanctions compliance, not production-sharing or political risk insurance.

Together, these eleven companies account for most foreseeable Venezuela-related legal spend.

Firms Positioned to Win

Jones Day’s Chevron Concentration

Jones Day leads the rankings for one clear reason: Chevron.

The firm handled 103 public matters for Chevron alone. That figure is nearly 2.5 times larger than the next biggest firm-client pairing, Bracewell’s 43 matters with Phillips 66. Since Chevron is already operating in Venezuela and holds Treasury approvals, Jones Day’s position is structural.

Any expansion flows through existing counsel.

Jones Day also appears among the largest pairings with Marathon Petroleum, at 23 matters. That dual exposure to two of the eleven target companies creates depth competitors cannot replicate quickly.

Litigation Specialists in Plain Sight

Latham & Watkins ranks second with 110 matters. King & Spalding follows with 97. Both show broader client spread across the eleven targets.

Practice area data from Pirical adds context. Litigation accounts for 338 matters, second only to M&A at 446. That matters in Venezuela.

King & Spalding’s 15-matter relationship with ConocoPhillips positions it well for arbitration and dispute work tied to legacy claims. White & Case, with 23 Occidental matters and 15 Hess matters, sits squarely in the lane of greenfield structuring and political risk mitigation.

The Service Company Angle

Sidley Austin holds 30 matters across the dataset, including 15 with Halliburton. Davis Polk shows a parallel 15-matter relationship with Baker Hughes.

Service company work rarely grabs headlines. It does generate volume. These companies need master service agreements, licensing terms, procurement contracts, and insurance structures in high-risk environments. The work is steadier than operator equity deals.

Boutique Arbitration Plays

Paul, Weiss logged 61 matters with just 37 lawyers. That produces the highest matters-per-lawyer ratio among top firms. In a market where arbitration clauses and sovereign immunity questions appear in nearly every deal, efficiency matters.

Davis Polk controls the largest ExxonMobil relationship in the dataset, with 34 matters. If ExxonMobil decides to convert its arbitration award into leverage for re-entry, Davis Polk will already be inside the decision loop.

Largest Single Firm-Client Relationships

What’s Missing Tells the Story

Kirkland & Ellis ranks near the top overall, but its exposure skews toward Marathon Oil Group and service companies rather than Chevron, ExxonMobil, or Hess. That mix signals strength in broader energy work without the same operator concentration that will likely drive early Venezuela decisions.

That is not a flaw. It is a strategic reality.

The same pattern appears for Skadden, Vinson & Elkins, and Sullivan & Cromwell. All have strong energy practices. None show dominant exposure to the specific companies most likely to move first.

Firms outside the top 20 face an even steeper climb unless they bring specialized sanctions, arbitration, or sovereign debt expertise that justifies breaking existing counsel relationships.

What the Practice Mix Reveals

Firm rankings only tell part of the story. Practice area distribution shows where legal risk and spend actually concentrate once activity begins. Pirical data makes the pattern clear.

Litigation does not trail far behind M&A. Insurance and product liability work ranks higher than capital markets and environmental matters. That matters in Venezuela, where degraded infrastructure, legacy equipment, and accident risk will drive claims early.

Practice Area Distribution Across 11 Target Oil & Gas Companies (Global)

The Litigation Boutiques Punching Above Their Weight

Beyond BigLaw, several U.S. litigation boutiques show outsized oil and gas exposure. Carver Darden leads with 19 matters handled by just five lawyers. That is a 3.8 matters-per-lawyer ratio.

Kobre & Kim, Beck Redden, and Gibbs & Bruns show similar patterns. These firms will not structure deals. When disputes arise, operators already trust them.

The International Players

Venezuela is not a purely U.S. story.

Clifford Chance, Osler Hoskin & Harcourt, Freshfields, and A&O Shearman all rank in the top 20. Their experience in international arbitration, sovereign debt, and cross-border regulation fills gaps U.S. firms sometimes lack.

Leading International Firms by Oil & Gas Matter Volume

When the Deals Start Moving

The top firms hold a real advantage. They are already embedded.

If Chevron expands, Jones Day does not pitch. If ExxonMobil acts on its award, Davis Polk is already advising. If ConocoPhillips negotiates under the new oil law, King & Spalding brings institutional memory others lack.

The work will not stay transactional. Creditors frozen out by Executive Order 14373 will litigate. Sanctions licenses will evolve. Contract disputes will cross jurisdictions. Political risk will shift month to month.

Firms with deep litigation and arbitration benches may capture more value than headline deal volume suggests. The data points to Paul, Weiss, White & Case, and King & Spalding.

Service companies add a second pipeline. Schlumberger, Halliburton, and Baker Hughes will follow their clients and bill consistently. Kirkland, Sidley Austin, and Davis Polk benefit from that steadier flow.

The market is largely spoken for. The open question is staffing. Can the firms that win actually handle the surge when it arrives?

Note on methodology

Rankings reflect analysis of more than 2,400 public lawyer-matter associations, sourced from Pirical’s database. Sources include law firm disclosures, news reporting, and IFLR deal data.

Target companies were selected based on Venezuelan exposure, market capitalization, and public strategy signals.

Matters are tied to lawyers’ current firm affiliations, not the firm where the work originated. Practice areas reflect current lawyer designations. Counts represent unique lawyer-location-matter associations, which may result in double counting.

Analysis powered by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Pirical Legal Professionals is the largest attorney database built with the most comprehensive data on the market. Specifically designed for legal recruitment and legal market research.

The Birmingham Legal Market In Numbers

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 14:53:44 GMT

Birmingham is the UK's second largest city and one of the most significant legal markets, home to more than 600 Partners at Global 200 & The Lawyer UK 100 firms.

In recent years, major firms like TLT and Hill Dickinson have opened new offices in Brum, attracted by " one of the largest and most successful professional and financial centres in the UK " and by the prospect of building " a bridge between London offices and regional bases in the North ".

Clearly Birmingham is still attracting growing firms, but what's really driving growth in the city and region at large? How have major infrastructure projects like HS2 and the Birmingham Knowledge Quarter affected recent demand in the local legal market? Using publicly-available data tracked by Pirical , we've taken a look.

Partner Headcount Growth in the Midlands Has Fallen Behind Other UK Cities

Birmingham ( +8% ) and Nottingham ( +3% ) have increased Partner numbers over the last 3 years, but the rate of growth has lagged behind all other major UK markets.

Among Global 200 & The Lawyer UK 100 firms, Edinburgh ( +32% ) has seen the sharpest growth in headcount, followed by Manchester ( +19% ) , Bristol ( +17% ) , and Glasgow ( +16% ) .

"The reverse of the city's proximity to London being an advantage to get in and out easily to see clients, is that it is possible to live south of Birmingham and commute into London, where salaries are so much higher .

That process was accelerated during the covid pandemic, when working from home became common. That presents something of a challenge to Birmingham firms, meaning the market for talent is not what it was . And lawyers are well looked after by their firms, making the market even more inert."

Chris Hunt

Partner & Real Estate Practice Leader, Gowling WLG

Almost Twice as Many Partners Leave Birmingham for London, as Move From London to Birmingham

More than 70% of the lateral Partner moves between 2022-2025, moved from within Birmingham itself, leaving around 30% as intercity moves. The top destinations for Partner moves in and out of Birmingham were London and Manchester.

London recorded 12 Partner moves into Birmingham (17% of total moves in) and 22 moves out of the city (37% of total moves out), creating an imbalance in the flow of Partners between the capital and Brum. According to Chris Hunt (Partner & Real Estate Practice Leader at Gowling WLG) , "Birmingham's proximity to London is not helpful in the context of recruitment. It presents candidates with a genuine choice in the way that no other major regional city does, with earnings so much higher in London."

Second to London, Manchester saw 8 moves into Birmingham (12% of total moves in) and 6 moves out of the city (10% of total moves out). This indicates a more balanced flow of Partner moves.

The Fastest Growing Firms in Birmingham Have Grown Through a Mixture of Lateral Hires and Promotions

Most of the top 10 firms with the highest increases to Partner headcount growth have favoured lateral hires. Irwin Mitchell and Mills & Reeve have taken a more balanced approach, while Browne Jacobson and Bevan Brittan have relied more heavily on Partner promotions.

Real Estate is the Fastest Growing Practice Area in Birmingham

Since 2022, Real Estate Partner headcount at Global 200 & The Lawyer UK 100 firms has risen by +13% . This ranks Real Estate as the fastest growing practice in Birmingham, alongside Corporate ( +11% ) and Insurance ( +10% ). Real Estate growth may be partly driven by the many "development and infrastructure projects going on in the city", such as HS2 and the Birmingham Knowledge Quarter. This "feeds professional services firms, such as lawyers", says Chris Hunt (Gowling WLG) .

Looking deeper, the growth among Birmingham’s Real Estate practices has been primarily driven by Partners working in Generalist Real Estate ( 67% ). More specialised sub-sectors such as Commercial Property ( 17% ), Residential Property ( 11% ), and Real Estate Planning ( 6% ) make up the rest.

"Many of the larger law firms have moved all or parts of their real estate practice out of London to regional cities , often for profitability reasons. Birmingham is an obvious destination because it's close enough to London to make travelling in and out of the capital (where many of the mort prominent real estate developers and investors are based) straightforward and with a mature market for talent in the city.

The corollary of that is medium-sized and smaller firms have stayed focused on real estate as core to their businesses in cites like Birmingham, as some the larger firms leave behind certain types of real estate, such as residential."

Chris Hunt

Partner & Real Estate Practice Leader, Gowling WLG

Birmingham's Real Estate Growth Ranks it Highly Nationwide, But Edinburgh and Bristol Have Seen Greater Spikes in Headcount

Real Estate is clearly a key area of growth in cities other than Birmingham. The increase in Partner headcount in Edinburgh ( +33% ) and Bristol ( +22% ), surpasses that of Birmingham ( +13% ).

Five Law Firms Hold 50% of the Real Estate Market Share in Birmingham

In terms of Partner headcount, Gowling ( 14%) holds the largest piece of the Real Estate market. Gateley ( 12% ), Shakespeare Martineau ( 10% ), Eversheds Sutherland ( 8% ) and Knights PLC ( 6% ) make up the rest of the top five.

Other Firms May Be Looking to Seize More of the Real Estate Market Share

Of the firms with significant market share in Real Estate, not all are actively growing. Knights PLC ( +80% ), Gateley ( +13% ), and Gowling ( +13% ) have increased Partner headcount in this practice area, but Shakespeare Marineau has flat growth ( +0% ) and Eversheds Sutherland headcount has decreased ( -27% ).

The firms with significant growth that may be looking to seize more Real Estate market share, are the likes of Browne Jacobson ( +150% ), Weightmans ( +100% ), and Freeths ( +67% ).

Note on methodology

Source: Publicly-available data tracked by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Timeframe: Dec 2022 - Dec 2025

Analysis powered by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Pirical Legal Professionals is the largest attorney database built with the most comprehensive data on the market. Specifically designed for legal recruitment and legal market research.

Which Law Firms Are Powering The Data Center Boom?

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 14:41:27 GMT

Space X recently announced a plan to launch up to 1 million satellites into the Earth's orbit , part of a grand vision to start putting data centers in space.

The logic? Land-based data centers require large volumes of water to power the cooling systems, whereas a space-based network would rely on the radiative cooling that occurs naturally in space. The reason? The explosive demand for data centers that's come with the rapid evolution of AI. For now at least, that demand needs to be met on Earth.

So this got us thinking, which law firms are most involved in data center work? Which firms are actively hiring attorneys with data center experience and building out the largest teams poised to benefit from this ever-growing industry?

Using publicly-available data tracked by Pirical , we've ranked the law firms powering the data center boom.

The Volume of Lateral Partner Hires With Data Center Experience Jumped by +65% in 2025

Legal demand for data center expertise is clearly rising fast among the AM Law 200. Lateral Partner moves with data center experience have grown steadily since 2020 (+168%) .

The rise partly reflects the fact that an increasing number of attorneys have worked on matters related to data centers. However, lateral demand is heating up, evidenced by the +65% spike in lateral Partner hires in 2025. Competition for Partners with data center experience is likely to intensify, with law firms expecting more and more work in 2026 — "Many firms have now formed special teams of lawyers across a broad range of practices to handle data center projects."

“Our investment in Data Center talent has been deliberate and forward-looking. We are seeing sustained client demand at the intersection of real estate, energy, infrastructure and technology , and we have aligned our lateral hiring strategy accordingly.

By prioritizing partners with deep, hands-on Data Center experience, we are not only strengthening our national platform but also ensuring we can guide clients through the full lifecycle of these complex projects , from site selection and incentives to financing, construction and long-term operations.

Being recognized among the top firms for Data Center-focused lateral hiring reflects a disciplined growth strategy driven by where the market is heading and where our clients need us most.”

Lauren Tapper

Chief Talent Officer, Benesch

Ranked: Which AM Law Firms Have Been Hiring the Most Lateral Partners with Data Center Experience?

Global, AM Law 200, > 5 Lateral Partner Hires, Jan 2020 - Jan 2026

“In just the past three months, we’ve continued adding leading deal makers and other senior attorneys across many disciplines, including digital infrastructure and energy, to strengthen our capabilities as data center work accelerates globally.

Our data center practice tripled in 2025 compared to the prior year, and we’re advising hyperscalers and other industry leaders around the globe on all facets of data center work, from digital infrastructure development and transactions to power supply solutions and navigating regulatory hurdles.”

Jonathan Gordon

Technology Global Chair, Baker Botts

The AM Law Top 20 Have the Deepest Benches of Data Center Partners, But Kirkland & Ellis Leads the Way

Looking at the number of 'data center' lateral hires relative to total hires shows us which firms are prioritizing and growing their data center expertise. But which firms are already dominant in the space, with the largest existing teams of Partners with data center experience?

The AM Law top 20 largely come out on top; Kirkland & Ellis have almost 250 Partners with data center experience and Dentons (195) , Latham & Watkins (110) , Greenberg Traurig (101) , and DLA Piper (100) all boast teams numbering in the hundreds.

Across the AM Law 200, 21% of Partners with data center experience primarily practice in Real Estate, followed by 16% in Corporate.

Ranked: Which Firms Have the Largest 'Data Center' Teams?

Global, AM Law 200, > 20 Partners, Data as of Jan 2026

Chicago Has Been Rising as a Major Hub for Data Center Work, Alongside Texas

The cities with the highest number of AM Law 200 'data center' Partner hires are the usual major legal markets of New York City (131) , London (87) , and Washington, DC (85) .

Looking beyond them, Chicago (43 hires) has been emerging as a tier 1 market for data centers . The Windy City now houses over 70 data centers, with major players like Equinix, Digital Realty, and CyrusOne driving its prominence. Chicago offers a strategic central location, with the robust infrastructure and reliable power supply needed for data centers.

Texas is another market with significant momentum, with most lateral hires occurring in Dallas (39) and Houston (35) . The state has become the second largest data center market in the US , collectively attracting hyperscale and AI-driven infrastructure investment in recent years.

Note on methodology

'Data Center' Partners are Partners with references to Data Center experience in their professional bios and previous matters worked

Source: Publicly-available data tracked by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Timeframe: Jan 2020 - Jan 2026

Analysis powered by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Pirical Legal Professionals is the largest attorney database built with the most comprehensive data on the market. Specifically designed for legal recruitment and legal market research.

The Legal Arms Race for AI: Which Firms Are Winning Big Tech's Most Coveted Clients

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 10:26:20 GMT

The scramble to represent Big Tech's AI ambitions isn't coming. It's already here, and the winners are pulling away.

Using Pirical's database of publicly disclosed legal matters, we tracked which law firms have built the deepest relationships with the world's most valuable AI companies. The results show a clear hierarchy. Latham & Watkins leads with 252 public matters across multiple AI giants. Fenwick follows with 223. UK Magic Circle firm Freshfields claims 135.

The hottest client roster in law right now has six names: Alphabet , Microsoft , Meta , Apple , NVIDIA , and OpenAI . Here's who represents them.

Why AI Is the Next Billion-Dollar Legal Market

Artificial intelligence has become one of the largest sources of legal demand worldwide. Leading AI companies now hold trillions in combined market value. Private developers like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Databricks are reaching valuations historically reserved for the biggest public tech firms.

According to the Stanford AI Index (2025) and J.P. Morgan analysis, private investment in AI exceeded $250 billion last year. Major tech players are projected to spend hundreds of billions annually on AI infrastructure alone. Regulatory activity is accelerating. The U.S., EU, and Asia are passing AI-specific laws at unprecedented speed, establishing new frameworks for compliance, IP, safety, and accountability.

Firms that can support fast-growing AI clients are positioned at the center of the next major wave of high-value legal work.

Methodology: How We Ranked the Firms

We identified the top 25 AI companies by estimated market value. The list includes both public corporations (using current market capitalization) and venture-backed private firms (whose valuations rely on investment rounds and reported estimates). Private company valuations are estimates. All data reflects information as of late November.

We cross-referenced this client list against Pirical's database of publicly available legal work, sourced from law firm websites, legal news, and LinkedIn. Pirical tracks specific lawyer-matter associations, providing a clear picture of which firms actively advise these AI giants.

Important data notes:

Counts reflect unique lawyer-matter associations, not unique matters. Each matter is tied to the current firm and practice area of the lawyers involved. This approach provides a granular, verifiable measure of legal engagement.

Top 25 AI Companies by Estimated Market Value

Leading Firms by Client-Specific AI Matters

Largest single firm-client relationships (all-time, global)

These engagements highlight deep, often long-term partnerships between leading law firms and AI's most influential players.

Quinn Emanuel and Cravath are trusted for high-stakes litigation, handling patent, trade secret, and regulatory disputes. Freshfields and White & Case navigate complex cross-border compliance. Fenwick's dual role with Meta and Databricks showcases appeal to both established tech giants and emerging AI startups.

Top Firms by Total AI Matters Across Multiple Clients

These firms act as cross-platform strategic advisors, offering comprehensive support across AI clients. Their broad exposure allows them to handle diverse needs, from regulatory compliance and IP protection to competition inquiries, complex contracting, and litigation.

By advising multiple AI leaders, these firms gain insights into emerging legal norms, positioning them to shape the AI sector's future legal framework.

Global Leaders Outside the Am Law 200

The AI legal market extends far beyond traditional Am Law 200 firms. UK Magic Circle firms like Freshfields and Slaughter and May lead in Europe, reflecting active regulatory environments. Specialized boutiques such as Keker, Van Nest & Peters and Hausfeld address niche litigation needs. Strong presence from firms in India, Africa, and China illustrates AI's worldwide footprint.

What This Means for the Legal Market

The legal race for AI clients is not just about billable hours. It's about shaping the foundations of technological regulation. Firms winning this battle are proactively defining guardrails for innovation, intellectual property, and ethical deployment.

While U.S. firms currently dominate, AI's global footprint demands international legal networks. The rise of specialized boutiques and non-Am Law 200 firms from every corner of the globe signals a distributed, interconnected legal ecosystem.

The stakes are clear. For law firms, it's about securing position at the forefront of the next technological revolution. For AI clients, it's about navigating unprecedented legal and ethical terrain. The winners will be those who possess not just technical fluency but strategic foresight to anticipate and shape the legal landscape.

The market has already begun to consolidate. Pirical data shows which firms have built the relationships that matter. As AI regulation accelerates and disputes multiply, those early bets are paying off.

Note on methodology

Analysis based on Pirical's database of publicly disclosed legal matters, sourced from law firm websites, news coverage, and IFLR deal records. Counts reflect unique lawyer-matter associations. Private company valuations are estimates based on reported funding rounds and industry analysis.

Analysis powered by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Pirical Legal Professionals is the largest attorney database built with the most comprehensive data on the market. Specifically designed for legal recruitment and legal market research.

AM Law 100 Partner Attrition: Which Firms Have Been Losing The Most Partners?

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 12:28:56 GMT

Partner attrition can be a key metric of a firm's stability, providing an insight into which firms are effectively growing and retaining talent.

Over the course of 2025, the average rate of Partner attrition across the AM Law 100 rose slightly from 6% to 8% . So are firms across the board struggling to keep hold of Partners or are a few firms in particular causing this spike?

Using publicly-available data tracked by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP) , we've analysed how Partner attrition compares across the AM Law 100.

Note on methodology: data is derived from tracked Partner exits, numbers may be slightly incomplete due to limited public information. Exits include Partners that left but didn't lateral to another firm, eg. retired.

Ranked: Which AM Law 100 Firms Have Had the Highest Recent Partner Attrition Rates?

Firms That Have Improved Their Partner Attrition

A few AM Law 100 firms saw big improvements in Partner attrition in 2025.

BCLP had the largest drop in attrition, falling from 14% to 9% . Hunton Andrews Kurth also saw major gains, with attrition nearly halving to 4% - a change that coincides with the firm’s introduction of a non-equity Partner tier, designed to help retain & attract senior talent.

Akin and Milbank made similar improvements, both firms lowered Partner attrition from 11% to 6% in 2025.

Has There Been Any Politically-Affiliated Attrition?

While exact causation is difficult to prove, some of the firms with the highest increases in Partner attrition were caught up in the US administration's targeting of law firms in early 2025.

As Bloomberg Law reported, 4 firms fought the executive orders placed against them, while 9 firms reached settlements in which they promised to provide a total of $940 million in pro bono legal services. A sample of the firms involved shows that most of them saw seen Partner attrition increase in 2025 (compared to 2024).

Which Practice Groups Have Seen the Highest Rates of Partner Attrition?

Relative to total AM Law Partner headcount, Insurance (18%) has the highest attrition rate of any major practice group. It's also the only practice group with above average attrition (15%) .

So if you're recruiting for your firm's Insurance practice, you're facing some of the highest Partner attrition rates in the industry.

Which Cities Have Seen the Highest Rates of Partner Attrition?

Texas appears to be the trickiest state to retain talent, with both Houston (19%) and Dallas (17%) recording the highest rate of AM Law Partner attrition between Jan 2024 - Dec 2025.

Among other large legal markets in the US, the Bay Area (17%) , Los Angeles (16%) , and Chicago (16%) all had a higher than average rate of attrition over the same 24-month period.

Note on methodology

Source: Publicly-available data tracked by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Timeframe : Jan 2024 - Dec 2025

Attrition Rate % = (Number of Partner exits) ÷ (Average Partner headcount for the timeframe) × 100

Data is derived from tracked Partner exits, numbers may be slightly incomplete due to limited public information. Exits include Partners that left but didn't lateral to another firm, eg. retired.

Analysis powered by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Pirical Legal Professionals is the largest attorney database built with the most comprehensive data on the market. Specifically designed for legal recruitment and legal market research.

Mapped: What Would the Hogan Lovells and Cadwalader Merger Look Like?

Fri, 19 Dec 2025 16:58:35 GMT

Yesterday, news broke of yet another Big Law merger! Hogan Lovells and Cadwalader announced their plans to combine, looking to launch in July 2026, according to Law.com . In November, we reported that Cadwalader had entered merger talks with Alston & Bird . However, the firm is now clearly pursuing an alternative tie-up.

If successful, the merger would create a new legal powerhouse, with more than 3,100 lawyers globally and an estimated $3.6 billion in annual revenue. 'Hogan Lovells Cadwalader' would rank as the fifth largest firm in the world by revenue.

This latest announcement follows a string of recent merger discussions, including Winston & Strawn and Taylor Wessing , and Ashurst and Perkins Coie , making 2025 a very busy year for Big Law combinations.

Using publicly-available data tracked by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP) , we've taken a look at which locations & practices would grow under the merger, and how many Partners might be expected to leave throughout the talks.

Hogan Lovells Stands to Significantly Strengthen its Footprint in the New York City Market

The combination would bolster Hogan Lovell's Partner numbers in New York City ( +72% ), London ( +12% ), Washington, D.C. ( +8 ) and Dublin ( +57% ), as well as offer a new office location in Charlotte ( +17 Partners ).

Cadwalader's Expertise in Banking & Finance and Capital Markets means Hogan Lovells Would Expand in Those Practice Areas

Both Firms Could Expect to Lose a Small Number of Partners Between Now and the Completion of the Merger

Note on methodology

Source: Publicly-available data tracked by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Notes: Based on all current Hogan Lovells Partners staying post-merger, attorneys with multiple locations have been equally distributed across each

Timeframe: Data as of December 2025

Analysis powered by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Pirical Legal Professionals is the largest attorney database built with the most comprehensive data on the market. Specifically designed for legal recruitment and legal market research.

Mapped: What Would the Winston & Strawn and Taylor Wessing Merger Look Like?

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 12:50:11 GMT

Last Friday, news broke that Winston & Strawn and Taylor Wessing are planning to merge. The combination would create Winston Taylor, a transatlantic law firm of around 1,400 lawyers and a combined revenue of more than $1.75bn .

The merger will not include all of Taylor Wessing's operations and is set to trigger a split of the Swiss verein structure. The firm's UK-led business (which includes the UK, Ireland, Dubai, and San Francisco) will exit the Taylor Wessing verein in order to combine with Winston & Strawn. Taylor Wessing Netherlands (which includes the Netherlands and Belgium) is also set to follow. This will primarily leave the firm's German operation of over 230 Partners to form a new structure.

The announcement is the latest in a number of major merger stories. If approved, it will mean yet another transatlantic combination, since the establishment of A&O Shearman and HSF Kramer . It also follows the news of recent merger discussions between Alston & Bird and Cadwalader , and Ashurst and Perkins Coie .

By Merging With Taylor Wessing, Winston & Strawn Would Bolster Their European Footprint, Primarily in London

Winston & Strawn would increase Partner headcount in London (+118) , Brussels (+5) , and likely the Bay Area (+4) . The firm will also expand into several new locations; Amsterdam (+15) , Eindhoven (+13) , Dublin (+11) , Dubai (+5) , and Cambridge (+4) .

Taylor Wessing's Depth in Corporate, Litigation, and Real Estate Means Winston & Strawn Would Expand in Those Practice Areas

Both Firms Could Expect to Lose a Small Number of Partners Between Now and the Completion of the Merger

Note on methodology

Source: publicly-available data tracked by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Notes: Based on all current Taylor Wessing Partners staying post-merger, attorneys with multiple locations have been equally distributed across each

Timeframe: Data as of December 2025

Analysis powered by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Pirical Legal Professionals is the largest attorney database built with the most comprehensive data on the market. Specifically designed for legal recruitment and legal market research.

The North West Legal Market in Numbers

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 09:40:14 GMT

The North West of England has seen a burst of investment and activity in the local legal market over the last few years. Manchester has seen a spur of office openings from firms like Lewis Silkin, Foot Anstey, Aberdein Considine, Keystone Law, and Harrison Drury. While Liverpool firm Hill Dickinson, recently became the official naming rights partner of Everton FC's new stadium.

Using publicly available data tracked by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP) , we've taken a look at some of the trends driving growth in the North West legal market.

Partner Headcount in Manchester has Grown by 22%, Outpacing London

The North West is a key focus of growth among The Lawyer UK 100 & Global 200 law firms.

Manchester ( +22% ) has had some of the highest Partner headcount growth of any major UK legal market since Oct 2022, second only to Edinburgh ( +30% ). While Liverpool ( +13% ) has also seen a significant increase in Partner numbers, growing at a similar rate to Leeds ( +13% ).

London remains the dominant market in the UK, but the Partner headcount growth of Manchester and Liverpool highlight the region as key legal hub outside of the capital.

The Fastest Growing Firms in the Region are Private-Equity Backed

According to Hazelwoods , "Private equity firms entered the legal sector both for the industry’s relatively stable revenue streams and because the relatively fragmented legal sector gives PE funds plenty of opportunity to “buy and build” bigger law firms."

The growth rate of PE-backed firms indicates that the tactic is showing signs of success. In the North West, the firms with the highest Partner headcount growth have private equity backing, boasting an average growth rate of 57% . The average for firms without PE funding is 23% .

Some of the fastest growing PE-backed firms since 2022 are Horwich Farrelly ( +83% ), Express Solicitors ( +80% ), Slater Heelis ( +50% ), and Farleys Solicitors ( +43% ).

Lateral Partner Hiring Has Been on the Rise, Increasing by +73%

The volume of lateral Partner hires made in Manchester & Liverpool increased by +73% between 2022-2024. That momentum seems to have continued into 2025, with 156 lateral hires made so far this year.

The firms that have made the most lateral hires have been JMW, Horwich Farrelly, Weightmans, and Express Solicitors. As the fastest growing firms in the North West, Horwich Farrelly and Express Solicitors have clearly expanded by tapping into the lateral market.

The Volume of Partner Promotions Has Also Been Increasing

Partner promotions among The Lawyer UK 100 firms increased by + 81% between 2022-2025.

While lower in absolute numbers than the lateral hires, the steady growth of promotions mirrors the trend seen in lateral recruitment. The 35 promotions tracked in 2025 so far, already surpasses 2024.

Firms in the North West Have Been Growing Across a Number of Practice Areas

The biggest spike in Manchester has been in Private Client practices ( +86% ), driven by a number of firms increasing Partner headcount, including JMW, Irwin Mitchell, and Gateley. Employment ( +34% ) and Insurance ( +24% ) practices have also seen strong growth, likely tied to the city's presence of big national insurers.

In Liverpool, Corporate practices have seen the highest increase in headcount ( +39% ).

Note on methodology

Source: Pirical Legal Professionals , using publicly available data

Timeframe: 2022 - 2025

Analysis powered by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Pirical Legal Professionals is the largest attorney database built with the most comprehensive data on the market. Specifically designed for legal recruitment and legal market research.

Secrets of Associate Productivity 1: Is There A ‘High Productivity’ Leverage Model?

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 14:31:10 GMT

Pirical has been working with customers to diagnose their current state of productivity and to test ideas about what really drives productivity across the market.

Case study: Firm X is a Mid-Market National Firm in the UK

Firm X’s Associates Are 20% Or £10m Per Year Less Productive Than Peer Firms’, Despite Having Similar Chargeable Hours Targets.

Across the Market, We Know that New Starters Are Up to 3% Less Productive Than Long-Tenured Associates. Could Low Attrition Rates Be One of the Things Peer Firms Are Doing Differently?

�� Does Firm X Have Particularly High Attrition?

Peer firms do have lower attrition than Firm X.

�� Would We Expect High Attrition to Drive Low Productivity?

In general, we wouldn’t expect associate attrition to drive productivity. If we look at the most productive firms in the market (the leaders) attrition is similar to the least productive firms (the laggards).

�� Are the Most Productive Firms Better At Exiting Low-Productivity Lawyers (‘Low Performers’) and Retaining High-Productivity Lawyers (‘High Performers’)?

When we segmented attrition by productivity quartile, we found that the most productive firms and the least productive firms are exiting low performers, and retaining high performers, at similar rates.

�� What About Firm X?

Firm X is losing significantly more high performers than low performers.

When it comes to attrition, while Firm X is out of step with peers, we wouldn’t these issues to be a primary driver of their low productivity.

One Hypothesis is That Peer Firms Might be Structured in a Particularly High-Productivity Way, Perhaps with Fewer Associates Per Partner (So There’s More Work to Go Around).

While very important to partner profitability, it turns out that overall associate:partner leverage ratios do not differentiate the most productive firms from the least productive firms.

We can see, however, that associate productivity does vary by seniority with a peak around 3-5 years of experience.

Firm X does actually have higher overall leverage than the market.

�� But That Leverage at Firm X is Concentrated in a Generally Low-Productivity Seniority Group (Associates With 12+ Years of Experience).

These two actionable opportunities are examples of many identified by Pirical for Firm X. Together they will help close the £10m revenue gap between peers and better compete in today’s legal market.

Analysis powered by Pirical on Demand (POD)

Pirical's award-winning technology unifies legal data to power the business of law

Mapped: What Will the Ashurst and Perkins Coie Merger Look Like?

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 17:56:11 GMT

Today, the news broke that Ashurst and Perkins Coie have agreed to a merger. The combination would be one of the largest in recent years, creating a firm of around 3,000 attorneys and $2.7bn in revenue, a figure that would place the merged firm in the top 20 globally by revenue.

The merger will mean yet another transatlantic combination, following A&O Shearman and HSF Kramer . Ashurst will significantly expand its presence in the United States by combining with Perkins Coie, bolstering its talent in Litigation and Corporate practices.

By Merging With Perkins Coie, Ashurst Will Significantly Bolster Their Presence Across the United States

Ashurst will grow headcount across 3 existing locations and expand into over 10 new cities.

Perkins Coie Has Much Stronger Depth in Litigation Practices Than Ashurst

Perkin Coie's Partner numbers in Intellectual Property and Cybersecurity, Data Protection & Privacy, will also bridge this gap in talent for Ashurst.

Both Firms Could Expect to Lose a Small Number of Partners Between Now and the Completion of the Merger

Note on methodology

Source: Publicly-available data tracked by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Notes: Based on all current Perkins Coie Partners staying post-merger, attorneys with multiple locations have been equally distributed across each

Timeframe: Data as of November 2025

Analysis powered by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Pirical Legal Professionals is the largest attorney database built with the most comprehensive data on the market. Specifically designed for legal recruitment and legal market research.

Mapped: What Would the Alston & Bird and Cadwalader Merger Look Like?

Fri, 07 Nov 2025 17:08:32 GMT

Yesterday, the news broke that Alston & Bird and Cadwalader were in merger talks. The combination would create a law firm of around 1,400 attorneys and $2 billion of revenue.

If it goes ahead, the merger would primarily bolster Alston & Bird's New York presence and Banking & Finance practices. This latest merger story, follows a wave of recent Big Law combinations like McDermott Will & Emery and Schulte Roth & Zabel , Herbert Smith Freehills & Kramer Levin and Troutman Pepper & Locke Lord .

By Merging With Cadwalader, Alston & Bird Would Bolster Their Presence in New York City and Grow in London & Charlotte

Alston & Bird's Partner numbers in Washington, DC would also increase and Cadwalader's Dublin office represents a potential new location.

Cadwalader's Depth in Banking & Finance and Capital Markets Means Alston & Bird Would Expand in Those Practice Areas

Both Firms Could Expect to Lose a Small Number of Partners Between the Merger Announcement and Completion

Note on methodology

Source: publicly-available data tracked by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Notes: Based on all current Cadwalader Partners staying post-merger, attorneys with multiple locations have been equally distributed across each

Timeframe: Data as of November 2025

Analysis powered by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Pirical Legal Professionals is the largest attorney database built with the most comprehensive data on the market. Specifically designed for legal recruitment and legal market research.

Poaching Packs of Partners: Big Law's Biggest Team Hires of 2025 so Far

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 16:22:50 GMT

It's been a busy year for team moves, with a number of Big Law firms raiding large groups of Partners from rival firms.

Big team moves represent a real coup from the hiring firm. As Gary Miles (Miles Partner Recruitment) puts it, "Firms tend to covet group lateral hires because there’s a higher likelihood of success , a group move often means stickier client relationships and more confidence that the assembled team will deliver. Secondly, large group moves make more noise in the press and show that the firm is growing, which is good for the brand!"

Using publicly-available data tracked by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP) , here are the biggest Big Law team hires so far this year.

The Biggest Team Moves of 2025 so far

AM Law 200 & Global 200 firms, Team Moves with >5 Partners, Jan 2025 - Oct 2025

Hires that officially joined from 1st Jan 2025 onwards

Want to see the list of Partners from each team move?

If you're already a customer of Pirical Legal Professionals , just search for them in the Moves tab. Otherwise, enter your details below and we'll reach out!

Note on methodology

Source: publicly-available data tracked by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Timeframe: Jan 2025 - Oct 2025

Analysis powered by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Pirical Legal Professionals is the largest attorney database built with the most comprehensive data on the market. Specifically designed for legal recruitment and legal market research.

Revealed: Kirkland & Ellis's 2025 Partner Promotion Class

Mon, 20 Oct 2025 16:18:55 GMT

As reported by Law.com , Kirkland & Ellis has made the decision not to publicly announce its newly promoted Partner class. The firm has historically issued a press release in early October revealing the new Partners, but this year marks a shift in strategy.

Nonetheless, using publicly-available data tracked by Pirical , we can reveal the details of the Kirkland & Ellis Partner promotions that we've mapped in October 2025.

This Year's Class is a Record-Breaking One, With Over 225 Partner Promotions

Bloomberg Law stated that this year's promotion round topped the previous high in 2023, according to two people familiar with the matter who didn’t provide the exact number.

However with Pirical data, we can reveal that the number is at least 228 Partner promotions . This means Kirkland has significantly surpassed last year's promotions (200) and the previous record (205).

Almost 90% of Kirkland's Partner Promotions Were Based in the United States

All of the firm's US offices, except the newly opened Philadelphia office, saw a number of promotions.

The offices with the largest number of promoted Associates were Chicago (58) , New York City (45) , and Houston (20) . While the cities that saw the largest Partner headcount growth relative to their size, were Salt Lake City (+31%) , Miami (+29%) , and the Bay Area (+23%) .

The remaining 12% of promotions were in Kirkland's international offices. London , which is now the firm's 3rd largest office worldwide, had the most promotions (20) . The rest were in the Hong Kong (3), Munich (2) , Beijing (1), and Paris (1) offices.

Almost Half of the Promoted Partners Work in Corporate Practices

Unsurprisingly, M&A attorneys (43) lead the way among this year's promotion class.

Litigation (33) , Investment Funds (26) , and Corporate (26) follow suit as the next most common practices for the newly promoted Partners.

Want to see the full list of Kirkland's promoted Partners?

If you're already a customer of Pirical Legal Professionals , just search for them in the Moves tab.

Otherwise, enter your details below and we'll send over the list!

Note on methodology

Source: publicly-available data tracked by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Timeframe: promotions from October 2025

Data is derived from tracked Partner promotions, numbers may be slightly incomplete due to limited public information.

Updated 31 Oct 2025: added additional mapped promotions.

Analysis powered by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Pirical Legal Professionals is the largest attorney database built with the most comprehensive data on the market. Specifically designed for legal recruitment and legal market research.

How Clyde & Co Hire Candidates Directly and Build Market Intel With Pirical Data

Mon, 15 Sep 2025 08:49:44 GMT

We spoke to Liz Rooke (Global Head of Recruitment), Mark Coates (Partner Recruitment, Senior Manager), and Matthew Cowan (Recruitment Manager) at Clyde & Co about how their lateral recruitment teams use Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP) to do more direct sourcing and gather market intel.

Clyde & Co is a global law firm providing a complete service to clients in its core sectors of insurance, transport, energy, infrastructure and trade & commodities.

3 Ways Pirical Helps Clyde & Co

Direct sourcing of talent

Most of the firm's lateral hiring for key practice areas is now handled in-house, using Pirical to build comprehensive talent pipelines.

Less reliance on agencies

The team moved from a previously heavy reliance on agencies to a model focused on direct sourcing and employee referrals.

Competitor analysis

Pirical data helps shape the firm's regular strategy meetings; analysing competitor team structures & distribution, tracking moves, and building market maps.

The Challenge

To increase direct sourcing at the firm

Clyde & Co employs over 5,500 people across nearly 70 offices worldwide and as an organisation, is always looking to grow. As such, the firm makes a significant number of lateral Associate and Partner hires every year.

Clyde & Co's candidate sourcing model had traditionally relied quite heavily on external recruitment agencies. However, when Liz joined the team in 2022, one of her key goals was to increase the volume of later hires made internally and reduce the firm’s agency spend.

Having already used Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP) for a few years, the recruitment team started to increase their usage as part of the new strategy to focus more on direct sourcing, averaging around 14,000 annual searches over the last 3 years.

"Tools such as Pirical have been critical to building more market knowledge and expertise within our recruitment team. This has helped the firm do more direct sourcing , relying less on external agencies and the cost that carries. At the non-Partner hiring level, we've reduced our agency usage globally to around 20% ."

Liz Rooke

Global Head of Recruitment, Clyde & Co

The Solution

Use Pirical to find more candidates internally and build ready to go talent pipelines

With Pirical's searchable database of lawyers, Clyde & Co's recruitment teams can find relevant candidates and create comprehensive pipelines of talent that are constantly kept up-to-date.

These candidate lists can then be easily shared with Partners for discussion and refined further.

"We'll create lists for Insurance, Corporate, Real Estate etc, then refine each one and export it. In the past year or so, it looks like we've created around 150 lists" Matt pointed out.

Improve market knowledge & gather competitor intelligence

"As an organisation we've always looked to make sure we have strong market knowledge", Liz said.

The market data and competitor intel available on Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP) , helps Clyde & Co stay up-to-date with shifts in the market and understand how competitor teams are structured.

"You can bring up a firm's data across various offices and see how many people they have in certain teams, eg. 4 Partners in office x doing this and 10 doing this in office y. That's really useful to see", Matt explained.

The Result

Pirical as a critical tool in the recruitment teams' workflow and a reduced reliance on agencies

Among the fee-earner hiring teams at Clyde & Co, Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP) is typically used several times a week. Both the experienced-hire and Partner-level teams use Pirical to research the talent market, build & maintain candidate lists, collect competitor intelligence, and strengthen market knowledge.

As a result, direct sourcing has become the default, with the firm's agency reliance flipping from an 80/20 to 20/80 split in many cases.

"The working relationship with Pirical has been positive", Liz said, "there's a massive drive for us to do more direct recruitment, and to do that we need the tools. Pirical is certainly a critical tool in our armoury".

“Every role that we recruit for will use Pirical at some point."

Matthew Cowan

Recruitment Manager,

Clyde & Co

Which Features do the Clyde & Co Team Use?

Find out what Pirical can do for your firm

Essential data for lateral recruitment and strategic growth

Global attorney database built with the most comprehensive sources of data on the market. Designed for law firm lateral hiring teams, legal headhunters and strategy planners, our data tracks over 695,000 profiles across 130+ countries. PLP enables firms to source talent quicker, leverage their own network for referral opportunities, map out competitors’ org structures, research new markets and much more.

Practice Growth Across the AM Law 200 (written for NALP Bulletin+)

Tue, 09 Sep 2025 09:58:54 GMT

We recently did some analysis for the NALP Bulletin+ magazine, looking at how practice demand has been shifting across the AM Law 200. Below is a copy of the article.

Many AM Law firms have seen demand for legal work increase over the past few years, but which practices have firms been focusing on? Using publicly-available data tracked by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP) , we’ve taken a look at some of the key practice growth trends among the Am Law 200 over the last three years.

Which Practice Groups Have Been Growing the Fastest?

Across the AM Law 200 globally, Partner headcount in Cybersecurity, Privacy & Data Protection has risen by +19% between 2022-2025, making it the overall fastest growing practice group. Regulatory & Compliance ranks 2nd with a +15% increase.

As the legal landscape around cybersecurity and data protection has become more complex in recent years, the demand for tech-literate legal professionals has clearly soared. Companies now have to “ navigate a maze of new, and often overlapping, cybersecurity requirements ” as well as heightened security standards.

Which Markets Have Been Growing the Fastest?

Factoring in specific geographic markets, we can track the fastest-growing individual practices across the AM Law 200 over the last 3 years.

Looking at the largest practices, with more than 100 combined Partners, the strongest growth has been in Investment Funds in London (+47%) , Washington, DC (+33%) and New York City (+29%) . As reported by McKinsey , law firms responded by scaling up their Investment Funds teams to meet renewed demand for fund formation, structuring, and regulatory guidance.

Among smaller practices, with less than 100 combined Partners, the highest increases in headcount have been Litigation practices in emerging markets like Denver and Nashville. In fact, Nashville has seen significant headcount growth in a variety of practices since 2022, Real Estate (+75%), M&A (+69%), Employment Litigation (+68%) and General Litigation (+61%) . In February 2025, McDermott Will & Emery opened a Nashville office, reinforcing the city’s continued appeal to Big Law.

Looking at the AM Law 200 as a whole reveals some interesting trends, but to dig a little deeper we’ve also broken it down by AM Law grouping.

Highest Growth Practices By AM Law Group

AM Law 1-50

The most significant growth among the top 50 firms has been concentrated in New York City and London, particularly within Finance related practices.

The individual practice with the highest growth is London - Banking & Finance - Acquisition & Leveraged Finance (+75%) , primarily driven by Kirkland & Ellis, Latham & Watkins, and White & Case adding Partners. The AM Law 50 has increased London-based Partner headcount by +16% in the last 3 years and shows little sign of slowing down.

AM Law 51-100

In contrast to the top 50, firms ranked 51-100 have grown headcount in a wider variety of markets and practices, but M&A ranks highly in Denver (+94%) , Boston (+66%) , Houston (+50%) and Los Angeles (+44%).

Denver - Corporate - M&A has the strongest increase in headcount, partly influenced by Taft’s recent merger with the Denver law firm Sherman & Howard.

AM Law 101-200

The highest ares of growth for the AM Law second hundred have been more Litigation heavy than the top 100.

Partner headcount within Employment Litigation practices on the West Coast increased significantly, alongside General Litigation practices across the USA. The major +135% spike in San Diego is partly due to Quarles & Brady’s merger with the California-based labor and employment boutique firm, Paul, Plevin.

Which Markets Have Been In Decline?

Across the AM Law 200 a few practices have seen significant drops in Partner headcount since 2022. M&A in Detroit (-26%) , as well as Insurance Litigation (-26%) and IP Litigation (-20%) in the Bay Area are some of the highest drop offs. However, a key broader trend has been the sharp fall in lawyers in China-based practices.

Formerly key practices such as M&A, Capital Markets, and Litigation have lost more than 220 AM Law Partners since April 2022. This combined decline in headcount has occurred in Beijing (-75%) and across China's key financial hubs, Shanghai (-72%) and Hong Kong (-20%).

With a decrease of over 100 Partners across the 3 cities, M&A practices have contracted the sharpest. The drop off reflects a broader pullback by US law firms from the Chinese market in recent years.

For reprint permission, please contact the NALP office at 202-835-1001 or email info@nalp.org.

Written using publicly-available data from Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

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Global attorney database built with the most comprehensive sources of data on the market. Designed for law firm lateral hiring teams, legal headhunters and strategy planners, our data tracks over 690,000 profiles across 130+ countries. PLP enables firms to source talent quicker, leverage their own network for referral opportunities, map out competitors’ org structures, research new markets and much more.

Unlocking AI-Powered Client Intelligence: How Law Firms Use Lawyer-Client Data to Drive Growth

Wed, 25 Jun 2025 13:54:42 GMT

When assessing a potential lateral hire, recruitment teams are keen to know as much information as possible on each candidate's client history. Knowing an Attorney's key clients and the type of work they take on is invaluable data to factor into a hiring decision.

While Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP) has always held client information on individual Attorneys, the data has proved difficult to collate and structure, meaning users had to do extra digging to understand a lawyer's clientele.

So, following some very targeted feedback from many of our clients, we're delighted to release our new AI-powered Client Work tab!

Here's What's New

1. More structured data

Users needed a simple and clear overview of the clients an Attorney has worked with — no more piercing things together from scattered mentions.

2. The strength of the client relationship

Has the Attorney worked on several matters for the client or was it a one-off deal? Users needed to understand how deep the working relationship is.

What Are The Results?

You can now easily view:

Which clients an attorney has worked with
The industries where they have the most experience
The depth of their client relationships (based on deal frequency, client type, and their level of involvement)

1. Find the Right Lateral with Shared Clients

A recruiting team was looking for a new Partner to help better serve a key financial services client. They wanted the Partner to have already worked with that client.

With Partner targeting based on a specific client, they filtered potential candidates by prior work with the key institutional client.

2. Map How Competitor Teams Are Structured Around Key Clients

Business Development teams want an winning edge when preparing for pitches. Success often comes down to knowing who you're up against and clearly stating how your firm stands apart.

Example: A team in a leading international law firm used the Client Filter to map out which competitor firms had existing connections to the client. By filtering for the target client, they quickly generated a list of attorneys across different teams who mentioned that client in their work history or public records.

Client Work on PLP helps teams to:

Identify which competitor firms already have relationships with the client
Understand how those relationships are structured across practice areas
Spot gaps or opportunities to differentiate your own offering.

3. Industry-Focused Recruitment

When evaluating attorney candidates or planning a sector-specific growth strategy, firms need more than just claims of industry experience, they need data they can trust.

Client Work on PLP helps teams to:

Break down an attorney's client work by industry
See industry exposure as a percentage of total transactions
Compare candidates more objectively when industry alignment is critical

Why does this matter?

One candidate might list Healthcare on their profile, another might have 60% of their recent transactions in Healthcare, backed by actual client data.

Client Work turns that difference into a clear, competitive insight.

NEW QUOTE NEEDED

 " There's huge value in leveraging AI to get better insights out of data, that you otherwise would not be able to get with a person looking through the records one by one. "

Omkar Joshi

Director Global Business Development & Strategy, Skadden

Find Out What Pirical Can Do For Your Firm

Essential Data for Lateral Recruitment and Strategic Growth

Global attorney database built with the most comprehensive sources of data on the market. Designed for law firm lateral hiring teams, legal headhunters and strategy planners, our data tracks over 660,000 profiles across 130+ countries. PLP enables firms to source talent quicker, leverage their own network for referral opportunities, map out competitors’ org structures, research new markets and much more.

How SSQ Find Candidates Quicker and Strengthen Client Relationships With Pirical Data

Thu, 19 Jun 2025 09:46:23 GMT

We spoke to James Charlton , CFO & COO at SSQ about how his team uses Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP) to research the candidate market and build stronger relationships with their clients.

SSQ is a legal search and recruitment agency, working with some of the world’s leading law firms and brands. The company has placed Partners, Associates, and other legal roles into firms and in-house teams all over the world, including a number of high profile team moves and office launches.

3 Ways Pirical Helps SSQ Find the Right Lawyers

Candidate research is +25% faster

The team used to manually collate market data, now they have up-to-date information at the click of a button and a much faster research workflow.

Access to high quality, reliable data

Having strong UK, US, and global data to hand allows the Research & Consulting teams to grab the information they need, wherever the client is looking to hire.

Building stronger client relationships

When meeting with key decision makers, the team can share market intel and candidate shortlists to build confidence and trust with their clients.

The Challenge

Having access to comprehensive and accurate candidate data

Prior to adopting Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP) , SSQ maintained a CRM with all their candidate data. This process required members of the team manually scraping individual lawyers' information from websites and other sources to add or update existing data.

Understandably, the process became difficult to manage and very time consuming, plus the data was full of holes so wasn’t fully trusted.

Around 2017, the leadership team at SSQ felt that their "CRM days were over", aware that there were tools out there that could provide the data they needed more easily. "Having a searchable database with all the law firm & candidate data in one place was more efficient than having to input it all yourself," James pointed out. After initially using a different provider, SSQ upgraded to PLP in 2018.

"Over the last 7 years, having access to Pirical has made our research process at least +25% faster than it used to be, and with a leaner team.

The old process was a lot more manual and required more resources to keep our information up-to-date. Now the team can just log into Pirical, perform a quick search and be confident that the data is accurate and reliable . Having a more complete data set that's quicker to access has resulted in some major efficiency gains."

James Charlton

CFO & COO, SSQ

The Solution

A reliable source of data that speeds up candidate research

Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP) provides SSQ's Research and Consulting teams with quick access to the data they need to find candidates and the ability to easily save them to a shareable list.

“In the past, we used to try and compile all that information ourselves but the data was full of holes. So now we can use the information on Pirical and know it’s trustworthy," James said.

No more trawling through German law websites and copies of The Lawyer for the latest candidate information!

More complete market data that helps strengthen client relationships

The breadth of data available on PLP has also helped SSQ strengthen relationships with their clients.

When speaking with key decision makers at elite global firms the team can share insights & market trends, as well as candidate shortlists for a particular role, to build the confidence and trust that's vital to bolstering that relationship.

"It means we can act like a partner with our clients and help them with their strategy and decision making.”

The Result

Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP) as an integral part of the team's workflow

Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP) is now a key part of the teams' daily workflow and the primary tool when researching the talent market. The CRM, which used to be the core source of information, is now the 3rd or 4th product they turn to. The numbers don't lie, in the first 6 months of 2025 the SSQ team has run over 80,000 searches!

The team can quickly perform searches and easily save relevant candidates to lists. The Moves section has also proved useful for mapping who has moved where, including lawyer moves outside of the UK.

All in all, SSQ can now easily access the data they need on a daily basis, knowing that the information provided is trustworthy and reliable. The efficiency gains have left more time to find the right candidates, make high value placements, and build stronger relationships with key clients.

“The Research team always has Pirical open on a tab."

James Charlton

CFO & COO, SSQ

Which PLP Features do the SSQ Team Use?

Find out what Pirical can do for your agency

Essential data for lateral recruitment and strategic growth

Global attorney database built with the most comprehensive sources of data on the market. Designed for law firm lateral hiring teams, legal headhunters and strategy planners, our data tracks over 660,000 profiles across 130+ countries. PLP enables firms to source talent quicker, leverage their own network for referral opportunities, map out competitors’ org structures, research new markets and much more.

AM Law 100 Partner Retention: Which Firms Have Been Retaining Their Lateral Hires?

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 13:33:16 GMT

Partner retention is a vital metric for law firms so we've decided to take a look at how lateral Partner retention compares across the AM Law 100 and uncover the firms with the strongest retention rates over the last 5 years, as well as any key trends among the hires that ultimately don't work out.

Using publicly-available data tracked by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP) , we've analysed how many of the lateral Partner hires made by AM Law 100 firms between 2020-2024 are still at the firm.

Note on methodology: excludes firms that made fewer than 10 lateral Partner hires and moves as a result of mergers. Data is derived from tracked lateral Partner moves, numbers may be slightly incomplete due to limited public information. Exits include Partners that left but didn't lateral to another firm, eg. retired.

Ranked: which AM Law 100 firms have had the highest lateral Partner retention rates?

Lateral Partner hires and how many then left the firm

AM Law 100, Jan 2020 - Dec 2024

The firms with 100% retention made a relatively low number of hires during this timeframe

"From my perspective, I've seen an increased focus on Partner integration across the industry, which has seen the majority of firms improve lateral retention.

A few firms stand out from the above analysis, with retention rates at or near 100%. Although they typically hire a small number of Partners annually, Cleary Gottlieb, Davis Polk, Debevoise and Fenwick are all high prestige, strong culture firms and thus rank highly. Sheppard Mullin's strong showing of 97% retention from over 100 hires also stands out.

While the first five years are important, firms with the most successful integration results think longer term and endeavor to make their lateral hires part of the fabric of their firms. "

Charles Curtis

President, CLCurtis31Consulting

How likely are lateral Partner hires to leave a few years after joining the firm?

Our analysis covers more than 11,000 Partner moves over a 5 year period and from this we've calculated the likelihood of an exit after each subsequent year of joining. As expected, very few Partners leave the firm within the first year of being hired (0.4%) but by year 4 the chance of an exit rises to 7.5% .

More interestingly, is the difference between junior and more senior Partner hires. Newly promoted Partners who were hired from their previous firm as an Associate or Counsel, are less likely to move firm again within the first few years of joining than more experienced hires who joined already as a Partner.

How does retention compare across different segments of the AM Law 100?

The average lateral Partner retention rate across the AM Law 100 is 87% . The most prominent gap in retention is between the AM Law 1-25 (89%) and 76-100 (85%) , with the top 25 firms retaining, on average, more lateral Partner hires than the rest of the AM Law.

How often do departing Partners return to their original firm?

2.2% of the exits in our analysis resulted in the Partner moving back to the firm they had previously left, what we've termed a 'boomerang move'. 31 firms registered at least one boomerang Partner move across this timeframe, the firms with more than one are shown below.

Note on methodology

Source: Pirical Legal Professionals , using publicly available data

Excludes: firms that made fewer than 10 lateral Partner hires and moves as a result of mergers

Timeframe: Jan 2020 - Dec 2024

Written using publicly-available data from Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Essential data for lateral recruitment and strategic growth

Global attorney database built with the most comprehensive sources of data on the market. Designed for law firm lateral hiring teams, legal headhunters and strategy planners, our data tracks over 660,000 profiles across 130+ countries. PLP enables firms to source talent quicker, leverage their own network for referral opportunities, map out competitors’ org structures, research new markets and much more.

Inside the Numbers: The UK Legal Market in 2025

Wed, 11 Jun 2025 15:04:15 GMT

London dominates much of the UK's legal landscape but other legal hubs play a significant role and some are even growing at a faster rate. We've taken a closer look at the current distribution of the UK's top lawyers, which markets have been growing the fastest, and how large a presence US firms now have in the UK.

Using publicly-available data tracked by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP) , here's a snapshot of the UK legal market in 2025.

Where Are the UK's Top Lawyers Located?

Among lawyers working at firms in The Lawyer UK 100, 94% are based in England, followed by Scotland with 5% , while the remaining share is split between Wales and Northern Ireland.

As expected, London dominates the legal landscape and accounts for 56% of The Lawyer UK 100 lawyers, with 22,225 calling it home. The next largest city is Manchester, with just over 2,700 lawyers, nearly a tenth the size of London, followed by Bristol ( 2.1k ) and Birmingham ( 1.9 k ).

These numbers highlight London’s overwhelming scale compared to other regional centres, and its distinct appeal to the largest British law firms as well as global firms.

London May Have the Largest Headcount but Which UK Cities are Growing the Fastest?

Over the last 3 years, the cities with the largest Lawyer UK 100 populations have experienced varied levels of growth. Manchester ( +32% ), Exeter ( +32% ) and Bristol ( +31% ) have increased lawyer headcount the most. These three cities have grown faster than London ( +20% ) over the same period.

" Powered by a varied economy, strategic location, excellent transport links, and a comparatively lower cost of living ", Manchester has experienced strong legal sector growth in recent years. Manchester offers a wide range of potential clients to firms looking to grow, partly due to the city's role as "the UK’s foremost tech hub outside of London."

Bristol's rapid rise could be due to its growing status as a cost-effective alternative to London , attracting lawyers to move there and firms to open new offices , establishing the city as a key legal hub outside of the capital.

What Are the Largest Legal Practices in London?

Corporate remains the largest primary practice area among The Lawyer UK 100 firms in London, with 3,059 lawyers primarily focused on Corporate work, a 27% increase since 2022. This growth is likely driven by sustained M&A activity , which continues to fuel strong demand for specialist Corporate lawyers in 2025.

Real Estate holds the second-largest headcount with 3,047 lawyers and has grown by 14%, while Dispute Resolution & Litigation has increased by 17% to 2,438 lawyers. Banking & Finance ( 1,992 ) and Employment ( 1,367 ) round out the top five largest practices in London.

What Are the Fastest-Growing Practices in the UK?

The fastest-growing legal practices among Lawyer UK 100 firms, again highlight Manchester and Bristol as key legal hubs on the rise.

Manchester-based practices that have seen lawyer headcount increase the most are Private Client ( +55% ), driven by several law firms including JMW and Irwin Mitchell, Employment ( +29% ), from the likes of Lewis Silkin and Hill Dickinson, and Insurance ( +27% ), with DWF and Clyde & Co growing the most.

While in Bristol, Corporate ( +42% ) and Dispute Resolution & Litigation ( +39% ) have grown thanks to firms such as Burges Salmon and TLT.

The Largest Law Firms in the UK by Partner Headcount

UK Headquartered Firms

Firms within The Lawyer UK 100 have increased UK-based Partner headcount by +14% since 2022.

In terms of total Partners, CMS leads the way with 424 , followed by Keystone Law ( 372 ) and Addleshaw Goddard ( 346 ). Knights PLC has now entered the top six, promoting nearly 30 new Partners in its latest round, bringing its total to 328 .

In contrast, the Magic Circle firms operate with smaller Partnerships, collectively employing just under 950 Partners in the UK. A&O Shearman currently have the most with 224 Partners , followed by Linklaters ( 219 ), Clifford Chance ( 215 ), Freshfields ( 161 ), and Slaughter and May ( 105 ).

"Partner recruitment in London remains extremely active. In particular, US firms continue to make headlines, with some fast-growing firms such as Paul Weiss needing to hire multiple Partners and other firms looking to achieve more dominance by building out their London bases.

Despite this, we have seen a slight reduction in immediate partnership hires this year. Among both US and UK-headquartered firms, there has been more of a focus on hiring gradually and based on specific requirements. Many firms are moving away from high volume hires and showing a real appetite to attract Partners who can make a strategic difference."

Amy Hambleton | Director, RedLaw Recruitment

US Headquartered Firms

London has become a key area of growth for US firms in recent years, with AM Law 100 Partner headcount growing by +22% since 2022.

Kirkland & Ellis, in particular, has built up one of the largest UK-based partnerships of any non-UK firm, with 230 Partners, surpassing even some of the UK's biggest domestic players. Hogan Lovells ( 173 ), Norton Rose Fulbright ( 167 ), Dentons ( 159 ), and White & Case ( 150 ) aren't far behind, all maintaining large teams that signal a long-term investment in the UK market.

Written using publicly-available data from Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Unlock unparalleled coverage of the legal market

Global attorney database built with the most comprehensive sources of data on the market. Designed for law firm lateral hiring teams, legal headhunters and strategy planners, our data tracks over 690,000 profiles across 130+ countries. PLP enables firms to source talent quicker, leverage their own network for referral opportunities, map out competitors’ org structures, research new markets and much more.

A Decade of Making Winning Decisions With Data: Top Takeaways From Pirical Pioneers 2025

Tue, 20 May 2025 16:31:38 GMT

Last week, Pirical celebrated a decade of innovation at our biggest Pirical Pioneers event to date! We brought together a fantastic crowd of law firm Recruitment, Strategy, HR & DEI leaders for some insightful panel discussions and previews of our latest tools & new features.

Now that the dust has settled, here’s a recap of the key takeaways from the day.

You’ve Shared Your Challenges and Data, and We’ve Helped Turn It Into Winning Decisions

Our CEO & Founder, Jason Ku, kicked things off by talking about his journey from a consultant at McKinsey to the founder of Pirical. Pirical was born from the idea of making better business decisions using data, plus a huge number of meetings over breakfast, lunch & dinner (who knew a free meal makes someone more likely to take a meeting).

From these meetings Jason found a home for his idea of ‘making data useful’ , the legal sector. And so began Pirical’s ongoing partnership with many of the world’s biggest law firms. 10 years down the line we’ve built a host of data-driven tools to address the variety of challenges faced by our customers. As Jason summed it up, “Pirical Pioneers 2025 marks the 10-year anniversary of us making winning decisions with data.”

How Much of an Impact Does Lawyer Productivity Have on a Firm’s Revenue Goals?

Next up, our Director of Analytics Consulting, Rob Griffiths, debuted an exciting pilot programme we've been running with customers of Pirical On Demand (POD) , the secrets of Associate productivity.

Back in 2024, we were approached by a law firm with an ambitious growth strategy to double revenues in 5 years. The firm was already growing headcount as much as possible and felt that after a recent period of high inflation and rate rises, increasing the rates of chargeable hours wasn't an option. This left productivity as the key area of focus.

In our deepest analysis yet, we shared insights derived from 10,000+ lawyers and more than 31 million billable hours over a 5 year period. The team compared how ‘Firm X’ was performing compared to a group of similar peer firms and found that productivity had been falling. So what factors were at play?

We tested dozens of hypotheses around hiring, retention, attrition, firm structure, offices, holiday allowance, business development, salaries and more. As a result, we uncovered plenty of areas for Firm X to work on in order to increase productivity to the Market Leaders level.

Using AI to Uncover the Clients That Work With Specific Partners

One of the most frequently asked questions we get from customers of Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP) , is around having better visibility over the type of work and types of clients that individual Partners take on. Naturally, when assessing potential lateral candidates, firms are keen to know which clients each Partner has represented.

Inspired by this topic, the team has been working on a solution that uses AI to structure all the client data Pirical holds on Partners in PLP. Fueled by the coffee break, our updated Client Work tab was the focus of the next session.

Client Work allows users to view a clear and concise breakdown of the clients & industries that each Partner on PLP has worked with. This new feature automatically extracts client information from a variety of sources using AI.

Navigating DEI in Today’s World: Some Practical Tips From Our Panelists

One of our panel discussions explored how leading law firms are practically approaching DEI in today’s shifting landscape. The conversation highlighted how some firms are beginning to integrate inclusion metrics directly into their core business analytics. Doing so requires a high level of transparency, but it’s also key to securing meaningful investment and long-term commitment.

Another theme that arose was the importance of interpreting DEI data carefully. Without context, data can be misleading, especially when dealing with complex outcomes like representation, progression, and belonging. Ultimately, the panel underscored that DEI data shouldn’t sit in isolation. When combined with performance, retention, and engagement metrics, it offers a more complete view of how people experience the workplace.

The session closed with a clear message: the firms making the most progress are those treating inclusion like any other core business priority, one that is measured rigorously, interpreted thoughtfully, and acted on with intent.

Bringing Your Firm’s Data to Life With Customisable Dashboards

As highlighted in Jason’s opening remarks, one of Pirical’s core principles is to make data useful. Our latest development in Pirical On Demand (POD) , has been designed with exactly that in mind, to make your firm’s data even more useful and accessible.

Some of our users have told us how helpful it would be to be able to create custom reports of their firm’s data directly in POD. In response, we've built Dashboards, a powerful way to explore and visualise your firm’s data. Stay tuned, Dashboards are coming soon!

Dashboards allow users to compile individual analyses to a customisable report at the click of a button. This gives you the ability to view different analyses side by side for better comparison & organisation, add notes to clearly explain the analysis or summarise key points, and easily download multiple analyses as one easy to read file. Dashboards can be edited to whatever layout, sizing and order you want to display, alongside text fields that help you tell the story you want to highlight. Sharing internal reports using POD data just got easier!

Curious to learn more about any of our latest features or programmes?

People analytics software & consulting for law firms

After 10 years working with the world’s leading law firms, we’ve learned one thing: great decisions start with great data. That’s why Pirical delivers the most definitive legal insights so you can run a winning law firm.

Mapped: What Would the McDermott and Schulte Merger Look Like?

Fri, 09 May 2025 15:46:44 GMT

Yesterday, McDermott Will & Emery and Schulte Roth & Zabel announced their plans to merge. The combination would create a law firm of around 1,600 attorneys and $2.8 billion of revenue. The merged firm would rank in the top 20 of the AM Law 100.

If approved, the merger would unite McDermott's broad expertise in healthcare, dispute resolution, and corporate law with Schulte's deep focus on hedge funds, private capital, and financial regulation. This latest announcement follows in the footsteps of other recent combinations like Herbert Smith Freehills & Kramer Levin and Troutman Pepper & Locke Lord .

Using publicly-available data tracked by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP) , we've taken a look at which locations & practices would grow under the merger.

By Merging With Schulte, McDermott Will Bolster Their Presence in New York City and London

Shared Depth Across Corporate, Litigation and Finance Practices Makes the Merger a Natural Fit

Both Firms Can Expect to Lose a Small Number of Partners Between Now and the Completion of the Merger

Written using data from Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Unlock unparalleled coverage of the legal market

Global attorney database built with the most comprehensive sources of data on the market. Designed for law firm lateral hiring teams, legal headhunters and strategy planners, our data tracks over 660,000 profiles across 130+ countries. PLP enables firms to source talent quicker, leverage their own network for referral opportunities, map out competitors’ org structures, research new markets and much more.

Inside the Numbers: The US Legal Market in 2025

Tue, 06 May 2025 12:45:54 GMT

The United States remains the country with the highest number of attorneys in the world but what does the US legal landscape really look like?

Using publicly-available data tracked by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP) , we've taken a look at where US attorneys are located, which practice areas they're working in and the leading law firms by headcount.

Which US States and Cities Have the Highest Number of Attorneys?

The US market is vast but legal talent remains concentrated in a handful of major cities and states.

Our latest data shows that over 20% of all AM Law 200 attorneys are based in New York City, with 27,400 calling it home . That’s nearly double the population of the next largest city, Washington, D.C. ( 15.3k attorneys). Chicago ( 8.8k ), Los Angeles ( 7.8k ), Boston ( 5.3k ), and San Francisco ( 4.9k ) make up the rest of the major legal hubs.

Combined, these six cities account for 53% of US-based attorneys, highlighting that, despite growing flexibility in where attorneys can work, Big Law still thrives in cities with the highest client density and legal infrastructure.

A few other locations also boast significant headcount. Texas is the state with the 3rd largest attorney population in the US, after New York & California, where 7% of AM Law 200 attorneys are now based.

What Are the Most Prominent Legal Practices in Each Major US City?

Litigation remains the largest practice area across the United States, with New York City ( 8.9k ) and Washington, D.C. ( 6.6k ) being home to the majority of Litigation attorneys.

Corporate and Finance roles are heavily concentrated in New York City. Notably, Banking & Finance attorney headcount has nearly doubled since our 2023 article , reflecting the city’s dominant role as the country’s financial center.

Cybersecurity & Data Protection practices are also on the rise, particularly in Washington, D.C., where 474 attorneys now specialize in the field. This growth likely suggests the increasing demand for legal expertise in privacy and data regulation, as more organizations look to adopt new technologies whilst also working to safeguard sensitive information, especially following a record number of data breaches at law firms in 2024.

Who’s Leading the Market? The Largest Law Firms by Partner Headcount

Kirkland & Ellis have the most US-based Partners with 1,451 currently working at the firm, up from 1,263 in 2023, showcasing their continued dominance at the top of the US legal market. Close behind are Greenberg Traurig ( 1,199 ) and Holland & Knight ( 1,152 ).

One of the major developments so far this year has been the formation of Troutman Pepper Locke , the product of a merger between Troutman Pepper and Locke Lord. The newly-combined firm has climbed the Partner headcount ranks to now have 717 US-based Partners. Strategic mergers like this continue to reshape the legal landscape, as firms prioritize regional expansion and practice depth, signaling that scale and adaptability remain essential in today’s competitive legal market.

Written using publicly-available data from Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Unlock unparalleled coverage of the legal market

Global attorney database built with the most comprehensive sources of data on the market. Designed for law firm lateral hiring teams, legal headhunters and strategy planners, our data tracks over 660,000 profiles across 130+ countries. PLP enables firms to source talent quicker, leverage their own network for referral opportunities, map out competitors’ org structures, research new markets and much more.

Fierce Competition For Legal Talent: How AM Law Firms Grew in 2024

Thu, 30 Jan 2025 15:19:03 GMT

Overall, 2024 was a strong year for the AM Law legal market, with demand for legal services experiencing a " historic growth surge " and most firms achieving " strong profits per equity Partner ". It was also a year that highlighted an increasingly competitive legal talent market, as lateral moves and mergers abounded.

Using publicly-available data from Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP) , we've taken a look at the lateral Partner hires and headcount growth from 2024, to see which law firms and practices had the most interesting growth stories of the year.

Lateral Partner hires in 2024

The number of lateral Partner hires increased across all segments of the AM Law 200

Both halves of the top 100 hired 8% more lateral Partners in 2024 than 2023, whereas second hundred firms increased lateral hires by 3%.

Lots of AM Law 100 firms were active in the lateral market

Kirkland & Ellis (134) and Lewis Brisbois (106) made the most Partner hires across 2024.

But not every firm grew headcount through lateral hires, some had a higher number of Partner departures

Kirkland & Ellis had a similar ratio of Partner hires (134) to Partner exits (132). Paul Hastings (+35), Polsinelli (+32), Greenberg Traurig (+30) and Gordon & Rees (+12) all hired more Partners than they lost.

Firms such as Paul Hastings, Baker McKenzie and Polsinelli grew aggressively by making large group lateral hires

Polsinelli's poaching of 47 lawyers (30 Partners) from Holland & Knight was the largest group move of the year.

"Firms tend to covet group lateral hires because there’s a higher likelihood of success, a group move often means stickier client relationships and more confidence that the assembled team will deliver. Secondly, large group moves make more noise in the press and show that the firm is growing, which is good for the brand!"

Gary Miles | Miles Partner Placement

Lateral Partner demand in certain practices shifted across different segments of the AM Law 200

"Ultimately, every law firm segment walked away from 2024 with something to brag about in terms of demand growth, although some had weightier hauls than others." Thomson Reuters, 2025 Report on the State of the US Legal Market

AM Law 1-50

The top 50 firms primarily increased lateral Partner hiring across Banking & Finance (+43%) and Corporate - Investment Funds (+36%) practices, where there were corresponding decreases in hiring activity among lower ranked firms. Real Estate (-34%) and Litigation (-7%) saw the highest drops in lateral moves to AM Law 1-50 firms.

AM Law 51-100

The second half of the top 100 saw major increases in Partner hires across Tax (+114%) and Litigation - Crime, Fraud & Investigations (+61%), while the sharpest declines were in Corporate - Investment Funds (-41%) and Banking & Finance (-27%).

AM Law 101-200

Second hundred firms increased lateral Partner hiring across Tax (+48%) and Real Estate (+37%), where the -34% decrease among AM Law 1-50 firms may have created an opportunity.

Partner headcount growth in 2024

Paul, Weiss had the highest growth in Partner numbers

The firm's significant rise in Partner headcount (+42%) is partly down to the adoption of a non-equity Partnership tier in 2024. The firm was also very active in the lateral market.

UK firms like Allen & Overy and Herbert Smith Freehills have used mergers with AM Law firms to grow in the US

In 2024, A&O Shearman completed its combination and Herbert Smith Freehills announced plans to merge with Kramer Levin . More trans-atlantic combinations are likely to continue, as British firms seek to cement their position in the US market and keep up with other UK rivals.

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia had the highest increase in AM Law 100 Partners

Riyadh (+132%) had the sharpest growth in Partner numbers while Hong Kong had the largest decline (-18%). Back in 2023, Nashville was the city with the highest increase in AM Law 100 Partner headcount (+175%), but growth slowed to just +3% in 2024.

AM Law 100 practices with the highest headcount growth

The increased demand for hiring Finance and Corporate Partners is reflected across many of the highest growth practices from 2024. In terms of location, London and New York City feature heavily in the top 30.

Written using publicly-available data from Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Unlock unparalleled coverage of the legal market

Global attorney database built with the most comprehensive sources of data on the market. Designed for law firm lateral hiring teams, legal headhunters and strategy planners, our data tracks over 620,000 profiles across 130+ countries. PLP enables firms to source talent quicker, leverage their own network for referral opportunities, map out competitors’ org structures, research new markets and much more.

Recent Growth in the New York City Legal Market

Tue, 28 Jan 2025 12:43:23 GMT

Using publicly-available data from Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP) , we've taken a look at New York City's Partner headcount growth and lateral market activity over the last 12 months to which firms and practices have been growing in the Big Apple.

Partner headcount growth ��

The highest growth firms are a mixture of AM Law 100 and UK headquartered firms

UK firm Freshfields tops the list with +36% Partner headcount growth in 2024, with Linklaters (+22%) also significantly increasing NYC headcount.

Banking & Finance practices have had some of the highest increases in headcount

Banking, Finance and Corporate related practices in NYC have seen the highest rates of Partner growth in the last 12 months.

Practices with the sharpest increases in headcount have been driven by a handful of firms; Financial Regulation (Norton Rose Fulbright, Freshfields, Sullivan & Cromwell) and Corporate (Kirkland & Ellis, Willkie Farr & Gallagher, Loeb & Loeb).

Lateral market activity ��

The AM Law 50 dominate lateral Partner hires in New York City and increased hiring in 2024

The top 50 firms make more than double the number of lateral Partner hires than the AM Law 51-100 or 101-200. Firms ranked 1-50 also increased the number of lateral NYC hires they made by +23% in 2024, compared to +7% from the second 50 and -9% from the second hundred.

Demand for lateral Partners working in Investment Funds increased in 2024

The number of Investment Funds hires in NYC grew by +53%, compared to 2023. Kirkland & Ellis (+14), Simpson Thacher & Bartlett (+11) and Paul, Weiss (+7) have increased their Partner numbers in this practice area the most.

Despite increases in a couple of sub-specialisms of Litigation, Litigation as a whole, saw lateral hiring drop by -34%, alongside Capital Markets (-37%).

Kirkland & Ellis and Paul Hastings made the most lateral Partner hires

The firms most active in the NYC lateral Partner market are from the top end of the AM Law rankings.

Written using publicly-available data from Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Unlock unparalleled coverage of the legal market

Global attorney database built with the most comprehensive sources of data on the market. Designed for law firm lateral hiring teams, legal headhunters and strategy planners, our data tracks over 660,000 profiles across 130+ countries. PLP enables firms to source talent quicker, leverage their own network for referral opportunities, map out competitors’ org structures, research new markets and much more.

Who Made the Cut? A Look at 2024's AM Law Partner Promotions so Far

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 16:30:44 GMT

As we near the end of the year, there have been a flurry of Partner promotion announcements from the top AM Law firms. Overall, promotion class sizes have decreased for the second year in a row . But is this a dramatic shift or an expected pivot in strategy?

Using publicly-available data from Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP) , we've looked into a few of the trends among the promoted Partners from 2024 so far and how the promotion classes compare to previous years.

Across most of the top AM Law firms, Partner promotion class sizes have decreased from 2023

After a record number of promotions in 2023 , Kirkland & Ellis promoted fewer Partners than the previous year, as have most of the AM Law 1-25 firms that have already announced their promotion classes for 2024.

There's a similar trend among the top UK law firms as well

Eversheds Sutherland and A&O Shearman are the only top 10 UK firms to have promoted more Partners in 2024 than 2023. A&O Shearman's Partner class partly grew thanks to the combination of Allen & Overy (32) and Shearman Sterling (8) Associates.

However, the decreasing volume of Partner promotions is a return to more normal levels after a peak in 2022

The number of promoted Partners increased dramatically in 2022 and remained high in 2023. This year's combined numbers are still higher than the 2020 or 2021 class sizes.

This year's decrease in BigLaw promotions has occurred across most practice areas, but Corporate numbers have grown

The share of promoted Partners that work in Corporate practices has increased by +6% compared to 2023, while most other practice areas have decreased by a small amount.

The focus on Corporate practices is primarily driven by attorneys working in M&A and Investment Funds

M&A demand has been growing steadily this year and ' activity is only expected to keep climbing because of the needs and desires of corporate leaders to transform their businesses — due primarily to the impact of AI and to accelerate their growth in a sluggish economy .'

Litigation and Banking & Finance also remain popular practice areas among this year's promoted Partners.

The promoted Partners are a mixture of homegrown talent and lateral hires

Some are homegrown talent who have spent the majority of their career at their current firm, while others have been laterally hired by their current firm after spending a few years working at a rival law firm. The top AM Law firms have all deployed slightly different strategies to acquiring and developing their Associates.

The level of experience among 2024's promoted Partners varies

The broad range of experience could relate to the mixture of equity and non-equity Partner tiers.

Kirkland & Ellis continue to remain an outlier in promoting more junior attorneys to their Partnership

Of the 200 Partners promoted by Kirkland & Ellis this year, most have 6-7 years of experience.

Note on methodology

Sources: Pirical Legal Professionals , using publicly available data

Press releases from AM Law 1-25 firms that had announced Partner promotions at time of writing

(Kirkland & Ellis, Baker McKenzie, DLA Piper, Latham & Watkins, Skadden, Ropes & Gray, White & Case, Morgan Lewis, Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, Hogan Lovells, Goodwin Procter)

Written using publicly-available data from Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Unlock unparalleled coverage of the legal market

Global attorney database built with the most comprehensive sources of data on the market. Designed for law firm lateral hiring teams, legal headhunters and strategy planners, our data tracks over 620,000 profiles across 130+ countries. PLP enables firms to source talent quicker, leverage their own network for referral opportunities, map out competitors’ org structures, research new markets and much more.

Seamless Lateral Partner Integration: Strategies for Success

Wed, 04 Dec 2024 11:34:47 GMT

This is a summary of a podcast we hosted on Lateral Partner Integration, you can listen to the full episode on Spotify or YouTube .

Earlier this year, we hosted a dynamic panel discussion featuring Bridget Salazar (Morrison & Foerster) , Kat Davis (Pillsbury) , and Chuck Curtis (CLCurtis31 Consulting) . These thought leaders shared invaluable insights into the often-overlooked yet crucial process of lateral partner integration. Beyond onboarding, integration is about crafting a strategic, supportive path that helps partners succeed and thrive within their new firms.

From fostering strong client connections to encouraging collaboration across teams, effective integration unlocks the full potential of incoming talent. Firms increasingly recognize that a well-executed integration program not only attracts top-tier partners but also secures their long-term success and retention.

Why Lateral Integration Matters

Successful integration is a competitive edge. New partners want to see how a firm will support their practice and client relationships. Firms that excel in this area start demonstrating their approach during recruitment, positioning integration as a core element of their value proposition.

Effective integration programs provide a clear roadmap, showcasing how the firm plans to empower new partners. This strategic focus creates confidence, reduces transition friction, and paves the way for mutual success.

Measuring Success

Evaluating lateral partner integration requires a mix of quantitative and qualitative metrics. Financial indicators like revenue generation, billable hours, and client retention offer clear, measurable outcomes. At the same time, qualitative factors—such as cultural fit, personal satisfaction, and positive feedback from colleagues—reveal important dimensions of a partner's impact.

The metrics for success can vary by individual. While some partners excel in client development, others shine through mentorship, leadership, or strengthening the firm’s culture. Firms that embrace these diverse contributions create a more well-rounded integration approach.

The Role of Integration Professionals

Dedicated integration professionals or teams are instrumental in ensuring smooth transitions. By coordinating activities, managing relationships, and addressing challenges, they provide consistent support throughout the process. Introducing these resources early—ideally during recruitment—makes a strong first impression and sets the tone for success.

Building a Strong Integration Program

Developing a robust integration program involves several key components:

1. Written Integration Plan
A tailored plan provides a roadmap for the integration process, outlining clear expectations and steps for success.

2. Dedicated Support
A professional or team dedicated to integration ensures partners always have access to resources and guidance when needed.

3. Stakeholder Buy-In
Support from practice leaders and stakeholders signals to new partners that their success is a priority for the firm.

4. Transparent Roles
Clearly defining roles and responsibilities fosters collaboration and avoids confusion during the integration process.

5. Open Communication
Regular check-ins and feedback channels create trust, enabling real-time adjustments to integration plans.

6. External Expertise
Coaches or consultants can provide impartial guidance, helping partners focus on their goals and navigate challenges.

 7. Continuous Improvement
Feedback from partners and stakeholders allows firms to refine their programs, ensuring they remain effective and adaptable.

Addressing Common Challenges

Integration isn’t without its challenges. Partners may struggle to connect when their specialties don’t align with the firm’s expertise, or when they are geographically distanced from the rest of the team. Addressing these issues early and thoughtfully is crucial to overcoming obstacles and fostering success.

Driving Long-Term Success

Seamless integration blends structured planning with flexibility, communication, and ongoing support. It cultivates a culture of collaboration, empowering new partners to feel valued and effective from day one. By investing in integration programs that focus on tailored strategies, law firms lay the foundation for long-term growth and collective success.

Firms that prioritize integration as a strategic initiative not only enhance the experience for new partners but also secure a brighter future for their teams and clients.

Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Unlock unparalleled coverage of the legal market

Global attorney database built with the most comprehensive sources of data on the market. Designed for law firm lateral hiring teams, legal headhunters and strategy planners, our data tracks over 620,000 profiles across 130+ countries. PLP enables firms to source talent quicker, leverage their own network for referral opportunities, map out competitors’ org structures, research new markets and much more.

Mapped: What Would the Herbert Smith Freehills & Kramer Levin Merger Look Like?

Thu, 14 Nov 2024 17:26:11 GMT

Earlier this week, Herbert Smith Freehills and Kramer Levin announced their plans to merge. The combination would create a law firm of around 2,700 lawyers and $2 billion of revenue. The Partner vote is due to take place in February 2025 and if approved, the merged firm would rank in the top 25 globally.

Using publicly-available data from Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP) , we've taken a look at which locations & practices would grow under the merger and where Herbert Smith Freehills might sit relative to rival UK firms seeking to expand in the United States.

Herbert Smith Freehills will gain a stronger foothold in the US if the merger with Kramer Levin goes ahead

Both firms have similar levels of practice area depth and would strengthen shared practices such as Litigation, Corporate and Finance

Herbert Smith Freehills could catch up with UK rivals in the US should the merger go ahead

Both firms can expect to lose a small number of Partners between now and the completion of the merger

Written using data from Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Unlock unparalleled coverage of the legal market

Global attorney database built with the most comprehensive sources of data on the market. Designed for law firm lateral hiring teams, legal headhunters and strategy planners, our data tracks over 615,000 profiles across 130+ countries. PLP enables firms to source talent quicker, leverage their own network for referral opportunities, map out competitors’ org structures, research new markets and much more.

What's Hot and What's Not? Practice Growth in the AM Law Second Hundred

Thu, 07 Nov 2024 12:01:28 GMT

Not long ago, we looked at practice area growth among the AM Law 100 and found some interesting trends. Cybersecurity and Corporate work led the way with the highest increases in Partner headcount, while various Litigation practices saw sharp decreases in Partner numbers.

So now comes the turn of the AM Law 101-200! Using data from Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP) , we've taken a look at Partner headcount growth by practice between 2019-2024 to reveal which practices are on the up and which have been shrinking.

Practices that have been growing ��

What's hot? Top 30 growing practices in the AM Law 101-200

Litigation work is fundamental to the AM Law second hundred

Across the AM Law 200 more Partners work in Litigation than any other practice group. For firms ranked 101-200, Litigation represents the primary practice group of 42% of Partners and accounts for almost half of the top growing practices listed above.

In particular, Partner headcount has increased in Employment Litigation and IP Litigation practices across multiple locations.

AM Law divide

Government Law and Private Client work are focuses of growth for second hundred firms, but not the AM Law 100

Two of the AM Law 101-200's highest growth practice groups make up some of the lowest growth areas among AM Law 100 firms.

The clear practice area in common across both halves of the AM Law 200 is Cybersecurity, Privacy & Data Protection, where Partner headcount has grown significantly for the top 100 (+36%) and the second hundred (+34%).

AM Law divide

California has been a focus of growth for AM Law 101-200 firms but has seen relatively low growth among the top 100

Across San Diego, San Francisco and Los Angeles, Partner headcount among second hundred firms has grown by +32% since 2019, compared to just +11% for AM Law 100 firms. Litigation work and a handful of firms growing aggressively (such as Buchalter, Fisher Philips and Fennermore Craig) has driven this West Coast increase.

Back in May, our analysis of practice growth among the AM Law 100 found that California had experienced relatively low growth, partly driven by a decline in some Litigation practices.

Practices that have been shrinking ��

What's not? Top 30 declining practices in the AM Law 101-200

Product Liability is the most common declining practice area

The practice has decreased in headcount across multiple cities since 2019, with a number of firms losing Partners to bigger rivals. Most notably, AM Law 100 firm Nelson Mullins has poached Product Liability Partners from several second hundred firms in recent years, including Tucker Ellis, Lathrop GPM and Benesch.

AM Law divide

The AM Law 100 are growing in Regulatory & Compliance, Corporate and International Trade more than firms ranked 101-200

Several of the AM Law 101-200’s lowest growth practice groups make up some of the highest growth areas among top 100 firms.

The gulf in Corporate work is particularly stark, the AM Law 100 has increased Partner numbers in Corporate practices by over 1,600 since 2019, compared to a headcount rise of just 167 Partners among the second hundred. Currently, Corporate is the primary practice group of 20% of AM Law 100 Partners and 10% of 101-200 Partners.

Detroit, Phoenix and a few Midwestern cities have seen decreases in Partner headcount

Detroit based law firms Honigman and Dickinson Wright account for a significant number of the Partner departures there. While Dickinson Wright again, makes up much of the decline in headcount in Phoenix, alongside Quarles & Brady.

Note on methodology

Source: Pirical Legal Professionals , using publicly available data

Timeframe: Jan 2019 - Sep 2024

Includes practices with more than 15 Partners and attributes 1 primary practice per Partner

Includes cities with more than 200 Partners and attorneys with multiple locations have been equally distributed across each

Written using data from Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Unlock unparalleled coverage of the legal market

Global attorney database built with the most comprehensive sources of data on the market. Designed for law firm lateral hiring teams, legal headhunters and strategy planners, our data tracks over 610,000 profiles across 130+ countries. PLP enables firms to source talent quicker, leverage their own network for referral opportunities, map out competitors’ org structures, research new markets and much more.

The New York City Legal Market in Numbers

Thu, 19 Sep 2024 14:38:52 GMT

The sheer size of the New York legal market relative to other US markets makes it rather unique. The city is by far the largest legal hub in the United States, with close to 10,000 Partners from AM Law 200 & Global 200 firms calling it home.

Using publicly-available data from Pirical Legal Professionals , we've taken a look at some of the trends and shifts driving the NYC market's ever-growing Partner population.

Firms have been growing their Partner numbers through lateral hires and increasingly, promotions

The volume of lateral Partner hires in New York has been consistently high since 2021 and the first half of 2024 saw a lot of movement

Lateral hires in NYC bounced back from a quiet 2020 and 2024 looks set to be as active as recent years, with almost 400 Partner moves to major firms occurring in the first half of the year.

The American Lawyer recently reported that the number of AM Law 50 Partner moves through the first two quarters of this year is tied for the second-highest total through Q2 of the last six years (in particular New York and London), with the increase being partly down to " a natural recovery, as firms are starting to feel like they’ve evened out."

Firms are also growing by promoting more and more Associates to Partner

Partner promotions in New York City grew by 114% between 2020-2023 and the 788 promotions recorded last year surpassed the number of lateral hires (579).

This significant increase could relate to stiffer competition for talent and the growing trend of law firms adopting 2 tier Partnership models. As Thomson Reuters state , "Since early 2020, the average law firm has replenished the ranks of its non-equity Partner tier at a noticeably higher rate than it has for its equity Partner tier."

The firms that promoted the most Associates to Partner in 2023, did so at varying levels of experience

Combined, Kirkland & Ellis, Simpson Thacher & Bartlett and Latham & Watkins made over 100 NYC based promotions in 2023.

However, the firms differed when it came to years of experience. Kirkland & Ellis predominantly promoted Associates with 6-7 years of experience, while Latham & Watkins and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett handed out promotions to more experienced attorneys.

BigLaw dominates growth in New York City and the fastest growing firms deployed different strategies to get there

The fastest growing firms in New York City are primarily from the AM Law top 30

Allen & Overy's merger with Shearman & Sterling helped the firm increase its NYC Partner headcount, while Kirkland & Ellis and Latham & Watkins have significantly added to their Partner numbers since 2020.

The lower ranked AM Law 100 firms are struggling to keep pace with the top 30

In 2020 and 2021, AM Law firms ranked 31-100 had higher rates of Partner growth than the top 30. But over the last few years, the top 30 AM Law firms have grown their NYC Partner numbers at a much higher rate.

In the last 12 months, the top 30 firms have increased Partner headcount by 6.8%, compared to just 1.2% for the rest of the AM Law 100.

The fastest growing firms had different strategies

The " Lateral Lovers"

Firms that grew mostly through lateral recruitment

The "Promoters"

Firms that grew their Partnership mostly through promoting their Associates

The "Happy Hybrids"

Firms that grew mostly through a balance of recruitment and promotions

Corporate and Litigation work remain the largest practices in New York City, but Cybersecurity has seen the highest growth

Corporate practices are still key

As the financial centre of the United States, "much of the practice is driven by corporate work and all of the firms located in NYC have financial institutions as clients." Georgetown Law's summary of the dominant practice work in New York is reflected in our data, with strong growth in Investment Funds (+28%), Emerging Companies & Venture Capital (+23%), and M&A (+22%).

Cybersecurity, Privacy & Data Protection has been booming

The fastest growing practice area since 2020, by some margin, is Cybersecurity, Privacy & Data Protection (+50%). In a recent article , we found that AM Law 100 Partner numbers in Cybersecurity had shot up in both NYC (+79%) and Chicago (+71%).

According to leaders of Sidley Austin's Privacy and Cybersecurity practice, views around privacy and data security are changing: "Concerns about misinformation and the misuse of personal information have created a ' crisis of new technologies ' or ' techlash ', which has shifted popular views about privacy in the United States and forced the hand of legislators and regulators."

Litigation work has seen relatively little growth in NYC

Despite Partner numbers in Litigation practices remaining high (over 3,200 Partners), growth in the practice has been quite low (+9%). The only Litigation practice areas that have seen significant growth are Real Estate (+49%) and Construction Litigation (+48%).

Note on methodology

Source: Pirical Legal Professionals , using publicly available data

Timeframe: 2020 - 2024

Written using publicly-available data from Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Unlock unparalleled coverage of the legal market

Global attorney database built with the most comprehensive sources of data on the market. Designed for law firm lateral hiring teams, legal headhunters and strategy planners, our data tracks over 600,000 profiles across 130+ countries. PLP enables firms to source talent quicker, leverage their own network for referral opportunities, map out competitors’ org structures, research new markets and much more.

Merger mania: what's driving so many AM Law mergers and what will the combined firms look like?

Thu, 12 Sep 2024 10:59:49 GMT

In the first half of September, Troutman Pepper (51st in the AM Law 200) and Locke Lord (97th) voted to approve their merger, Womble Bond Dickinson (88th) announced they were combining with Lewis Roca (175th), and Ballard Spahr (99th) revealed their plans to merge with Lane Powell (sub-200).

This burst of activity clearly represents a desire from some AM Law firms to scale and grow. But why are so many firms planning mergers in 2024 and what will the combined firms look like once complete? We've taken a look using publicly-available data tracked by Pirical Legal Professionals .

Second 50 AM Law firms have experienced slower growth than the top 50 and are merging in order to stay competitive

In 2020 & 2021, AM Law firms ranked 51-100 achieved much higher rates of annual Partner growth than their top 50 peers. However, since 2022 that trend has reversed and over the last 36 months the top 50 firms have registered stronger and more consistent headcount growth.

1-50 ranked firms are growing steadily, but for lower ranked firms " it's harder to grow through laterals without being dented by attrition of your own ." In the last 12 months AM Law 50 firms have increased Partner headcount by 3.2%, compared to just 0.7% from the second 50 firms.

In an effort to keep up with their competitors, continue to grow, and increase revenue, more & more firms outside of the top 50 are looking to merge.

Troutman Pepper will grow their Partnership in a few key cities and gain a foothold in Texas for the first time

The merger is likely to create a 1,600-lawyer firm, with revenue of around $1.5 billion, and rank in the top 30 of the AM Law. Troutman Pepper and Locke Lord share several key practice areas , namely Litigation, Real Estate and Corporate.

Womble Bond Dickinson will significantly grow their presence in the Southwest

The merger is likely to create a 1,300-lawyer firm, with revenue of around $742 million. By combining with Lewis Roca, Womble Bond Dickinson will primarily increase headcount across the firm's Litigation, Real Estate and Intellectual Property practices.

Ballard Spahr will open a new regional presence by expanding into the Northwest

The merger is likely to create a 750-lawyer firm, with revenue of around $584 million. Ballard Spahr will be boosting depth in Litigation and Corporate practice areas by merging with Lane Powell.

Written using publicly-available data from Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Unlock unparalleled coverage of the legal market

Global attorney database built with the most comprehensive sources of data on the market. Designed for law firm lateral hiring teams, legal headhunters and strategy planners, our data tracks over 600,000 profiles across 130+ countries. PLP enables firms to source talent quicker, leverage their own network for referral opportunities, map out competitors’ org structures, research new markets and much more.

How an AM Law 100 firm leverages Pirical data for strategic research

Thu, 29 Aug 2024 16:43:03 GMT

We spoke to the Research team at an AM Law 100 firm, about how they use Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP) to enhance their recruitment and competitor research strategies.

The challenge

Having access to rich enough data to support the firm's research goals

The firm places a lot of value on conducting regular research to better understand developments in the market. In order to satisfy their goals, the Research team needed access to an accurate and in-depth data source that could help them carry out competitive landscape analysis, lateral recruitment research and gather targeted competitor intelligence.

Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP) has helped bolster the team's analytical approach and started saving them hours of time.

With all the relevant data in one place and backed up by powerful search filters, the team can research which markets, industries or practices multiple firms are in with one search; "Being able to search across all the biographies for all the firms we are interested in is a huge time saver... knowing the database is fairly comprehensive allows us to quickly get results instead of having to run the same search 1 to 500 times on various law firm websites."

Using the same granular search filters, they can also compile lists of candidates that match the firm's recruitment criteria and identity existing relationships between clients and other firms when carrying out competitive intelligence research.

With Pirical data the team can:

Save time understanding the competitive landscape

Researching law firms’ presence in specific markets and practices used to require individually searching each firm’s website.

PLP unlocks the ability to search across all relevant attorney profiles for the firms the team are interested in, saving significant time. Powerful search filters help them drill down into precise market research questions, results which can be gathered and saved quickly.

Find the right candidates for lateral recruitment

Using the same granular search capabilities, the team can build out lists of potential candidates for the firm's lateral recruitment purposes.

They can search for attorneys by role, experience, location, rankings and more to generate candidate lists that meet the criteria. Having previously used another provider, the team understand that in order to work, "You really need a comprehensive database."

Get deeper competitive intelligence insights

When conducting research for a RFP, it can be difficult to find extensive results on less public-intensive practice areas.

With PLP, they can search for firms and attorneys that have previous client work experience. This helps them understand which firms have worked with a client before and which matters were worked on. The clearer picture helps the Research team better articulate any potential clients' needs when bidding for work.

Find out what PLP can do for your firm

Unlock unparalleled coverage of the legal market

Global attorney database built with the most comprehensive sources of data on the market. Designed for law firm lateral hiring teams, legal headhunters and strategy planners, our data tracks over 600,000 profiles across 130+ countries. PLP enables firms to source talent quicker, leverage their own network for referral opportunities, map out competitors’ org structures, research new markets and much more.

Which firms are driving growth in the London legal market?

Wed, 28 Aug 2024 10:45:45 GMT

At an event we recently hosted in London, we analyzed some of the trends driving Partner growth in London over the last few years.

Using publicly-available data from Pirical Legal Professionals , we've taken a look at London's Partner headcount growth, uncovering which firms & practices are flourishing and how UK firms are competing with their US rivals in the market.

Partner moves recovered to pre-covid levels in 2022 and are not showing signs of slowing down

According to Bloomberg Law , "Partner hires in London hit record high levels in the first half of the year compared with in 2023", primarily driven by US firms.

UK and US firms are using the lateral market and acquiring smaller firms to help fuel their growth

The firms with the largest increases in Partner headcount are a mixture of UK & US firms and each deployed different strategies in order to grow. Kirkland & Ellis, for example, have focused on lateral hiring, while Mishcon de Reya have primarily grown through the acquisition of Taylor Vinters.

When looking at Partner headcount growth as a percentage, US firms are growing more aggressively

In terms of relative Partner growth, the fastest growing firms in London are all from the US. In fact, Addleshaw Goddard and Mishcon de Reya are the only UK headquartered firms to make the top 20.

US headcount growth is dominated by Corporate, Litigation and Banking & Finance practices

The AM Law firms that are expanding in London have focused on a few key practice areas. In particular, Corporate - Investment Funds has seen a boom in Partner headcount.

Magic Circle firms are struggling to keep pace with the large US firms

The top 5 AM Law firms have maintained higher rates of growth than the Magic Circle since 2020, however the main focus of growth for these UK firms has probably been the US market.

Kirkland & Ellis are on course to have more Partners in London than any of the Magic Circle law firms in 2026

Highlighting the story of major US growth in London, Kirkland & Ellis look set to overtake A&O Shearman and Linklaters in terms of total Partner numbers (having already surpassed the rest of the Magic Circle).

Note on methodology

Source: Pirical Legal Professionals , using publicly available data

Timeframe: 2019 - 2024

Partners with multiple locations have been equally distributed across each.

Written using publicly-available data from Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Unlock unparalleled coverage of the legal market

Global attorney database built with the most comprehensive sources of data on the market. Designed for law firm lateral hiring teams, legal headhunters and strategy planners, our data tracks over 600,000 profiles across 130+ countries. PLP enables firms to source talent quicker, leverage their own network for referral opportunities, map out competitors’ org structures, research new markets and much more.

How Miles Partner Placement use Pirical Legal Professionals to uncover high value opportunities

Tue, 09 Jul 2024 13:14:15 GMT

We spoke to Gary Miles, President and CEO at Miles Partner Placement, about how his team uses Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP) to bolster its research process.

With PLP, Miles Partner Placement’s recruiters can unlock essential data, save time and find the most relevant candidates.

3 ways Pirical helps Gary and his team

A smart, simple interface

Recruiters don’t have the time to sort through unclear or irrelevant information.

Thanks to Pirical’s user-friendly platform, the team can move quickly and get straight to the conversations

Unparalleled data coverage

In legal recruitment, knowledge is key.

As a US-based firm, Miles Partner Placement trusts Pirical because its data isn’t just strong in one region, but across the country and the world.

Rapid feature delivery

The software you buy should provide long-term value.

As PLP continues to evolve, we’ve implemented Gary and his team’s feedback in a matter of days.

The challenge

Providing his team with the tools to excel

Gary started in the industry almost two decades ago, back when legal recruiters used physical directories to find candidates. In the years since, he’s successfully placed more than 100 partners.

So Gary’s market knowledge and network of relationships go deep, but with the founding of Miles Partner Placement he began using search software. His team needed a database to research the market and find relevant candidates, not every recruiter can rely on the years of expertise in their head like Gary can.

However, as the team grew and the company began placing Partners all across the United States, Gary realised their existing search database wasn't going far enough. "It was a little unwieldy,” Gary said. “It took time to refine the search categories, with hundreds of lawyers we weren't looking for.” They needed richer data and a more intuitive design.

The solution

Accurate and in-depth data to help build client relationships quicker

As Gary puts it, "In our business our currencies are information , relationships and time ." So any efficiencies that can be made in these areas takes the team closer to meeting new contacts. And when every phone call is an opportunity to make a large placement, any time saved is hugely valuable.

Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP) provides the team with comprehensive and up-to-date bios on attorneys all over the world, equipping them with the information they need to ask the right questions and begin building those key relationships . With all the relevant data in one place and backed up by powerful search filters, Gary's recruiters can save hours of time .

The result

Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP) as an integral part of the team's workflow

By helping Gary’s team refine their search process, Pirical has enhanced their output dramatically. “Pirical’s flexibility means my recruiters can create lists of different categories, for different firms, in different regions,” Gary said. Plus, if a feature needed improving, his team don't hesitate to feed that back. “We would point it out,” Gary told us. “And it would be fixed that day or within a couple of days.”

But even more than customer service, Gary pointed to Pirical’s data as its biggest asset. “Our searches are very specific... you’re looking for certain skill sets, certain years, certain pedigree of law school.” His recruiters need to ascertain who might have a relationship with a client, and Pirical does exactly that.

Pirical aligns with the way Gary gets new staff up to speed too. “My newest recruiter has been with us for six or seven months,” Gary told us. Importantly, this new hire also didn’t have a background in law or recruitment. “When we trained her up, PLP was very helpful and very accurate. She’s since generated four or five candidates and closed deals north of a million.”

Gary Miles, President and CEO

Miles Partner Placement

“ Pirical isn’t just accurate, it's also easy to use .

Most of my recruiters create all of their candidate lists using Pirical . We’re talking seven figure numbers in terms of the deals that have resulted from that.”

What features do Miles Partner Placement use?

People

Search 600,000+ legal professionals by location, practice area, seniority, law school and more.

Understand the client relationships a Partner might have, so you can ask the right questions during your first call.

Lists

With Pirical it’s easy to refine and save your search results, as well as create lists of attorneys based on your criteria.

Share shortlists of candidates, leave notes on profiles and easily export or contact the whole list.

Moves

Pirical helps you stay ahead of the competition by tracking lateral attorney moves and promotions.

Identify trends, monitor who’s hiring, who’s leaving and where candidates are heading to.

Find out what PLP can do for your firm

Unlock unparalleled coverage of the legal market

Global attorney database built with the most comprehensive sources of data on the market. Designed for law firm lateral hiring teams, legal headhunters and strategy planners, our data tracks over 600,000 profiles across 130+ countries. PLP enables firms to source talent quicker, leverage their own network for referral opportunities, map out competitors’ org structures, research new markets and much more.

The Boston Legal Market in Numbers

Wed, 26 Jun 2024 15:54:24 GMT

In early May, Blank Rome and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett announced that they would be opening offices in Boston. This follows a number of AM Law firms that have set up shop in the city in recent years, looking to " break into the thriving technology and life sciences hub ."

Among the largest legal hubs in the United States, Boston has had the highest growth in Partner headcount (between May 2020 - May 2024). So let's take a deeper dive into the state of the Boston legal market and find out where this growth has been occurring.

Which law firms have the largest presence in Boston?

Goodwin Procter, Ropes & Gray and Mintz Levin have the largest number of Partners, with Boston acting as the headquarters for each firm.

Which law firms have been opening offices in Boston?

13 Global 200 firms have opened offices in Boston since 2020, with 3 taking place in 2024.

Lateral Partner hires have increased significantly in Boston

Overall, lateral Partner hires have increased by 76% since 2020. Much of this growth occurred in 2021 (+52%) and 2023 (+19%), with Partner moves decreasing slightly in 2022 (-3%).

Most Partners moving into Boston from another location come from New York City and Washington, DC.

Partner promotions have increased at a higher rate than lateral hires

Partner promotions have grown year on year and at a higher rate (+104%) than lateral hires (+76%).

Which practices have been growing in Boston?

"Boston is an incubator for technology and biotech companies, which drives much of the work. Because so many of these companies need funding, Boston is also popular for venture capital companies and private equity companies."

Georgetown Law's summary of why Boston has been attracting Big Law firms echoes our data on practice growth in the city. Corporate (+24%) is the practice group with the largest growth since May 2020, followed by Intellectual Property (+22%) and Insurance (+22%). Various Corporate and Litigation practice areas have registered significant increases in Partner headcount (Employment Litigation +35%, Insurance Litigation +32%, M&A +30% and Private Equity Transactions +27%).

Most of the fastest growing firms in Boston are AM Law 100

Kirkland & Ellis have added more Partners to their Boston office than any other firm since 2020, with Goodwin Procter not far behind.

Which practices have the top growing firms focused on?

Kirkland & Ellis has primarily grown their Corporate practice in Boston, with Partner headcount increasing in Investment Funds and M&A.

Goodwin Procter has increased their Partner numbers in Private Equity Transactions, M&A and Emerging Companies & Venture Capital.

Choate has added the most Partners to the following practices; Private Client, Intellectual Property, Crime, Fraud & Investigations and M&A.

The fastest growing firms had different strategies

The "Lateral Lovers"

Firms that grew mostly through lateral recruitment

The "Promoters"

Firms that grew their Partnership mostly through promoting their Associates

The "Happy Hybrids"

Firms that grew mostly through a balance of recruitment and promotions

The Promoters

+70% of new Boston Partners at Goodwin Procter and Foley & Lardner came via promotions

The Happy Hybrids

Kirkland & Ellis and others deployed both tactics to increase their Boston Partner headcount

The Lateral Lovers

Barnes & Thornburg, Greenberg Traurig and Withers primarily hired Partners from Boston based rivals in order to grow

Note on methodology

Source: Pirical Legal Professionals , using publicly available data

Timeframe: 2020 - 2024

Partners with multiple locations have been equally distributed across each.

Written using data from Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Unlock unparalleled coverage of the legal market

Global attorney database built with the most comprehensive sources of data on the market. Designed for law firm lateral hiring teams, legal headhunters and strategy planners, our data tracks over 600,000 profiles across 130+ countries. PLP enables firms to source talent quicker, leverage their own network for referral opportunities, map out competitors’ org structures, research new markets and much more.

A glass of wine and 500 hours surfing POD: 5 key takeaways from our POD Pioneers event

Mon, 17 Jun 2024 13:23:13 GMT

Last week marked the 2nd edition of POD Pioneers, our latest gathering of Pirical On Demand (POD) customers for a day of product updates, networking and plenty of cake. This year we had fascinating sessions on how law firms are using HR and diversity data to effect lasting change, solve complex issues and achieve strategic wins.

Now the dust has settled, we’ve assembled our five key takeaways from the day.

1. Law firms are keener than ever for business leaders and HR Business Partners (HRBPs) to ground their everyday in data

Making data available and actionable to people leaders on the frontlines continues to be a common ambition among law firms. Firms have concluded that hiring ever more analysts to manually crunch numbers in Excel is not a scalable approach. More firms have experimented with business intelligence solutions like custom dashboards (PowerBI, Tableau) or analytics modules within operational systems (e.g. Workday HRIS) and have a more sophisticated understanding of the costs and trade-offs.

One particular shift mentioned at the event is new senior hires coming into law firms from outside the legal sector with higher expectations that data will be at their fingertips and lower appetite to make decisions without data. As a result, teams are being asked to invest in data quality and usability.

2. Showing what’s possible with data will increase appetite for more data

Even if law firm leaders are keen to adopt more data-driven practices, getting buy-in from the wider organisation can be tricky. In one of the discussions, a UK firm discussed their journey towards a more data-driven culture.

With the help of Pirical, the firm conducted a project with two key goals; (1) identify if the firm had an attrition problem in one of their key growth regions and (2) build some internal appetite for further data projects. The team addressed the first goal by identifying a specific problem office in that region and a specific reason employees were leaving. Using data they were able to convey the story of that office to the firm leadership and get real commitment to fix the attrition problem.

The data-driven approach to identifying the source of attrition helped make progress on their second goal, building an awareness of the data capabilities. Our speaker noted that internal stakeholders began to be more curious around this HR data, asking questions like “I didn't know we could provide this, what else can we do?”

3. Spending 500 hours mastering your data will help drive lasting organisational change

“Law firms love evidence”, one speaker pointed out. If you can use data to show the need for strategic and cultural changes, you'll be better able to bring everyone at the firm on board.

If you want to effect lasting change across organisations as large and complex as law firms, having access to data is only half the battle.

You also need to have a deep sense of what your data says. Simply having the numbers in front of you will not address the problems, as one speaker said, "Don’t think of data as the answer, think of it as a way to ask another question.”

"If you're a diversity leader, you can't just rely on a data analyst to summarise what you need to know. You need to have spent the time yourself - I think I've spent like 500 hours in POD or something - getting to grips with our data. What's interesting about it, what I want to look into next etc."

"You could be sitting in front of the telly just POD-surfing. You know, a glass of wine and a bit of POD."

4. Long-term strategic planning doesn’t work without good data

“Law firms are obsessed with other law firms.” This quote from one of our speakers highlights the competitive state of the legal industry. We discussed how understanding your competitors’ growth strategies can be an invaluable asset.

For many people working in this space, gathering named-firm competitor data would usually involve manually looking through websites and 'counting heads' to see where firms have been growing. We discussed Pirical's new legal market intelligence tool, PLP Strategy, which solves this gap in the market.

5. General Counsel (GCs) want law firms to back up their claims of diversity progress with hard data

As well as making plans, another element of using data is looking back to track progress. In one of the case studies presented on the day, we looked at how a law firm used evidence of the organisation’s DEI improvements to stand out from its competitors and build a strong high-trust relationship with a valued client.

In the case study, the client discovered that an underrepresented group had been disproportionately staffed on fixed fee matters with low billing potential. Intricate benchmarking data showed some firms on the client's panel had made more progress than others.

What is Pirical On Demand (POD)?

Pirical's people analytics software equips law firms with the HR, rewards and diversity data they need to make smarter and fairer people decisions.

HR data is messy, hard to analyze and difficult to distribute to people leaders. With Pirical On Demand , it's a lot easier for people leaders to get value out of it, without the need for an army of analysts and engineers. With Pirical , you can save time, get people engaged and take a more sophisticated, data-driven approach.

Book a demo today

How Eversheds Sutherland fills out diversity surveys in just a few clicks

Mon, 03 Jun 2024 13:30:09 GMT

We spoke to Katie McIntyre, Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Manager, Data Analytics at Eversheds Sutherland , about how her team uses Pirical On Demand (POD) to streamline its diversity reporting.

Thanks to Pirical, the firm can save time, exceed client expectations and get more out of its internal data.

3 ways Pirical helped Eversheds Sutherland

Keeping clients happy

When you answer a diversity data request, your submission has to be perfect.

By delivering accurate data ahead of time, Eversheds Sutherland can keep clients (and relationship partners) happy.

Saving weeks of time

Diversity surveys cost firms a huge amount of energy and resources.

With Pirical, Eversheds Sutherland went from surveys taking weeks to completing them in under 15 minutes.

Making the most of its data

The data you collect should have long-term benefits for your firm, rather than descending into busywork.

Using Pirical, Eversheds Sutherland can ensure its internal data is also being used in more strategic ways.

The challenge

Sourcing complex, disparate data in a short timeframe

Like every firm, Eversheds Sutherland gets lots of requests for diversity data. This includes the big annual industry surveys, such as those carried out by The Minority Corporate Counsel Association (MCCA). But it also means more short notice client requests, as well as data compiling for internal use.

For Katie, one challenge was sourcing data from teams with their own priorities. “When the surveys are due, my recruitment department is overwhelmed with summer associate résumés,” Katie told us. As if contacting multiple, busy departments wasn’t hard enough, each survey also had different definitions of diversity. Plus, these definitions changed each year. “It was difficult for me to set myself up for success,” Katie said.

At one point, these surveys were creating weeks of work for Katie. And any delays could have a real impact, especially when the requests had come from valuable paying clients. “Money is on the line when it comes to these surveys,” Katie told us.

The solution

A quick and easy way to organise diversity data

By prepopulating for the most common questionnaires, Pirical’s Survey Filler tool saved Katie a huge amount of time. “A lot of the client surveys would take us two weeks, with industry surveys taking much longer,” Katie told us. “Now it takes two clicks and a maximum of 15 minutes. It's literally a drop-down menu, with the exact wording as what’s in these surveys,” Katie said.

It has also taken the pressure off Katie’s interactions with other departments, which protects client relationships too. “It’s difficult to go to a relationship partner and say, "can you please ask your client for an extension?" Katie said. “Now I never need the extensions.”

What’s more, because of its point-and-click interface, Katie’s less technical colleagues can take over when she’s away. This same functionality has also freed her up to do other data projects. “I don’t have to focus as much on the grunt work of filling these surveys,” Katie said. “Pirical’s worth more than we’re paying for it. It gives us the power to truly look at our firm: here’s our wins, here’s our opportunities, here’s where we can go.”

Darwin Conner, Chief Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer (US), Eversheds Sutherland

“One issue we run into when it comes to processing and coordinating data is that the software systems holding all of that data don’t necessarily ‘talk’ to each other.

"Pirical’s product is user-friendly and helps us coordinate the data we receive from multiple systems , making that data more accessible for internal purposes and for our data-based responses to client surveys.”

What features did Eversheds Sutherland use?

Survey Filler

Survey Filler helps you answer diversity-related questions in one place, and avoid the pain of gathering data from multiple teams.

It does this by providing easy access to hundreds of the definitions and metrics used in the most common requests.

Survey Templates

This tool is designed for surveys that require multiple cuts of data, or even hundreds.

Built alongside Survey Filler, it has all the data tables you’ll need for each survey pre-configured. So you can load them in just a few clicks.

Find out what POD can do for your firm

Pirical's people analytics software equips law firms with the HR, rewards and diversity data they need to make smarter and fairer people decisions.

HR data is messy, hard to analyze and difficult to distribute to people leaders. With Pirical On Demand (POD) , it's a lot easier for people leaders to get value out of it, without the need for an army of analysts and engineers. With Pirical , you can save time, get people engaged and take a more sophisticated, data-driven approach.

What's Hot and What's Not? Practice Growth in the AM Law 100

Thu, 16 May 2024 13:34:27 GMT

In Thomson Reuter's State of the US Legal Market 2024 , a key finding was the ongoing shift from the "Transactional decade" (a period of strength for transactional practices such as Corporate, M&A, Real Estate, Tax) "to the more recent period in which the majority of growth in demand for law firm services has relied on counter-cyclical practices" (eg. Litigation, Labor & Employment, Bankruptcy).

This made us curious to dig a bit deeper into practice area growth among the AM Law 100 over the past few years. Using data from Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP) , we've taken a look at Partner headcount growth by practice between 2019-2024 to reveal which practices are on the up and which have been shrinking!

Practices that have been growing ��

What's hot? Top 30 growing practices in the AM Law 100

Cybersecurity, Privacy & Data Protection has boomed in New York City and Chicago

It is interesting therefore, that the practice has also grown in Washington, DC (+14%).

Source: Lexology

Corporate has had the highest net growth in Partner headcount

Investment Funds has grown significantly across the East Coast of the US, Washington, DC (+44%), Chicago (+42%), Boston (+42%) and New York City (+36%).

M&A has grown by an average of +26% in almost all the cities in our analysis, with Minneapolis (+60%), Philadelphia (+48%), Dallas (+34%) and Denver (+32%) all ranking in the top 30. Only San Diego (-11%) and St. Louis (-6%) saw a decline in M&A Partner headcount.

Dallas has been a focus of growth for AM Law 100 firms

Partner headcount in Dallas increased by +31% between 2019-2024, with M&A, Tax, Banking & Finance, Employment Litigation and Real Estate being the key practice areas driving this growth.

Many AM Law 100 firms have opened offices in Texas in recent years, drawn by the state's growing rank of corporations, "strong economy and healthy legal market".

Source: Major, Lindsey & Africa

Practices that have been shrinking ��

What's not? Top 30 declining practices in the AM Law 100

San Francisco - Insurance Litigation is the practice with the sharpest decline

A number of AM Law 100 firms, including Cozen O'Connor, Gordon & Rees & Duane Morris have decreased their number of Partners working in Insurance Litigation in San Francisco. The practice has declined significantly from 2022 onwards.

Litigation practices make up much of the bottom 30

Although Litigation grew overall, by an average of +15% across the AM Law 100, various Litigation practices make up nearly half of the practice areas that have seen negative growth.

Changes in demand appear to vary by location and focus, eg. IP Litigation decreasing in Seattle (-16%), Palo Alto (-10%), Philadelphia (-9%) & Houston (-6%) and Antitrust Litigation shrinking in Chicago (-16%), New York City (-6%) & San Francisco (-5%).

California had relatively low growth over this period, partly driven by a decline in some Litigation practices

Silicon Valley has experienced a bit of an economic slump in recent years, with mass layoffs occurring in the tech sector. This trend may have influenced the decline of certain Litigation practices in the state. Some of California's top declining practices are Insurance Litigation (-29%) & Antitrust Litigation (-5%) in San Francisco, IP Litigation (-10%) in Palo Alto and Employment Litigation (-9%) in Los Angeles.

Although, bucking this West Coast trend with significant growth is Patents Litigation in San Francisco (+33%) and Employment Litigation in San Diego (+33%).

Note on methodology

Source: Pirical Legal Professionals , using publicly available data

Timeframe: 2019 - 2024

Only includes practices with more than 30 Partners and attributes 1 primary practice per Partner. Partners with multiple locations have been equally distributed across each.

Written using data from Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Unlock unparalleled coverage of the legal market

Global attorney database built with the most comprehensive sources of data on the market. Designed for law firm lateral hiring teams, legal headhunters and strategy planners, our data tracks over 600,000 profiles across 130+ countries. PLP enables firms to source talent quicker, leverage their own network for referral opportunities, map out competitors’ org structures, research new markets and much more.

Mapped: What Would the Troutman Pepper & Locke Lord Merger Look Like?

Thu, 25 Apr 2024 10:05:11 GMT

Last week, Troutman Pepper and Locke Lord confirmed they had opened merger negotiations.

If successful, the combination would create a law firm of around 1,600 lawyers and revenue of more than $1.5 billion. The merged firm would jump into the top 30 of the AM Law 100 (currently Troutman Pepper is 45th & Locke Lord is 96th).

This made us wonder, what would the merged firm look like, and which offices & practices would see the most growth?

Troutman Pepper would grow their Partnership in a few key cities and gain a foothold in Texas for the first time

Both firms have similar structures so would be boosting several shared practice areas

Written using data from Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Global attorney database built with the most comprehensive sources of data on the market. Designed for law firm lateral hiring teams, legal headhunters and strategy planners, our data tracks over 595,000 profiles across 130+ countries. PLP enables firms to source talent quicker, leverage their own network for referral opportunities, map out competitors’ org structures and research new markets.

How law firms can use data to differentiate their pitch

Tue, 02 Apr 2024 11:19:26 GMT

A few years ago, our founder Jason Ku, used data to select a law firm to work with (for those of you who know him this will come as no surprise). We thought there were some interesting parallels with what GCs are looking for when picking firms to work with, so we've broken down his approach and highlighted the key learnings for law firms.

Why does this apply to law firms?

Clients are becoming more analytical when it comes to selecting firms to work with. Therefore, there's a great opportunity for law firms to

take a data-driven approach to highlighting their offering.

As more and more clients look to access data when making their decisions, if your firm isn't providing it then your rival firms might be instead. Using tools like Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP) , you can analyze how your firm's offering differs from the competition and strategically emphasize your key strengths.

How Jason used data to pick a law firm

For context, Jason was looking for an immigration lawyer and reached out to several firms. He received nearly identical proposals from 3, all offering the same kind of generic service and quoting a similar price (within 5% of each other).

After price negotiations he ended up with 3 different options

Firm 1

Agreed to a 10% discount

Firm 2

Agreed to a 15% discount

Firm 3

Agreed to a 30% discount

But why would 3 firms with similar offerings accept different fees? And more importantly, which one should he pick to work with?

Using Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP) , our legal market research tool which collects public data of almost 600,000 lawyers globally, Jason started to dig into the market and the 3 law firms he was considering working with.

He looked into the organization structures of each firm

Each one had a very different structure, which meant he was able to make some expectations around each firm's offering and make his final decision

Firm 1

Top-heavy

Premium priced service driven by expertise for difficult matters

Firm 2

Well-balanced

Flexible full-service for different needs

Firm 3

Light on Partners

Lower-cost offering for common immigration issues

Differentiating their services relative to the competition would have influenced Jason to make a different choice

Had any of the firms highlighted their specific strengths at the beginning of the process, Jason's choice could have been much simpler.

Firm 1

Top-heavy

"We have deep expertise in complex issues that our competitors can’t match. You will get personal service directly from our Partners who will work closely with you."

Firm 2

Well-balanced

"We are well-balanced to ensure we can optimally meet your different needs. As your business grows, you will have different needs, which we can handle."

Firm 3

Light on Partners

"We offer a cost-effective solution to your legal requirements, while maintaining a high level of service."

Using Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP) to differentiate your offering

Benchmark your firm's strength against competitors

Understand the opposite team’s size, seniority split, legal rankings, tenure, previous clients, and their firm’s strength in associated practice areas.

Examples from PLP users:

Identified that the opposing team had a high proportion of Junior Partners (6-9 years experience) compared to their more senior & experienced Partnership team
Discovered that the rival team had more Partners who were listed in both New York City and London, but these same Partners seemed to be primarily based in London. When pitching for New York work, the rival firm was inflating their bench size numbers

Showcase the dimensions where your firm shines

Identify which KPIs make your firm stand out: financials, headcount growth, diversity representation, attrition rates, national or global presence, etc.

Examples from PLP users:

Identified that their firm's IP practice had 3 more Partners than their competitor's
Discovered that the other firm didn't have a strong Antitrust practice while pitching for M&A work
Emphasized their firm's strong retention rate and stressed the continuity of service the client would receive
Highlighted the diversity of the team pitching for work relative to the market

Research the Partners you're up against

Leverage a network of 10 million+ legal connections to identify who at your firm can share intel on teams pitching for the same work or RFP.

Data collected using Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Global attorney database built with the most comprehensive sources of data on the market. Designed for law firm lateral hiring teams, legal headhunters, BD & Marketing professionals and strategy planners, our data tracks over 580,000 profiles across 130+ countries. PLP enables firms to source talent quicker, leverage their own network for referral opportunities, map out competitors’ org structures and research new markets.

State of the Bay Area Legal Market

Mon, 18 Mar 2024 14:23:02 GMT

A few weeks ago, we presented a deep dive into the state of the Bay Area Legal Market to BALRA (Bay Area Legal Recruitment Association) while in San Francisco.

We uncovered some interesting insights on Partner growth and the different strategies that some of the fastest growing law firms have deployed there, so we've published the findings as an article.

Despite the burst of the Tech bubble in 2022/2023, lateral Partner hiring levels have slightly increased in the Bay Area

Even though there was a lot of negativity in the wider market last year, this wasn’t realised in the Partner hiring levels.

The Bay Area had about as many Partners moving in than moving out since 2020

Despite rumours that attorneys have been relocating out of the Bay Area, this turned out not to be the case.

Firms have also significantly increased their volume of Partner promotions, at a faster rate than hiring

Firms have been moving people up as opposed to hiring laterally, so good news for aspiring Associates.

Overall, Partner exits have been offset by lateral hires, promotions & firm acquisitions in the Bay Area

There were over 1,000 Partner exits but promotions, hires, a little bit of M&A and intra-firm location moves more than offset this.

The fastest growing firms in the Bay Area were quite spread across the AM Law 200 and also included the UK player Freshfields

Quite a few firms have grown their Partnership headcount. But how have these firms grown and what strategies did they use?

The fastest growing firms had different strategies

We found 4 main categories:

The "Lateral Lovers"

Firms that grew mostly through lateral recruitment

The "Super Mergers"

Firms that grew mostly through acquisitions

The "Promoters"

Firms that grew mostly through promoting their Associates to Partnership

The "Happy Hybrids"

Firms that grew mostly through a balance of recruitment and promotions

The Lateral Lovers / Lewis Brisbois has attracted talent through an “immediate route to Partnership” strategy

20% of Lewis Brisbois Partner hires were brought in through promoting them to Partner.

The Super Mergers / Two firms made a significant dent in the Bay Area market through combinations

There have been other mergers in the Bay Area but these firms stood out as having the highest proportion through M&A.

+40 Partners in Oakland & San Francisco through combination with full-service business law firm Wendel Rosen (2022)

+11 Partners in San Francisco through combination with litigation & transactional firm Cooper White & Cooper (2022) +2 Partners in San Francisco through combination with boutique litigation firm Simmonds & Narita (2023)

The Promoters / Latham & Watkins and Gordon & Rees have been making 5+ Partner promotions per year in the Bay Area

Both firms averaged around 5 promotions per year.

19 Partner promotions in the Bay Area between 2020-2023

~5 partner promotions / year

18 Partner promotions in the Bay Area between 2020-2023

~5 partner promotions / year

The Happy Hybrids / Goodwin, Baker McKenzie and K&L Gates had an even number of lateral hires and Partner promotions

These 3 firms almost made an identical number of Partner promotions to hires.

Written using data from Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Global attorney database built with the most comprehensive sources of data on the market. Designed for law firm lateral hiring teams, legal headhunters and strategy planners, our data tracks over 580,000 profiles across 130+ countries. PLP enables firms to source talent quicker, leverage their own network for referral opportunities, map out competitors’ org structures and research new markets.

How's the merger going? A look into Shearman & Sterling's Partner exits

Mon, 11 Mar 2024 12:31:35 GMT

A few weeks ago we published an article looking at which AM Law 100 firms have been the best at retaining their lateral Partner hires . In last place, with a retention rate of 60% (between 2020-2023) was Shearman & Sterling. Presumably, the upcoming merger with Allen & Overy has been a major factor in the firm's more recent Partner departures.

So this got us thinking, how many Partners have left the firm since the A&O Shearman merger was announced back in May 2023, and have there been more or fewer exits than in other recent mergers?

Shearman & Sterling has lost 9% of their Partners since the merger was announced

Allen & Overy has lost 3% of their Partners since the merger was announced

Shearman are losing more Partners than expected, when comparing to other recent mergers

The average decrease in Partner headcount among our comparison sample* of mergers is 4%.

As A&O Shearman, the merger is on par with the expected number of Partner departures, having seen a 4% decline in combined headcount since the announcement. But separated, Shearman & Sterling has lost 9% of their Partners to Allen & Overy's 3%. As is stands, Shearman has suffered a higher rate of Partner exits than any other firms in our comparison sample, while Allen & Overy has maintained an expected attrition rate for a firm undergoing a merger.

The merger is set to be complete by May 2024, so these figures could increase should more Partners leave over the next few months.

*Sample of comparison mergers: Bryan Cave <> Berwin Leighton Paisner (BCLP), Clyde & Co <> BLM (Clyde & Co), Faegre Baker Daniels <> Drinker Biddle & Reath (Faegre Drinker), Troutman Sanders <> Pepper Hamilton (Troutman Pepper), and Holland & Knight <> Thompson & Knight (Holland & Knight)

Most of Shearman's Partner departures have taken place outside of the United States

There has been a 13% decrease in Shearman's non-US Partner population, compared to a 6% decline among US based Partners.

The highest total number of exits have been in Paris and London, where 4 Partners in each office have left since the merger was announced. The Bay Area and Austin have registered the highest departures among Shearman's US offices.

"When contemplating a combination, firms must be mindful of how the two legacy firms will evolve to become “one firm” and ensure they retain their valuable talent.

Successful firms always start with a sound strategy before attempting a combination, taking the time to reflect on what their culture is, and what their “personal brand” is that defines them as part of their strategy planning process. This sentiment is echoed in the Thomson Reuters Institute’s research that shows that the strongest drivers of lawyer engagement are the firm’s direction and its leadership."

Tom Snavely | Thomson Reuters

Written using data from Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Global attorney database built with the most comprehensive sources of data on the market. Designed for law firm lateral hiring teams, legal headhunters and strategy planners, our data tracks over 580,000 profiles across 130+ countries. PLP enables firms to source talent quicker, leverage their own network for referral opportunities, map out competitors’ org structures and research new markets.

Which AM Law 100 firms have been retaining their lateral Partner hires?

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 11:56:56 GMT

Since a dip in 2020, the number of lateral Partner hires made by AM Law 100 firms have increased. In total, over 10,000 Partner moves have taken place, but how successful have the firms been at retaining these hires?

Using publicly-available data tracked by Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP) we've taken a look at how many of the lateral Partners hired between 2020 - 2023 by AM Law 100 firms, are still at their new firm. We've excluded moves made as a result of mergers.

Ranked: which firms have had the highest Partner retention rates since 2020?

Firms with strong retention - 90%+

Cleary Gottlieb, Davis Polk, Debevoise & Plimpton and Fenwick (1st)

These 4 firms jointly claimed the top spot in our list, as all of them have managed to retain 100% of their Partner hires since 2020.

Interestingly, 3 of the joint top firms and a large portion of our top 30 have something in common, single tier Partnership models. It would seem that operating an equity model can lead to a more stable Partner population, as evidenced by the retention rates of Cleary Gottlieb (100%) , Davis Polk (100%) , Debevoise & Plimpton (100%) , Paul Weiss (97%) , Skadden (97%) , Arnold & Porter (97%) , Covington (96%) , WilmerHale (94%) , and Schulte Roth (94%) .

Source: Above The Law

Is 100% retention as good as it sounds?

"Even though 100% retention of Partners hired since 2020 is good, it's not yet the sign of success . A lot of law firms need around 5 years to judge whether a lateral Partner hire has been a success or not. Nonetheless, a low retention score after a few years is clearly still a bad sign. "

Gary Miles | Miles Partner Placement

Barnes & Thornburg (10th), Willkie Farr & Gallagher (14th), Gibson Dunn (15th), Morgan Lewis (17th) and Womble Bond Dickinson (27th)

These firms are noteworthy for ranking in the top 30 of Partner retention while making an above average number of hires. Each firm made well over 100 lateral Partner hires between 2020-2023 and have retained more than 90% of these new recruits.

Mintz (34th)

Mintz's strong showing in retaining Partners (93%) could relate to the firm's fairly new compensation model. Mintz have capped the origination credit for bringing in business at 75%, awarding credit on a matter-by-matter basis instead. This approach leaves more room for newer Partners to be fairly recognized and rewarded for their part in developing client relationships.

Source: Reuters

The benefit of more selective Partner hiring

"The ranking reinforces the notion that purposeful, more selective Partner recruiting seems to have a much higher success rate. The firms who are recruiting less, appear to have a higher retention rate."

Almost 90% of the top 30 ranked firms in our list made fewer hires than the overall average. Furthermore, 50% of the 10 firms with the highest total number of Partner hires rank in the bottom 20 of retention rate.

Warren Smith | Smith Legal Search

Mid-table performers - 80%+

DLA Piper (64th) and Kirkland & Ellis (65th)

As two of the largest law firms in the market, DLA (88%) and Kirkland (88%) have had similar retention rates over the last few years. Both firms have hired around 450 Partners since 2020 and lost over 50 each, marking some of the highest total exits in our list. However, DLA and Kirkland operate non-equity tiers and maintain huge Partnerships so a high number of exits is to be expected.

Firms with slightly lower retention - 60%+

McDermott Will & Emery (96th)

McDermott (79%) registered 49 Partner departures, one of the highest total exits on our list. In fact, the firm has lost almost as many laterally hired Partners as the likes of Kirkland and DLA, both of whom made twice as many hires as McDermott in the same timeframe.

Lewis Brisbois (99th)

With the highest total number of Partner exits, Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith (64%) claim 2nd last place on our list. 152 laterally hired Partners have joined and subsequently left the firm since 2020. In fact, a massive 126 of the 152 exits left Lewis Brisbois within the first 2 years of moving. The firm was rocked by mass departures and scandal last year, one possible reason behind the poor Partner retention record.

Source: LA Times

Shearman & Sterling (100th)

Last place in our ranking goes to Shearman & Sterling, soon to be A&O Shearman. The upcoming merger with Allen & Overy is presumably the overriding factor in the firm's 60% retention rate. 27 Partners have moved elsewhere since the merger was officially announced and lateral hiring ground to a halt in 2023.

We mapped out what the US presence of the combined law firm could look like in a recent article, have a read of The American dream: a look at Allen & Overy's potential US presence post-merger .

What can motivate Partners to leave?

"Each lawyer will have their own deeply personal reasons for making a switch, yet our research at the Thomson Reuters Institute uncovers several common reasons offered by those who do leave (Fig 1). Dissatisfaction with firm leadership and strategy are top the list, although compensation issues and a lack of opportunities to grow and progress within their careers were also cited.

The firms that have high retention rates are taking a strategic approach to lateral hiring and integration across the entire talent management lifecycle (Fig 2). Firms that have strong retention rates have a talent management strategy that ensures success.

Our previous Stellar Performance research has shown that lateral partners bring roughly 22% of their books of business to their new firms, on average; but that number can reach much higher or shrink to nothing, depending on how well-organized and effective the hiring law firm’s on-boarding and integration strategy is for new laterals."

Tom Snavely | Thomson Reuters

Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP)

Empower your firm’s Recruitment and Strategy teams with our global database of 580,000+ attorneys. Source top legal talent, leverage a network of referrals, map out your competitors’ organisations and identify areas for growth.

Note on methodology

Source: Pirical Legal Professionals , using publicly available data

Excludes: firms with less than 10 lateral Partner hires since Jan 2020 and Partner moves as a result of mergers
Timeframe: 01 Jan 2020 - 31 Dec 2023

Citations

Written with commentary and feedback from Gary Miles (Miles Partner Recruitment), Keith Fall (Walker Associates), Maria Ho (Vault), Warren Smith (Smith Legal Search) and Tom Snavely (Thomson Reuters Institute).

How To Forecast Diversity With Predictive Data Analytics

Tue, 23 Jan 2024 15:25:40 GMT

How can you make predictions about the future diversity of your organization, with a model grounded in real data? In this tutorial we will explain how diversity projections work in Pirical On Demand (POD).

Pirical On Demand is a library of over 1,000 tried-and-tested analyses, kept up to date with your firm’s data. HR professionals use POD to benchmark statistics against competitors, to analyze bias in recruitment and work allocation systems, and for real-time or predictive capabilities like highlighting which employees may need extra support. POD addresses all core diversity traits: Gender, Ethnicity, Social Mobility, Sexual Orientation, Disability, Age, and Religion.

Pirical has been supporting law firms to forecast diversity representation since 2018

Our latest model is now available to customers today through POD, a self-service analytics platform.

Diversity projections are an essential tool for:

Unifying stakeholders around the state of diversity today
Identifying the most effective levers for change
Setting and evaluating progress against diversity targets
Defining the boundaries of healthy progress: avoiding underperformance (discrimination risk) and overperformance (affirmative action risk)

The model is designed on the principle that what has happened in the last 5 years is a good baseline for what might happen in the next 5 to 10 years.

Projections in POD are available for all roles, both timekeepers/fee earners and staff/business professionals.

Projections can be generated for any diversity trait, practice group, business function or office.

Users with the right privileges can also access the underlying headcounts generated by the model.

POD generates three scenarios to illustrate their relative impacts on the rate of diversification:

Equal promotion rates (for example, the number of women promoted is proportional to the population of women)
Equal attrition rates (for example, the number of women leaving is proportional to the population of women)
Custom diversity of new hires - set your own parameters for roles and employee categories

As well as the combined scenario: what is possible if multiple scenarios are achieved.

The model uses recent historical trends to project the future

The algorithm takes, for every role in a law firm over the last 5 years:

Recruitment rates and diversity of new hires
Attrition rates and diversity of leavers
Promotion rates and diversity of promotions

Then steps forward with these numbers each year to see how representation is expected to evolve, if the firm keeps going as it has.

Headcounts are rounded to the nearest whole individual.

No artificial growth rates are imposed at any level. Instead roles will have their 'natural growth rate'. For example, if the 5-year rate of recruitment for a role has been higher than the 5-year rate of attrition, then the role might increase headcount over time.

Career ladders are not linear

An important aspect of the model is that it takes into account the whole network of roles in your firm, including moves that deviate or flow against the traditional pathways. For example, the model might take into account individuals' different pathways to partnership:

This will look different for each firm, as roles and movements will vary.

The Pirical team can help you get the most from projections

Pirical analysts are available to support customers with training and advice, or on a project basis to manage complex projects involving projections. Contact us today for a quote.

Not yet a Pirical On Demand customer?

Explore the demo today to see the power of On Demand.

Stroock from all sides: which rival firms have benefited from the demise of the 150-year old firm

Tue, 28 Nov 2023 09:43:32 GMT

At the end of October Stroock & Stroock & Lavan announced that the firm was dissolving after nearly 150 years of history.

The struggling New York firm had recently tried to save itself through merger talks with Nixon Peabody and Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw & Pittman. The failures of these talks coupled with a string of high profile departures has resulted in a rapid recent decline to Stroock's Partnership.

All of Stroock's offices have suffered from Partner departures

54 Partners have left the firm in 2023, marking a 76% decline in headcount. All four of the firm's offices have felt the impact as rival firms across the US have capitalised on Stroock's difficulties.

Rival law firms have been poaching large groups of Stroock Partners

Quite a few rival firms have benefited from Stroock's struggles in recent years. The first major loss of a large group of Partners came in March 2022 when Paul Hastings hired an 18-Partner Restructuring team based in New York.

In 2023 the scale of the departures increased. Shortly after Stroock's merger talks with Nixon Peabody failed, both Steptoe & Johnson (5) and Morgan Lewis (8) hired a significant number of Partners from a variety of offices and practice areas. While a number of other rivals picked off smaller numbers of Partners here and there.

Hogan Lovells just hired a huge group of Stroock Partners

At the end of October, amid the failed merger discussions with Pillsbury and increasing uncertainty about the future of the firm, Hogan Lovells announced it was snapping up 28 of Stroock's Partners. The vast majority of these hires are attorneys based in New York, with Real Estate being the key practice area.

The mass departures to Paul Hastings and Hogan Lovells gutted the leadership of two of Stroock's key practices, Restructuring and Real Estate. That impact plus the continued wave of smaller scale departures, has left Stroock with only a handful of Partners who will now likely join their former colleagues and move onto other firms.

Interested in legal market insights?

Understand the market better and gain insights on your competitors with Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP) .

Our comprehensive market coverage and historic data allows you to monitor which law firms are thriving & which are churning, track attorney movements, and identify trends within the legal industry.

Partners piling up: Kirkland & Ellis's record number of attorney promotions

Tue, 24 Oct 2023 11:25:54 GMT

At the start of October Kirkland & Ellis announced their latest cohort of Partner promotions, with a record 205 attorneys making the cut.

Kirkland promote more Partners, relative to their size, than any other AM Law 100 firm

The number of Associates the firm elevates to Partner has been increasing year on year, setting new industry records each time. This year's figure is, yet again, the largest class to be promoted to Partnership and significantly eclipses the number of promotions handed out by Kirkland's nearest AM Law 100 rivals.

This round of Partner promotions was spread across most of Kirkland's global offices

Over 80% of the promotions were based in the United States

All of Kirkland's US offices increased their Partner numbers within this round of promotions.

The firm's largest offices elevated the highest total number of Associates:

New York City = 49 promotions
Chicago = 40 promotions
Washington, DC = 17 promotions

While the offices with the highest levels of Partner growth relative to their size were:

Salt Lake City = +36%
Bay Area = +24%
Boston = +20%

The bulk of Kirkland's international promotions were in London

There were 39 Partner promotions among the firm's international offices. The 26 in London means that it remains Kirkland's largest office outside of the US.

There were a handful of promotions across Munich and Paris to complete the round of European activity. While the Shanghai (+25%) and Hong Kong (+18%) offices had the largest relative increases to their Partner numbers.

Kirkland promote their Associates to Partner much earlier than other firms

One of the reasons behind Kirkland's much larger Partner population is the promotion model they operate. The firm tends to promote Associates with 5-10 years of experience to Partner, whereas their peer firms typically hand out promotions after 9-14 years of experience.

How Kirkland source their Associates varies depending on the location

This cohort of promoted Partners are a mixture of homegrown talent, who have spent the majority of their careers at Kirkland and lateral hires, who have been poached from other firms as Associates a few years into their careers.

Where this year's batch of promoted attorneys began their careers varies depending on the location. Among the US based promotions there is an even split between homegrown talent and lateral hires, but among the firm's international offices there is a clear tendency towards lateral hiring.

The London office is very reliant on bolstering its Associate ranks with lateral hires, with 85% of this year's promotions being attorneys that began their careers at a rival firm. As a US firm operating in a very competitive local market this makes some sense. In fact, we recently explored the stiff competition between US & UK firms vying for London's legal talent in a recent data insights article .

Out of all the US offices, New York City leans the most heavily towards hiring Associates from other firms. Chicago meanwhile, being the firm's headquarters and largest office, is the only Kirkland location to have a greater number of homegrown attorneys.

Interested in legal market insights?

Understand the market better and gain insights on your competitors with our data-driven legal market intelligence tools.

Our comprehensive market coverage and historic data allows you to monitor which law firms are thriving & which are churning, track attorney movements, and identify trends within the legal industry.

The American dream: a look at Allen & Overy's potential US presence post-merger

Mon, 25 Sep 2023 17:03:26 GMT

Allen & Overy and Shearman & Sterling are due to begin their Partner votes on the proposed merger at the end of September. If approved, the merger will create a mega firm of almost 4,000 attorneys worldwide. Given that the deal would represent a major milestone for a UK firm securing a foothold in the US market, we decided to have a look at what Allen & Overy's presence in the United States could look like if the merger goes ahead.

Magic Circle firms have been growing their US Partner numbers over the last few years. Some faster than others.

Using data from Pirical Legal Professionals we dug into the current headcount of US based Magic Circle Partners and mapped out the potential Partner headcount of A&O Shearman, comparing their improved regional presence to their British rivals.

The figures are based on all current Shearman & Sterling US Partners staying post-merger. However, even if 50% of Shearman's Partners leave between now and the completion of the merger, A&O Shearman will still be the largest Magic Circle firm in the US with around 150 combined Partners.

For context, Shearman & Sterling's Partner attrition rate in the United States over the last 12 months has been 15%.

New York City

The four Magic Circle firms with a US presence (Clifford Chance, Allen & Overy, Linklaters, and Freshfields) all have their largest offices in New York City. Between them they currently have almost 200 Partners based in NYC, with Clifford Chance leading the pack in terms of headcount.

Should the merger go ahead, Allen & Overy will overtake their British rival and substantially increase their headcount to well over 100 New York Partners.

Washington, DC

It's likely to be a similar story in Washington, DC where Allen & Overy could increase their headcount from 19 to over 30 Partners, compared to Clifford Chance (23 Partners), Freshfields (17 Partners), and Linklaters (7 Partners).

Texas

Thanks to Shearman & Sterling's 3 offices in Texas, Allen & Overy will gain a new regional presence in the US.

Texas has been a real growth spot among the AM Law 100 over the last few years and Clifford Chance's recent opening of a Houston office (9 Partners) highlights the desire for Magic Circle firms to get in on the action. Allen & Overy's new foothold in the state is likely to overshadow Clifford Chance's presence and given that competition for Texan talent will be tough, gaining Shearman's offices in Houston, Dallas, and Austin could prove to be a huge win for A&O.

California

Allen & Overy and Freshfields are the two Magic Circle firms to have expanded into the Californian market, with both firms opening offices in Silicon Valley in the last few years. Freshfield's 14 Partners currently outweigh Allen & Overy's 8, but should the merger go ahead A&O Shearman would double their Partner numbers in the Bay Area.

Allen & Overy already have a strong presence in California with 6 Partners also in Los Angeles. The addition of Shearman & Sterling's Bay Area based Partners would comfortably give the new firm a clear lead in California as a whole.

Interested in legal market insights?

Understand the market better and dive into competitor insights with our legal market intelligence tools . Make decisions based on data with our comprehensive market coverage; monitor which law firms are thriving and which are churning, track attorney movements, and identify trends within the legal industry.

How Osborne Clarke used Pirical to overhaul its diversity strategy

Thu, 21 Sep 2023 16:39:32 GMT

We spoke to Bola Gibson, Head of Responsible Business at Osborne Clarke, about how the firm used Pirical On Demand (POD) to get more from its people data.

By digging into its numbers, Osborne Clarke was able to pinpoint problems, overhaul its strategy and create lasting organizational change.

3 ways Pirical helped Osborne Clarke

Uncovering issues

Sometimes internal data isn’t rich enough to tell a clear story.

By comparing its data with other firms, Osborne Clarke was able to diagnose issues and tailor its response.

Winning hearts & minds

When the data tells you to switch strategy, you still need to get stakeholder buy-in.

Using Pirical, Osborne Clarke created a compelling case: “Pirical gives us the evidence to drive change,” Bola told us.

Saving valuable time

Even if you have strong data capabilities, capacity can be a challenge.

With the help of Pirical’s tools, Osborne Clarke streamlined analytics work and freed up time for more valuable projects.

The challenge

Understanding the why, not just the what

When it comes to diversity and inclusion, Osborne Clarke has been ahead of the curve for some time. After receiving the National Equality Standard (NES) accreditation in 2019, the firm set a range of ambitious targets.

A few years later, Bola’s team wanted to better understand how Osborne Clarke could set new, more meaningful goals. Pirical gave the team access to a wider range of analyses, including a clearer understanding of attrition among its ethnic minority population and a longer term view of attrition & promotion trends which they were able to marry with other qualitative data. “There’s only so much our old data could tell us,” Bola said. “By combining the deeper analysis from Pirical with what our people were telling us, we were able to get closer to understanding why it was happening and plan to take action.”

Bola also felt they weren’t seeing the full picture because the firm wasn’t able to benchmark its data against the market. “We were comparing ourselves to ourselves,” Bola said. “I wanted to probe the why, not just the what.”

The solution

The data to create a new strategy

Osborne Clarke used Pirical On Demand (POD) to look at its projections more closely. POD showed the firm was having to effectively over-recruit, due to the fact they were struggling to retain minority ethnic employees.

Importantly, Osborne Clarke used POD to compare itself against other firms’ diversity data. These insights paved the way for the firm’s new Race Action Plan , which aims to increase diversity in senior roles by overhauling trainee recruitment, in tandem with a range of progression and inclusion schemes.

But before Bola’s team got these programmes off the ground, they had to convince practice group leaders. “Pirical enabled us to build a really strong case for our Race Action Plan, ” Bola said.

“Let’s face it, lawyers love evidence. Pirical allows practitioners to add weight to their recommendations.”

Bola Gibson

Head of Responsible Business

Osborne Clarke

"For me, Pirical’s biggest selling point is its usability . It’s like a bunch of nerds have designed a system for people who are not nerds. Whoever designed the UX was (thankfully) thinking about D&I or HR people, not technical specialists."

Which features did Osborne Clarke use?

Goals dashboard

With the Goals Dashboard, you can load up your firm’s diversity targets to see if you’re on track with your targets, which was key to the analysis Osborne Clarke carried out.

Whether you’re looking firm-wide or by practice group, this feature allows you to set custom goals, organize your projections and return to this data whenever you need it.

Recruitment and retention screens

Recruitment is a bit like pouring liquid into a bucket of water. As you add in something new, it’s important to monitor how you dilute or concentrate what’s in there already.

By browsing Pirical’s readyma de recruitment and retention graphs, Bola’s team could measure exactly how the makeup of Osborne Clarke was changing, then take action.

Find out what POD can do for your firm

Pirical's people analytics software equips law firms with the HR, rewards and diversity data they need to make smarter and fairer people decisions.

London's legal talent contest: the data behind US & UK firms vying for Partners

Thu, 14 Sep 2023 15:09:11 GMT

For years now, competition for London's top legal talent has been characterized by large US firms swooping into the UK market and offering significantly higher salaries than their British rivals. The ongoing US expansion has created a stiff contest for London based Partners, so we decided to dig into some of the data behind this trend.

Using Pirical Legal Professionals we looked at Partner headcount growth over the last three years, among the London offices of a sample of US & UK law firms. Unsurprisingly perhaps, UK firms have been struggling to compete with their US peers when it comes to hiring Partners.

Based on the sample of law firms we looked at, British firms have experienced a 9% growth in their Partner headcount since August 2020. Meanwhile, the US firms have increased their London based Partner numbers by 24%, more than double the growth of their UK peers.

A handful of UK firms have seen comparable increases to their US rivals, with Eversheds Sutherland (+17%) and Ashurst (+22%) increasing their Partner numbers at a similar rate to Skadden (+21%) and Latham Watkins (+22%). However, these firms fall well short of the largest US growers such as Gibson Dunn (+35%), Kirkland & Ellis (+44%), and Simpson Thacher & Barlett (+75%).

The large US law firms are likely to continue their push into the London market and given the gulf in salaries being offered, this trend of US firms dominating Partner hires is also set to continue.

Interestingly, when looking at where these Partner hires are being sourced from, it's not a case of the US firms simply poaching the top talent of the UK firms.

From a similar time frame, the data shows that the US firms used in this analysis made their Partners hires from both UK & US firms. Magic Circle firms represent a significant source of the moves, but the majority of Partner hires are being taken from other London based US firms.

Interested in legal market insights?

Understand the legal market better with Pirical Legal Professionals , the leading global database of over 560,000 attorneys. Make decisions based on data with our comprehensive market coverage; monitor which law firms are thriving and which are churning, track attorney movements, and identify trends within the legal industry.

How law firms can use Pirical On Demand to report diversity data: Survey Filler tutorial

Tue, 29 Aug 2023 15:16:43 GMT

Law firms are spending an increasing amount of time reporting their diversity data to clients and third parties including regulators. Learn how Survey Filler in Pirical On Demand (POD) can save you 90% of the time spent reporting diversity data.

What is it?

Survey Filler is a comprehensive and flexible table of your firm's diversity data, where you select what to populate the rows, columns & fields with. Easily access all the data you need in one place, apply a wide range of metrics and extract it at the click of a button.

Already a POD customer? Check out Survey Filler now.

What you can view

With Survey Filler you can combine a number of different data points to view granular diversity information about your firm. See demographic data across various metrics, role information, client work, location and more. Grab the absolute and percentage % figures for all key diversity traits, allowing you to answer any specific diversity related questions that come your way.

View your firm's diversity data by...

Diversity trait

Gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic background and disability.

Headcount

View the overall demographic figures at your firm; apply the distinct headcount , headcount at start & end of period , average headcount and average FTE metrics.

Career progression

See the diversity breakdown of how staff are progressing in the firm; apply the hires , terminations and partner promotions metrics.

Utilization

Analyze diversity data against how staff at the firm are utilized; apply the hours worked metric.

Financial

See how different groups at the firm are performing from a financial perspective; apply the achieved revenue and discounts and write-offs metrics.

Client work

View the diversity data of staff that worked for specific clients and on specific matters.

Role information & location

Look at demographic info by role, department, employee category, division, office and region.

Pre-populated templates

Survey Filler contains pre-populated templates for the most common legal industry surveys.

Select a template and view your firm's data in the exact format needed for the diversity survey in question. Easily copy and paste the results directly into the survey in just a few clicks.

Templates include:

Minority Corporate Counsel Association (MCCA) Law Firm Diversity Survey
American Bar Association (ABA) Model Diversity Survey
General Counsel for Diversity & Inclusion questionnaire
Law.com International UK Diversity Survey

How to view different data points

On the right hand panel under Filters , you can select to view different data points from a series of drop down lists. The table automatically updates after each selection.

Under Metric you select which of the metrics listed above you'd like to look at; headcount, career progression, utilization or financial related.

Choose which data points to populate the table with from Rows and Columns , select various diversity traits and role information such as:

Role
Department
Employee category
Gender
Ethnicity
LGBT+
Socioeconomic background

Under Client and Matter you can choose to look at data for staff that worked for specific clients and on specific client matters.

The rest of the filter options include Employment status , Office , Region , Role , Employee category , Department and Division .

Adjust the timeframe for your data under Options in the right hand panel. Choose between financial year, calendar year or a custom timeframe.

Easily export any data set with the Copy to Excel button on the right hand side of the screen.

What is Pirical On Demand (POD)?

Pirical's people analytics software equips law firms with the HR, rewards and diversity data they need to make smarter and fairer people decisions.

HR data is messy, hard to analyze and difficult to distribute to people leaders. With Pirical On Demand, it's a lot easier for people leaders to get value out of it, without the need for an army of analysts and engineers. With Pirical , you can save time, get people engaged and take a more sophisticated, data-driven approach.

Book a demo today

Partner headcount growth by city (USA)

Thu, 13 Jul 2023 16:00:58 GMT

A look at US Partner headcount growth over the last 3 years among some of the top AM Law 100 firms. See which firms have been growing in which cities, where their partnership has been shrinking and where new offices have opened up.

Get in touch if you're interested in accessing legal market data like this.

Fresh Approaches to Drive Business Development and Strategy with Data

Fri, 23 Jun 2023 11:23:18 GMT

6 real and practical examples of how Business Development & Strategy teams in law firms have been using Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP) for their projects.

1. Plan an expansion strategy

High level competitor analysis is useful when you want to understand the lay of the land, but when defining a winning strategy for a practice or office, firms need in-depth and precise analyses.

2. Identify merger and acquisition (M&A) targets & conduct due diligence

Depending on the need, whether it’s to acquire a certain expertise, to add bench strength, or to enter new markets, the criteria for M&A targets will vary.

Strategy & BD teams require a quick way to identify firms with the right profile, presence, and talent.

“ The Artificial Intelligence (AI) market is buzzing. I used PLP to identify which firms are starting to set up AI practices, or Data Privacy practices.”

3. Leverage competitor intelligence to differentiate your pitch

Business Development teams want a winning edge when working on a pitch or tendering for a panel.

PLP can help to:

understand who you might be up against
and work out how to differentiate your firm's offerings effectively.

4. Identify leads in target organizations

5. Conduct due diligence on prospective partner laterals

PLP profiles centralize information about:

Education & Bar admissions
Deals information & potential clients
Connections
Rankings

The firm used the deals & client information to identify any potential conflicts between the Partner’s clients and the firm’s clients. The Connections feature enabled them to quickly identify individuals who could give them a reference.

6. React quickly to market changes

It’s good to have a strategy but it’s even better to be able to quickly adapt it if the market shifts, and if significant changes may affect your firm.

Explore the leading global database of 500,000+ attorneys across 130+ countries.

Pirical Legal Professionals is trusted by law firms and legal recruiters all over the world to source top legal talent and stay up to date with the latest market trends & insights.

Introducing POD Survey Filler

Tue, 23 May 2023 15:22:21 GMT

DEI teams at law firms are spending an increasing amount of time filling out diversity surveys. From requests from clients to third party benchmarking, the number of surveys that need completing each year can easily rise into the hundreds for a large firm and be an incredibly time-consuming task.

Our latest tool on Pirical On Demand (POD) can save 90% of the time spent filling out diversity surveys and client data requests.

Client requests for diversity data

Access all the data you need to answer diversity related questions in the one place, avoiding the pain of gathering different data points from multiple teams.

With Survey Filler you can view your firm's demographic data across headcount, hours worked, hires, terminations, promotions and achieved revenue. Filter results by all key diversity traits, as well as role, practice group & financial year. For more granular diversity questions you can filter the data by office, location, role, practice group and specific client data, providing a quick overview of the teams that worked on individual client matters.

Save 90% of the time spent filling out diversity surveys

Based on your own estimates, calculate the potential savings per year from using POD to complete diversity data requests much quicker.

Diversity surveys

Complete large third party diversity surveys in just a few clicks with pre-populated templates for the most common legal market questionnaires.

We've built Survey Filler referencing key questionnaires such as the Minority Corporate Counsel Association (MCCA) Law Firm Diversity Survey, the American Bar Association (ABA) Model Diversity Survey , the General Counsel for Diversity & Inclusion questionnaire and state bar association surveys.

Pre-populated templates

We've designed Survey Filler to make completing third party diversity surveys as quick & easy as possible. It includes pre-populated templates for the most common diversity questionnaires, with your firm's data arranged in the exact format needed.

Select the relevant metrics then copy & paste directly into the survey.

And More Very Soon…

We are always adding new analyses and everything we build is designed with our clients’ needs in mind. As we continue to build more tools we’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions.

Talk to us about your ideas

What is Pirical On Demand?

Pirical's people analytics software equips law firms with the HR, rewards and diversity data they need to make smarter and fairer people decisions.

Book a demo today

Advancing DEI & building a compelling firm identity: 5 key takeaways from our POD Pioneers event

Thu, 18 May 2023 10:35:19 GMT

From retaining talent to creating fairer and more inclusive places to work, law firms have no shortage of challenges. That’s why for our first POD Pioneers event, which took place last week, we wanted to look at the legal profession’s biggest problems – and uncover practical ways to solve them.

It was one of our most compelling sessions yet. Across a set of fascinating talks and panels, we invited people leaders from across the industry to explore the good and the bad, diving deep into notoriously tricky areas like data, employer value propositions and getting people engaged with DEI.

Now that the dust has settled, we’ve assembled our five key takeaways from the day. (Since the session was held under the Chatham House Rule, we’ve anonymised all speaker quotes.)

1. DEI succeeds when it’s collegial

If you work in people management, you’ll probably know how hard it is to get other teams involved with diversity. All too often DEI feels cut off from the rest of the business, even though it really blurs into everything. That’s why it helps to “bring everyone into the fold,” as one of our speakers said.

Creating this sense of shared responsibility is about making every colleague, regardless of level or business function, feel like they have a stake in making things better. And that doesn't just mean fee-earners; it applies to IT, marketing, business development, personal assistants and more. While your people team sets the strategy, everyone else makes it happen.

The same collegial spirit should extend beyond your organisation too. So share what you’ve learned with other firms, especially if your DEI work has been successful. As stated by one of our speakers, “We don’t gain anything by being the only place to have reached this pinnacle."

2. Avoid a blanket approach to data

With diversity metrics, it can be tempting to talk in more general terms. And while firm-wide stats have their place, issues tend to play out in a more granular way. With more tailored insights, you can invest resources in the right places and drive real change at a practice group level.

Let’s say your firm has a problem keeping female staff. Even if a certain office looks like it's bringing the wider firm’s retention stats down, there may be more to it than that. The issue could actually be down to a specific practice group within that office, while other teams in the same place are performing well.

By drilling into the detail, you can avoid tarring everyone with the same brush. Not only do nuanced insights allow you to be more targeted, they also mean you don’t “lose credibility” internally, as one of our speakers put it.

3. Be mindful in the way you share information

Even though granular data can be more useful, you still have to be careful with it. Many teams choose to include summary sheets when they’re presenting data, depending on who they’re putting it in front of, rather than sharing the figures as they are. “We don’t want to overwhelm [people],” one of our speakers said. “You need to have context.”

So sharing DEI data involves a level of tact. Introducing material in a positive way, by giving credit where it’s due, can soften the blow when you broach a practice group’s shortfalls. Praise goes a long way in other areas too, since so many legal professionals don’t feel confident around DEI more broadly.

Tact is particularly important when clients ask about DEI. So for lawyers who are less fluent on the topic, it’s worth providing them with a few high-level talking points. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t hold someone to account if they haven’t addressed a specific client request. Your department can help, but their client is still their responsibility.

4. What’s pushed externally has to be true internally

As with diversity, you need to think carefully about how you express what your firm stands for. An employer brand isn’t something you can just make up. What’s more, misguided messaging can undermine how your organisation is perceived internally too.

So when you set out to craft your employer value proposition, it’s worth doing enough work up front. That means holding focus groups, carrying out internal surveys and poring over Glassdoor reviews, so that your messaging is grounded in what your workforce actually thinks. “You’ve got to be able to articulate what your staff will recognise as true,” one of our speakers said.

Still, the DNA of your organisation may not always live up to your principles – and that’s okay. As one of our speakers explained, not everyone will have the same experience all the time. But if 90% of your staff experience something close to what you’re aiming for, it’ll be clear that your employer brand has grown out of a kernel of truth.

5. Law firms have to work harder to stand out

For a long time, lawyers have accepted the late nights, the weekend work and all the other sacrifices involved in the job. Why? Because in exchange, they get compensated extremely well, with salaries that beat out most other sectors.

Yet many law firms still have serious retention problems. What’s interesting here is that when it comes to salaries and benefits packages, many leading firms simply offer the same as their competitors. But with so little variation, it can be hard to stand out.

One way you can do better with talent acquisition is by bringing your culture to life with the help of advocates from inside your organsiation. As one audience member explained, producing a company podcast series is a great way to do this, since it gets real, human stories out there in a format that applicants engage with.

In a way then, both DEI and employer brand initiatives have a lot in common. They’re both about listening to staff, getting everyone involved and striving to make your firm more human.

What is Pirical On Demand (POD)?

Pirical's people analytics software equips law firms with the HR, rewards and diversity data they need to make smarter and fairer people decisions.

Book a demo today

The US Legal Market In Numbers

Fri, 05 May 2023 16:42:38 GMT

The United States is one of the largest legal markets in the world so we thought it would be interesting to analyze some US attorney data. Using our attorney database, Pirical Legal Professionals , we looked at the number of attorneys in the US, where they're located, what practice areas they work in and which US law firms are the largest.

How many attorneys are there in the US & where are they located?

Unsurprisingly, the majority of attorneys at AM Law 200 firms in the United States are located in New York City (25k).

Washington DC (15k), Chicago (8k), Los Angeles (8k), Boston (5k) and San Francisco (5k) make up the next most populous locations. In fact, these six cities account for over 50% of the entire AM Law 200 attorney population.

The high density of attorneys in New York City and these other major cities - as a proportion of the national total - still doesn't represent as much of a dominant force as other countries’ top legal hubs. For example, London alone accounts for over 50% of the lawyers in the United Kingdom.

How many attorneys work in Corporate, Finance or Dispute Resolution law?

Each of the major six legal cities in the United States has its own strengths, but by far & away the largest practice groups across all are Dispute Resolution & Litigation and Corporate.

New York City is indisputably the home of Banking & Finance in the USA, while Washington DC has a disproportionately high representation of Dispute Resolution & Litigation groups.

Which are the largest law firms in the USA?

We last looked at this data in a blog article in 2020. Since then, Kirkland & Ellis have retained the top sp ot, while Lewis Brisbois have snatched 2nd place from Greenberg Traurig. Holland & Knight and Dentons make up the rest of the top 5 US law firms by Partner count.

As with our 2020 analysis, Latham & Watkins continue to have a relatively modest number of partners for the amount of revenue the firm generates. Latham ranked 2nd in terms of revenue in 2022 , despite having over 500 fewer partners than the top revenue holders, Kirkland & Ellis.

Looking for legal sector data?

We sourced all the above insights using Pirical Legal Professionals , the leading attorney database of 500,000+ legal professionals across 130+ countries. Better understand the legal market with stats & beautifully designed charts, view complete market maps in seconds and monitor which law firms are thriving or which are churning.

We'd love to show you how Pirical Legal Professionals can transform your legal recruitment efforts.

If you're interested in learning more book a free demo!

How To Set Diversity Goals From Data

Fri, 21 Apr 2023 12:16:41 GMT

Pirical on Demand can give you the data and corresponding actions to set and achieve your firm's diversity goals. Some firms will call these 'targets'.

The most common target set by law firms is for partner representation

Unless you have a specific population in mind, Pirical recommends that diversity targets focus on partner representation. It is commonly an area of underrepresentation and encourages attention on the performance of your entire pipeline to partnership.

Furthermore, we recommend that the targets are set for 3 to 5 years’ time. This is enough time to effect change and for the current leadership to see change.

Set diversity targets with a bottom-up approach

↓ Top-Down Approach

Set targets for the firm and then push the targets down regardless of individual practice groups’ constraints.

This method is a one-size-fits-all approach. Some practice groups benefit, others are disadvantaged.

The firmwide target of 50% female partnership by 2033 is applied unilaterally to every practice group.

Practice group 1: We are already above that target. Practice group 2: We will not be able to reach that target by 2033, maybe if there was more time we could. Practice group 3: This target is totally unrealistic for our practice group and we cannot achieve it.

↑ Bottom-Up Approach

Set targets for each practice group and then aggregate them up for the firm.

This method allows for personalisation of goals and for reality to be included in the plan when it is made. This makes the ultimate goals of the plan easier to achieve. Pirical on Demand enables you to analyse practice-specific targets which ultimately lead to a firmwide aggregate.

Practice group 1: We can hit 55% female partnership by 2033 if we do X and Z.

Practice group 2: We can hit 49% female partnership by 2033 if we do Z.

Practice group 3: We can hit 47% female partnership by 2033 if we do X, Y and Z.

If the practices achieve their individual plans, the firm can expect to hit 50% female partnership by 2033.

Using Pirical on Demand to Set Diversity Targets

This bottom-up method of setting diversity targets uses a spreadsheet and Pirical on Demand data to fill it out.

Step 1

The first step is to define the current practice group partner populations by gender.

To help keep track of all the numbers, you will find it helpful to set up a spreadsheet like this one.

Smaller practices may present a challenge: the target-setting process works better with large enough population sizes. Pirical recommends grouping them together into an 'Other' row.

Step 2

This step uses Pirical on Demand projections. There are 4 different scenarios plotted on this graph. Each scenario focuses on a different lever that affects the % of female partners over the next 10 years.

This graph shows the various projections for the Tax Practice

This information needs to be added to the spreadsheet. There are two columns that need to be added. The first column is the scenario in black; change nothing/keep going, also called the 'Baseline'. The information for the Employment and Capital Market practice groups was taken from their projections.

The second column will be a combination of all the scenarios depicted which will be a stretch target. This target is calculated automatically in POD as the 'Combined Case', example:

Add this stretch target to your sheet as another column:

Step 3

This step is aggregating the individual practice’s targets to produce a firmwide target. This is calculated as a weighted average. Taking the Employment row as an example, if the target was 56%, the number of female partners is 8.4 (56% x 15). The last column was worked out this way for each practice. The firmwide target is 55%, worked out by taking the total number of female partners/total number of partners (30.3/55).

Next Steps: Present and get buy-in

An important part of setting diversity targets is getting the buy-in from everyone at the firm. Presenting the spreadsheet above might not be the most persuasive way to do this. A simplified version with the key facts and figures that make up this spreadsheet will be easier to understand and digest.

This is an example of a slide that was put together using a spreadsheet like the one above. It is broken down to show the present position of a tax practice, the future position and how the practice can get there. It is to the point and only focuses on the key highlights. If you wanted to supplement each statement with evidence, you could add links to each that make use of the charts and graphs behind the numbers.

Next Steps: Monitor progress against targets

Pirical on Demand has a screen that can help you monitor the progress of each target. The information on this screen will be updated monthly. This gives you ownership of the goal. These goals can be set up by Pirical once you have decided what they should be for your firm.

Protecting Personal Diversity Data during Reporting and Analysis

Wed, 08 Mar 2023 12:41:34 GMT

POD features a protective mechanism to avoid accidental disclosure of sensitive personal data. It is called small-group masking.

What is the risk?

When a group is too small, it is easier to infer who the data refers to. This could result in accidental identification of an individual and their diversity trait. Most POD users won’t be authorised to see personal data at an individual level, only aggregated data.

What does small-group masking look like in POD?

When a total headcount is too low, the number will be hidden and represented by < k .

What determines the minimum threshold, k?

When Pirical on Demand is set up for your firm, you can choose a minimum threshold. Most firms choose a minimum of 3. If < k appears, it means that the number of people is less than the agreed threshold.

For example, if it is decided that k =4 then any number less than 4 will be hidden.

What if <k shows as the total?

If < k appears in the total column it is because a headcount, < k , is a part of that total. If the total was revealed, then the value of < k could be determined.

Does this apply to all diversity traits?

Small-group masking is applied to all diversity traits in POD.

What if a screen I want to see is k-masked? Is there a way around it?

An admin on your account may be able to authorise a special cut of the data. Please discuss with your POD account manager.

Introducing POD Rewards

Wed, 08 Feb 2023 14:53:04 GMT

We've launched a brand new Pirical On Demand (POD) content module for Rewards teams at law firms! Our latest people analytics tool helps you make smarter and fairer compensation decisions.

The need to adopt a data-driven approach to compensation has become even more important as the legal sector reacts to global market changes like high inflation and a looming recession. Factor in the ever-changing pay expectations of employees, then live compensation data is vital to staying up-to-date with salary trends and making sure your pay is competitive enough to attract the best talent and boost employee retention. Maximise your compensation budget with POD Rewards by understanding where best to allocate pay raises and bonuses.

Benchmark Law Firm Salaries

How competitive is your compensation?

POD is the most up-to-date source for legal salary data, helping you stay ahead of a highly competitive market. Review your salary ranges and benchmark bonuses against the market for fee earners or business services, with granular role, office, and department combinations. Simpler and more accurate than filling in salary surveys: POD uses live HR data direct from your peer firms' HR & payroll systems.

Should your firm open up an office in a new city, you can now get a sense of what other firms in the area are paying their employees. Breaking salary data down by role and location gives you the ability to accurately set salaries of new hires based on the market average.

Use POD Rewards salary trends to support increases to compensation budgets and stay competitive across the departments and locations you operate within.

Track Salary Changes Over Time

Are you matching the market salary position?

Understand your historical position against the market, alongside inflation and market changes data. This analysis contains predictive modeling that allows you to instantly apply market alignment scenarios and easily calculate the cost to achieve them. "My team spends weeks doing modelling in spreadsheets. Now they can do it at the click of a button!" - Head of Rewards at an international law firm.

Use this monthly refreshed data to plan salary budgets for the following year with precision.

Starting salaries of NQ employees saw a rapid increase across the whole market in 2022, drastically affecting overall costs for law firms. With our historic market insights you can track major changes and better plan for the future.

Calculate Accurate Salary Raises

Our People Extract tool is the smarter and fairer way to calculate pay recommendations within law firms. Extract compensation and performance data for each individual then compare them against the market for their granular role and location. Build up a complete picture of an individual's value to the firm and reference all the performance metrics you need to justify pay decisions & bonuses.

Avoid the long and painful process of gathering all the information needed for pay reviews from multiple sources. This analysis effortlessly extracts complex compensation, finance and HR data. Contains all the information needed in one place: current salary, last raise, market median, compa-ratio, utilization, billed hours, revenues realized, salary multiplier and more!

And More Very Soon…

We are always adding new analyses and everything we build is designed with our clients’ needs in mind. As we continue to add more content to POD Rewards we’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions.

Talk to us about your ideas

What is Pirical On Demand?

Pirical's people analytics software equips law firms with the HR, rewards and diversity data they need to make smarter and fairer people decisions.

Book a demo today

How Pirical helped a leading law firm build a data-driven diversity and inclusion strategy

Mon, 09 Jan 2023 15:29:35 GMT

A UK-based law firm with thousands of lawyers globally has been working with Pirical for several years, mostly focusing on gender equality. The Head of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at the firm was looking to use Pirical’s HR data analytics to strengthen its wider diversity strategy too.

The DEI team has a wide range of responsibilities, including shaping and implementing new policies. A big part of their work is getting the backing of senior figures, as well as securing engagement more broadly. As one of the team states, “We try to get everybody engaged at a ground level, we’re always working hard to create a culture of inclusion.”

The challenge: Making an ambitious strategy a reality

The firm has six major legal practice groups, covering areas like finance, real estate, technology and much more. The Diversity, Equity & Inclusion team was tasked with setting DEI targets for each of these groups, including the percentage of ethnic minority individuals at partner level.

The team lead was keen to take a 'bottom-up' approach rather than a blanket one, by tailoring targets to each practice group and its individual circumstances, to make them fairer and more motivating. “It was evident to us that flat targets wouldn’t work, because they were too generic," they said. "It wouldn’t encourage responsibility.”

The biggest challenge was figuring out where to start. For organizations of all sizes, it’s hard to decide what’s realistic, how ambitious to be and how far out to plan. What’s more, making a clear and compelling pitch to internal stakeholders can be just as tricky. “All that data can be overwhelming, I wanted to know what it was really telling me.”

“The last thing we wanted to do was to have targets where nothing changes.” For practice groups that were already doing well, they wanted to challenge them to do better. And for other parts of the firm that have more to do when it comes to diversity, it was important to make sure they weren’t disheartened by unrealistic, blanket targets. “We needed to have a more granular approach.”

The solution: Accessible information that inspires action

Pirical helped this client deliver the bottom-up targets setting process, beginning by analyzing gender and ethnicity data for each practice group. With the help of Pirical On Demand the firm was able to carry out quick and simple modeling, run analyses repeatedly and explore different cuts of data.

After this, they used Pirical’s tools to assess each practice group, which involved looking at how diversity had evolved over time. Pirical allowed the firm to compare each practice group’s performance, both internally and against competitors. Next, they used Pirical’s tools to build models for each practice group – around recruitment, attrition and promotion – which forecast what would happen around these three areas if they continued at the same rate.

The firm and Pirical then presented these findings to each practice group, in an accessible and engaging way, with projections around what would happen if no action was taken. “It was all super informative and non-judgemental,” the Head of DEI said. “Being able to see how each practice group compared against each other helped tease out a level of competitiveness too.”

Finally, the firm used Pirical to aggregate each practice group’s targets into a firm-wide target, rooted in that granular analysis and shared equally across the company. “The whole process enabled more meaningful conversations. Instead of scratching our heads, figuring out what to do, there was a sense of excitement. We were ready to crack on.”

The results: Faster target-setting with clearer goals and deeper engagement

Pirical initially projected that the firm could increase the number of people from an ethnic minority background in partner level roles to 18% by 2030, although some practice groups would find this goal more difficult. By working backwards from tailored targets, with some practice groups accountable for more ambitious figures, Pirical helped them ramp this up to a realistic overall firm target of 21%.

As Jason, CEO & Founder of Pirical points out, “Issuing a firm-wide goal and expecting every practice to hit it would be ineffective and unfair. Some would find it easy, but for others it would be nearly impossible. Giving every practice tailored targets actually increased the overall firm target substantially.”

With Pirical’s help, the Diversity, Equity & Inclusion team was also able to win hearts and minds more easily. “Pirical turned something difficult into something digestible. Being able to show leadership how other firms are doing has been a real eye-opener. Pirical helped us understand where it was worth investing our time and energy, by unlocking the possibility to have a conversation.”

Overall, by working with Pirical, our client was able to drastically speed up its entire target-setting process. “Put it this way, I don’t think we would be anywhere near where we are now without Pirical’s help,” said the Head of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion.

What is Pirical On Demand?

Pirical's people analytics software equips law firms with the hr and diversity data they need to make smarter people decisions.

HR data is messy, hard to analyze and difficult to scale. With Pirical On Demand , it's a lot easier for people leaders to get value out of it, without the need for an army of analysts and engineers. Setting HR or diversity targets in-house is no easy feat. With Pirical , you can save time, get people engaged and take a more sophisticated, data-driven approach.

Book a demo here

What are p-values?

Wed, 07 Dec 2022 09:22:00 GMT

What are p-values?

A p-value, or probability value, is a number between 0 and 1 which indicates the likelihood that results occurred by chance. Generally speaking, the smaller the p-value, the more solid the result.

A p-value of 0.04 can be read in any of the following ways:

There’s a 4% chance the result of this analysis occurred randomly and cannot be relied on.
There’s a 96% chance the result of this analysis is real and can be relied on.

Why do p-values matter?

Noise - or randomness - in data is inevitable.

Even in identical scenarios where both Group A and Group B perform equally, you can still expect small fluctuations in the data.

This presents a challenge.

If you can see a difference (in our example here: ±4%), at what point should you be concerned?

p-values tell you how confident to be

The p-value allows you to determine whether or not to believe the difference you are seeing.

The lower the p-value, the more confident you can be that the results are real. The greater the p-value, the more likely the results are coincidental (the effect of normal random noise), and hence, you should not draw any conclusions.

What influences p-values?

Sample size: The effect of random error decreases as the size of a sample increases. So the larger your sample, the more confident you can be. This is why it’s hard to make a judgement based on 2 data points, but it’s easy when you have 2,000.

Distribution of results: The less variance in results, the more confident you can be. The more outliers there are, the larger the p-value will be.

How should you interpret p-values?

In the natural sciences, a p-value of less than 0.05, which is 5%, is generally agreed to be significant. This implies a less than 5% likelihood that results occurred by random chance, so conclusions are therefore deemed to be noteworthy. Similarly, a p-value less than 0.01, or 1%, is considered highly significant.

When considering impact-driven business decision, we need to add risk and reward. For example, a p-value of 0.15 may be acceptable if the cost of an initiative is low and the reward is high.

“You need to ask yourself, for the action I’m considering taking, am I happy to accept there’s an X% chance we made the wrong conclusion from the data?”

As a general approach, Pirical will highlight to clients where p-values are less than 0.10.

Analysing p-values in Pirical On Demand

You will find p-values throughout Pirical On Demand where two populations are being compared.

P-values below 0.1 will be highlighted.

Running Up That Hill: Five issues shaping social mobility in the legal profession

Tue, 11 Oct 2022 10:13:38 GMT

Like many industries, the legal profession has a social mobility problem. Although many firms have been working hard to become more diverse, they still have a long way to go. Data can help by uncovering issues, putting them in context and helping firms take the right action. But collecting this data can be a challenge in itself.

We held a panel exploring these topics last week, with speakers from two major law firms and a leading inclusion consultancy. We wanted to understand how firms can do better, by gathering richer data and working to remove obstacles to employee progression. It was a lively debate, with a lot of audience participation and positive feedback.

We dug deep into the issues – not only to see how they’ve emerged, but also to identify the steps we can take to start solving them. From resource management to making people feel safe, read on for our five key takeaways from the session.

1. The difference between who gets in and who gets ahead

Even if it looks like your firm has an increasingly broad church, more granular data could tell a different story. By analysing multiple firms who use Pirical, the data suggests that diversity tends to decline with seniority, due to attrition and slower progression along the way. This means fewer people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds reach the top.

Our speakers expressed similar points: “traditionally, law has emphasised being ‘reassuringly expensive’,” one panelist said. By hinging on social capital, things like accents have become a proxy for talent, which has made it harder for underrepresented candidates to break through. For those that do win a training contract, persisting attitudes can mean they’re given less impactful work, which holds them back.

Our audience suggested one solution here lies in resource managers. By ensuring those in gatekeeping roles understand diversity, they can challenge old behaviours and champion underrepresented staff. As a result, a more diverse set of people can get staffed on crucial matters and ultimately, get ahead.

2. The reality of working in law

Another recurring theme during our session was the reality of working at a law firm. “In our pursuit of democratising access, I’ve taken it for granted that people will understand what it means to be a lawyer,” one speaker said.

There’s a tension between traditional working practices and the need to make firms more diverse. The reality is that firms are built on a model that relies on billable hours requirements, which can translate to much longer hours than other professions. Even if firms want to change these practices, culture shifts like this take time. So in the meantime, more needs to be done to prepare new hires for the sacrifice involved with a job in law, especially those who haven’t had lawyer parents.

But there are deeper, more problematic issues at play too. Audience members mentioned the racism and bullying that people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds can experience, which is obviously unacceptable. It goes without saying that systemic racism needs to be rooted out from the legal profession. If firms are to attract diverse talent – and allow them to progress in the same way as everybody else – they must start there.

3. More trust breeds richer data

Another common challenge is collecting reliable data, particularly when it comes to candidates’ and existing hires’ backgrounds. Response rates can be a real issue, since people often don’t feel safe enough to answer questions about class and race honestly.

Sometimes it starts at the top. When senior figures speak openly about their family background, professional experiences and problems they’ve faced along the way, it encourages others to do the same. Another way to drive up response rates is to explain precisely what you’re going to do with personal information, to make applicants and staff feel at ease.

A simple way to make data collection more transparent is to include explanatory text in questionnaires, which tells candidates how their input helps improve the firm. “Without safety, there’s no inclusion,” one speaker said. It may sound simple, but a lot of that sense of safety can be achieved through clearer communication.

4. The jargon doesn’t work in real life

The way we talk about social mobility can feel overly dry and technical. In normal conversation, people rarely say things like “low socioeconomic background”, but more familiar terms like “working class” have their own limitations too. In any case, people may prefer to avoid the stigma attached to either of these terms, in the same way that they may choose not to disclose that they received free school meals.

“You need to have two conversations at the same time,” one audience member suggested. There’s the hard-edged conversation you have in the boardroom, where it’s about the numbers and convincing decision-makers to take action, by identifying how acute problems are. But there’s also the reality of speaking to people in less formal environments, where the conversation needs to be more human.

5. Holding a mirror to your firm

“If we’re not collecting data, we don’t have an informed strategy,” one speaker said. This idea was echoed by both speakers, in that data should hold a mirror to your firm, so that you can see what’s really going on and come up with a plan of action. Otherwise, “it’s just collecting data for the sake of collecting data.”

The bigger step is publishing your findings, so that your firm can put a stake in the ground and be held accountable moving forward. This level of openness won’t be right for every organisation, but by publicly sharing your people data, it can show that you're serious about addressing diversity issues. This doesn’t just incentivise staff to stay with you, it also encourages people from more diverse backgrounds to apply.

Still, getting your data to a point where you can share it – internally or otherwise – is easier said than done. As we’ve seen, there are plenty of things you can do to put your firm on the road to improvement when it comes to socioeconomic diversity. But whatever approach you take, this type of data can be messy, hard to analyse and difficult to scale.

Sometimes getting started can be the hardest part. With Pirical On Demand, it's easier to get value out of your people data, without the need for an army of analysts and engineers.

How working class lawyers get in and get on at large UK law firms

Fri, 07 Oct 2022 14:46:36 GMT

The following case study was presented by Pirical at an event in October 2022.

It is based on a real law firm's data. The firm is large, with over 600 Fee Earners in the UK. The data comes directly from the firm's HR system.

Pirical On Demand helps people leaders conduct this analysis themselves by self-serving from the firm's live data.

We're using Main Parental Occupation Aged 14 to analyse Socioeconomic Background (SEB)

The UK government's Social Mobility Commission recommends this metric as the "single best measure to assess someone's background".

The question asked is: "What was the occupation of your main household earner when you were aged about 14?"

We will drop Intermediate SEB and compare Low SEB directly to High SEB. There are relatively few people in the Intermediate category. Including it adds noise and complexity.

Some people prefer the label 'Working Class' instead of 'Low SEB', and 'Professional' instead of 'High SEB'. We will use 'Low/High SEB' in this analysis to be clear we have excluded the intermediate category, which contain occupations some may consider Working Class.

The firm in our case study has about 50% data completeness for parental occupation data. This is enough to get good insights.

Using parental occupation as our primary measure of socioeconomic background is supported by a host of government, campaigning and research organisations, as well as large employers .

The % of Low SEB Fee Earners has been increasing slightly, and is above market average.

The market average for 2022 is 13%. The market average is calculated across firms using Pirical On Demand.

The firm has 23% fewer Low SEB Fee Earners than would be expected if drawing randomly from the UK working age population.

The firm has 80% High SEB Fee Earners, 43% more than the population .

Low SEB Fee Earners are more likely to be from ethnic minorities.

Ethnic minority includes Black, Asian and Mixed/Other Minority ethnicities. 'Black+' includes Black & Mixed Black ethnicities. Same for Asian.

There is a pyramid: the firm’s socioeconomic diversity declines with seniority.

The percentage of Low SEB partners is actually higher than might be expected. One suggestion is that this is due to age, and how UK society has changed over time (the implication is fewer people work in manual and service occupations today than 50+ years ago). Pirical is keen to explore this further as more parental occupation benchmarks are made public.

The firm’s diversity exceeds market average for junior roles.

Diversity in senior roles has been decreasing, despite a diversity increase in junior roles.

What’s happening?

There seems to be an issue with the pipeline: how talent is progressing through the firm.

There are three issues to investigate:

Who is coming in: recruitment
Who is going out: attrition
How people are moving up through the pipeline: promotion

The recruitment team seems to be doing OK - not obviously a recruitment issue.

We can rule out recruiting bias.

Low SEB Fee Earners at the firm have higher attrition rates than High SEB peers.

This attrition bias - to continue our metaphor - means the pipeline is leaky.

High SEB Associates are expected to stay at the firm for 2.2 years longer than Low SEB peers.

An Average Firm would also have higher attrition rates for Low SEB Associates and Senior Associates.

Using attrition data from all firms on Pirical On Demand, we can construct a market average.

Excess Low SEB associate attrition costs our Average Firm nearly £100k per year

We estimated the financial cost of excess Low SEB associate attrition by considering the impact of reducing the Low SEB attrition rates to equal those of High SEB peers.

We have identified attrition bias.

At every step of the career ladder Low SEB Fee Earners at the firm progress more slowly.

The pipeline for Low SEB talent is not just leaky, it’s clogged too.

Comparing against the market average, lower promotion rates for Low SEB Fee Earners is common across firms.

Although not at Trainee level.

We have identified promotion bias.

There are no obvious utilisation differences to explain outcomes.

Utilisation is the number of billed hours as a proportion of total hours. It is sometimes used as a metric of performance.

What else could be happening? Maybe it’s about access to opportunities. Low SEB Fee Earners on average work within larger teams.

We have some evidence that working on larger teams is associated with higher attrition rates and lower promotion rates.

And Low SEB Fee Earners work on fewer matters per year, particularly Associates.

We also have some evidence that working on fewer matters is associated with higher attrition rates.

Ensuring balance in work allocation may be an effective mechanism for future change.

Something for next time. For the Business Services (Non-Fee Earning) population of the firm, the issues are similar, and potentially more acute.

Promotions from coordinator (or individual contributor) roles into the managerial ranks have the highest promotion gap.

Pirical On Demand is a flexible solution for real-time social mobility data analysis, and for all diversity traits. Ready to learn more? See how Pirical On Demand works.

How To Handle Unknown Or 'Prefer Not To Say' Diversity Data

Tue, 02 Aug 2022 14:51:00 GMT

When analysing or reporting on diversity data, two cases are important to consider:

Individuals who haven’t been asked or did not respond -> Unknown
Individuals who decided not to participate -> Prefer Not To Say (PNS)

A common confusion is how to analyse these records.

Do not include them

It’s important to only consider individuals with known diversity characteristics; including unknowns will actually understate how diverse your organisation is.

Here’s an example. This organisation has 176 individuals, of which 23 are Unknown/PNS. To say 17% of their staff are Black would be underreporting their diversity. They would be saying they are less diverse than they actually are. The actual figure is 30 out of 153 = 20%.

Including the Unknown/Prefer not to say values misrepresents the percentage of employees in each ethnicity category.

In practice, excluding Unknown/PNS values is the same as assuming they will be distributed in the same way as the known values. In our example, we can expect 20% of the 23 to be Black.

It’s worth noting there is no consensus that individuals who choose not to fill in diversity surveys or respond 'Prefer Not To Say’ will skew one way or another, so no correction is required.

Be clear they are excluded

Include the total numbers of Unknown/PNS to make clear people are not missing from your sample, but you are instead missing some diversity data about them.

The number of Unknown / Prefer Not To Say responses should not change the result, it is a measure of uncertainty

It’s good to understand what Unknown/PNS values represent. They aren’t a category in themselves but actually represent a margin of error. The way to think about this is: the ‘true’ value lies somewhere within this range, but we’re not sure exactly where.

If everyone has responded and no one has said ‘Prefer not to say’ (100% data completeness), the margin of error would be zero. The more Unknown/PNS, the larger the margin of error.

The technical way to report on these representation figures would be to state them with a ±%, for example, 20±2%

Here's a worked example:

More Unknowns mean we can have less confidence about exactly where the ‘true’ value lies. Technical note: error calculated at 90% confidence interval.

It’s generally not necessary to report in this level of detail for people analytics. Pirical’s advice is keep an eye on your data completeness levels. Anything above 60-70% is enough to get reliable insights.

Statistical testing takes into account smaller samples

Analyses in Pirical On Demand can offer an additional layer of insight to determine whether you have enough data to have confidence in the conclusion.

Higher levels of Unknown/PNS values can reduce your level of confidence in the data. Our primer on R^2 and p-values will help you understand more.

How To Control Access To Sensitive HR Data

Wed, 11 May 2022 14:03:00 GMT

As more users have access to self-serve from your firm’s HR data, how can you make sure commercially or personally sensitive data is protected? In this tutorial we will explain the privileging system in Pirical On Demand (POD).

Pirical On Demand is a library of over 1,000 tried-and-tested analyses, kept up to date with your firm’s data. HR professionals use POD to benchmark statistics against competitors, to analyse bias in recruitment and work allocation systems, and for real-time or predictive capabilities like highlighting which employees may need extra support. POD addresses all core diversity traits: Gender, Ethnicity, Social Mobility, Sexual Orientation, Disability, Age, and Religion.

Privileging is by datasets

An analysis in POD may use one or multiple datasets to answer a question.

Each dataset can be restricted, so only certain individuals can see analyses using that type of data.

A POD user can have any of the following privileges:

Headcount . Can see active headcount data, including joiners and leavers.
Diversity . Can see analyses using any diversity data (e.g. Gender, Ethnicity, LGBT+).
Disclosive Diversity Data . If small group anonymity protections are applied across the account, individuals with this privilege will be able to see screens where the protections can be removed. For example, the 'Survey Filler' screen offers the ability to see small groups.
Finance . Can see analyses looking at utilisation & hours, as well as revenues, discounts and write-offs. Also includes client names.
Compensation . Can see analyses using salary and bonus data.
Absences . Can see analyses using absences data (e.g. holiday, sick leave, parental).
Individual Compensation . Can see analyses that show individual salaries and bonus data (including names).
Individuals . Can see analyses that show individuals (including their names and reasons for leaving). Importantly, does not reveal diversity data for individuals. May however include diversity data completeness for individuals (i.e. whether value is 'Known' or 'Unknown'). Does not grant access to see individual compensation (for this, a user needs the Individual Compensation tag).
Performance . Can see analyses that show utilisation and performance rating data.

What if an analysis uses multiple datasets?

Many analyses in POD combine multiple datasets. If multiple datasets are used, a user needs to have all of the privileges associated with the analysis to see it.

For example, an analysis of utilisation by gender will appear restricted to users who have not been given privileges to see both Diversity and Performance datasets .

Who can manage privileges?

The manage privileges feature is only visible to selected users, called admins. By default it will only be available to account owners. Other users can be set up as admins on request.

The feature can be found on the top right-hand-side of the POD site.

All active POD users are visible from this screen, and their privileging tags can be set.

Not yet a Pirical On Demand customer?

Explore the demo today to see the power of On Demand.

How To Build Presentation-ready HR Reports That Update Themselves

Fri, 11 Mar 2022 17:04:00 GMT

Creating simple, beautiful, and insightful analytics from HR data can be hard work. Particularly if you want to keep those analyses up to date and circulate them to stakeholders each month.

In this guide we will look at how to use Pirical On Demand (POD) to assemble custom stories, which are then automatically kept up to date with your firm’s latest data.

Pirical On Demand is a library of over 1,000 tried-and-tested analyses, kept up to date with your firm’s data. HR professionals use POD to benchmark statistics against competitors, to analyse bias in recruitment and work allocation systems, and for real-time or predictive capabilities like highlighting which employees may need extra support. POD addresses all core diversity traits: Gender, Ethnicity, Social Mobility, Sexual Orientation, Disability, Age, and Religion.

What is a custom story?

Custom stories in Pirical On Demand allow you to accumulate analyses into a presentation-ready format, similar to a slide deck.

Custom stories can be shared directly and securely through POD to other users, or downloaded to PDF.

When should you use a custom story?

‘They should see that’

The custom stories feature in POD is a great tool for capturing specific data analyses that you want to present later. POD analyses are designed to be easily interpretable to a non-specialist audience.

‘This makes sense alongside that’

Custom stories allow you to sequence analyses, and shuffle the order around, so you can build a storyline around your data, to inform and influence stakeholders.

‘We need to keep an eye on that’

Custom stories allow you to track progress over time. You won’t have to rebuild the story every time the data changes. Within a custom story, all analyses will update automatically each time your data is refreshed. To see what’s changed, just come back to the same story you built before.

How to create a custom story

Step 1: Create a story in the ‘ Stories ’ navigation.

Give your story a name.

Step 2: Add analyses to your story from the ‘ Discover ’ navigation. On an analysis, use the ‘ Save to Story ’ button.

Then select your story from the dropdown menu.

Step 3 : Now it's time to edit your story. Find your story back in the ‘ Stories ’ navigation.

Edit the custom story to adjust its name, and the order of the analyses within it.

Use the

Arrows to edit the order
Bin icon to delete slides

Once you are happy, click ‘ Save ’ to save your changes .

Sharing your custom story

Who can view my story?

Custom stories are only visible to you, by default.

You can send the link to someone else, so they can view it in POD, but you will need to share the story with them first. Click ‘ Share ’ and search for their name or email address.

Can’t find the user you want on POD? They might need an account created first. Please contact us.

Stories will only be accessible to those who have both:

- Permission to view the story and
- Permission to view all the analyses within the story

For example, Alex might have access to a story that Benita created. However, if Benita adds analyses to the story which Alex is not authorised to view, such as an analysis using compensation data, Alex will not be able to access the story unless that particular analysis is removed.

Your custom story will update automatically

The analyses within each story will update automatically when the data in POD updates. Your story will always reflect the most up-to-date data in POD.

Exporting your custom story

The ‘Download’ button allows you to export any custom story as a PDF.

You should receive a notification that your PDF is ready within 1-2 hours. If you don’t receive this notification please contact support@pirical.com

Not yet a POD Diversity customer?

Schedule a demo today to see the power of On Demand.

Magic Circle Firms are losing lawyers to US firms

Thu, 04 Feb 2021 09:20:00 GMT

Over the past year, the UK legal climate has experienced a lot of changes. Trying to understand trends has become increasingly difficult, but remains an important task.

The pandemic has caused many to reevaluate and recalibrate their career paths for a multitude of reasons, which perhaps might include relocation, unemployment, and work from home which has allowed individuals the time to reassess their career trajectories. This has led to a huge shift in the legal sector, from small firms to the Magic Circle. At Pirical we put evidence before guesswork, and didn't want to make assumptions on the impact of these changes on employment, so we didn’t. We looked at the data, and this is what the data said.

The most popular destination for Magic Circle firm leavers in 2020 was US law firms

It might come as a surprise that the most popular destination for Magic Circle firm leavers in 2020 was US law firms in the UK, absorbing 56.8% of leavers, while non-Magic Circle UK firms absorbed a total of 36.6%. Only 6.6% of these leavers left to join another Magic Circle firm.

Linklaters and Allen & Overy have experienced the most leavers to US law firms in 2020:

We took this a step further and looked at which Magic Circle firms were losing the most to US firms, and which US law firms were gaining the most of these leavers.

Linklaters and Allen & Overy have experienced the most leavers to US firms in 2020, losing 29 and 27, respectively, to US firms. The most popular US firms to join were Kirkland & Ellis and Latham & Watkins, with some other surprising appearances by US firms with a relatively small presence in the UK, like Cahill Gordon & Reindel.

Clifford Chance experienced the most leavers to UK firms

Taking a look at which Magic Circle firms lost the most lawyers to non-Magic Circle UK firms, you can see that there is a near inversion of the results compared to the US leavers results, with Linklaters losing the least lawyers to UK firms and Clifford Chance losing the most. At the top of the list of UK firms to employ Magic Circle leavers in 2020, was Ashurst.

Who left Magic Circle firms to become partner?

Finally, we took a look at who left their respective Magic Circle firms to make partner elsewhere. There seems to be a slight favouring of UK law firms as destinations for new partner promotional moves. While Allen & Overy and Slaughter and May have been seemingly unaffected by these moves, Linklaters has experienced the most leavers seeking partnership at other firms, both US and UK.

Final thoughts

So there you have it: in 2020, a majority of 56.8% of lawyers who left Magic Circle firms joined US firms in the UK, followed by 36.6% joining non-Magic Circle UK firms. It’s worth noticing that Linklaters and Allen & Overy experienced the most leavers to US firms, while Clifford Chance experienced the most leavers to UK firms. Kirkland & Ellis and Latham & Watkins seem to be the US firms to watch as they collect Magic Circle leavers and grow in their UK presence.

Most law firms report the wrong social mobility data

Thu, 14 Jan 2021 15:41:00 GMT

New guidelines issued late last year aim to stop the confusion

How do you measure success when it comes to social mobility, also known as socioeconomic status?

It’s a question many firms have grappled with at some point.

Monitoring progress on gender and ethnicity is pretty straightforward by comparison. There’s a high level of consensus about how they are defined, how to collect the data, and what ‘good’ looks like: usually some combination of how your firm compares with the population, and equal outcomes in areas like recruitment, retention and work allocation.

But social mobility presents a more complex challenge: how do you measure something for which there are many definitions and no consensus yardsticks?

What metrics of social mobility do firms currently use?

We took a sample of 40 of the UK’s top law firms to understand more.

We found that the most commonly reported metric was the type of secondary school attended.

25 firms (or 96% of firms regularly reporting) in our sample were disclosing the balance of state school educated and independent school educated staff.

Number of firms in sample using each metric for regular social mobility reporting

As of December 2020

Many firms point out their reporting is in line with the UK’s Solicitors Regulation Authority , which asks firms to collect and submit data for three metrics: Type of Secondary School, Parents’ Highest Educational Qualification, and Main Parental Occupation aged 14.

While the SRA has asked for type of secondary school for several years, the other two metrics were only introduced in 2019.

Why are some social mobility metrics better than others?

Pirical’s clients are not unusual among major employers in that, faced with no clear consensus metric, they often collect and report on a combination of metrics to be safe.

Pirical has worked with many and found that most of the commonly used ones have at least one major drawback.

Summarising an extensive body of research on the subject, there are 5 criteria that determine the usefulness of a social mobility metric:

Simple . Is the question straightforward enough to receive high response rates and unambiguous answers?
Accurate . Do responses correlate well enough with other more detailed and academic assessments of social mobility to be a decent proxy of socioeconomic status?
International . Is the metric applicable across many, if not most, countries?
Multigenerational . Is the metric relevant across all age groups?
Balanced . Does the metric account for both social advantage and social disadvantage?

What changed?

In November 2020 a consortium of organisations interested in making progress around social mobility collectively issued revised guidance on which metric should be prioritised.

The initiative was driven by the Social Mobility Commission, and backed by major players including CIPD, The Sutton Trust and the Social Mobility Foundation.

A number of major legal and professional services organisations are even represented on the steering committee including:

BCLP
Clifford Chance
EY
KPMG
Linklaters

This revised guidance, which promotes a single, universal metric for social mobility is the biggest intervention in this space for years.

The consortium came together to extoll the benefits of collecting data about the main occupation of an individuals’ parents aged 14 , above all else.

The consortium’s guidance says this metric is the ‘single best measure to assess someone’s background’.

Main Parental Occupation Aged 14 performs well across the 5 criteria discussed above, which makes it the best proxy available to employers interested in assessing social mobility in their organisation:

Main parental occupation distinguishes between higher socioeconomic status individuals, whose parents had ‘Professional’ occupations as well as those with intermediate and lower/working class occupations.

The guidance also offers a simplified question that boasts high response rates and tests well as a proxy to other, more detailed assessments of social class.

The question asks individuals to categorise their parental occupation according to a number of granular categories with examples, for example:

Modern professional & traditional professional occupations such as: teacher, nurse, physiotherapist, social worker, musician, police officer (sergeant or above), software designer, accountant, solicitor, medical practitioner, scientist, civil / mechanical engineer.
Senior, middle or junior managers or administrators such as: finance manager, chief executive, large business owner, office manager, retail manager, bank manager, restaurant manager, warehouse manager.
Clerical and intermediate occupations such as: secretary, personal assistant, call centre agent, clerical worker, nursery nurse.
Technical and craft occupations such as: motor mechanic, plumber, printer, electrician, gardener, train driver.
Routine, semi-routine manual and service occupations such as: postal worker, machine operative, security guard, caretaker, farm worker, catering assistant, sales assistant, HGV driver, cleaner, porter, packer, labourer, waiter/waitress, bar staff.
Long-term unemployed (claimed Jobseeker’s Allowance or earlier unemployment benefit for more than a year).
Small business owners who employed less than 25 people such as: corner shop owners, small plumbing companies, retail shop owner, single restaurant or cafe owner, taxi owner, garage owner.

Responses are grouped and firms are encouraged to compare their results against the national benchmarks:

Of the firms Pirical sampled, we found only 9 (34% of firms reporting) were already using Main Parental Occupation Aged 14 for their regular reporting. The firms were:

Charles Russell Speechlys
DAC Beachcroft
Fieldfisher
Linklaters
Macfarlanes
Mills & Reeve
Mishcon de Reya
Osborne Clarke
Travers Smith

Note this was from a selection of major firms, and so is not an exhaustive list.

What difference will this change make?

It is likely that 2021 will see a sudden shift in the number of firms reporting on this data, particularly if the SRA changes their guidance accordingly.

Those responsible for collecting and analysing their firm’s social mobility data are likely to find this guidance cuts through what has been a tricky conversation to date.

By focusing on a single metric, the guidance will reduce the need to have multiple angles of reporting, enable more benchmarking, and ultimately elevate the social mobility agenda to compare more directly with ethnicity and gender reporting.

Pirical On Demand (POD) is the UK’s first on demand people analytics service for HR in legal and professional services. Track your firm’s diversity and inclusion strategy with real-time data and thousands of pre-populated HR questions.

Where to find the top attorneys in the USA (Infographic!)

Mon, 07 Dec 2020 11:07:00 GMT

So you’re hunting lawyers.

Trying to recruit? Sell your services? Or maybe someone owes you money…

First you’ll need to know where to look: Which are the biggest firms? In which cities are the top lawyers based?

Historically, to answer this question you’d need to trawl through the bar association for each state, or click around on LinkedIn hoping to gather a comprehensive list.

Today, you’re in luck. Pirical Legal Professionals aggregates data sources for a rapid, comprehensive, international overview of legal talent.

Just to illustrate what data we’re collecting: let us be your guide to the state of the US legal market in 2020.

If the charts on this page do not load, you may need to refresh the page.

Which US cities have the most top lawyers?

Of the biggest law firms in the US market, their lawyers are focused in just 2 cities: New York and Washington, DC. Between them, these two cities host 40% of all AM Law 200 lawyers.

New York City 26% (22.0k)
Washington, DC 14% (12.4k)
Chicago 7% (6.1k)
Los Angeles 7% (5.9k)
San Francisco 5% (3.9k)
Boston 4% (3.6k)
Other 37%

The top city, New York, at 26% is - as a proportion of the national total - not as much of a dominant force as other countries’ top legal hubs. Sydney and London, for example, each boast around 40% of all the lawyers in Australia and the UK respectively.

Which US cities are best for Corporate, Finance or Dispute Resolution law?

Each of the major USA legal cities has its own strengths.

While New York is indisputably the home of Corporate, Banking & Finance attorneys, Washington has a disproportionate representation of Disputes, Investigations, and (perhaps unsurprisingly) the greatest number of Public Law specialists.

Which are the largest US law firms?

While Kirkland & Ellis takes the top spot by number of US-based partners, note the relatively modest number of partners at Latham & Watkins, which has more lawyers worldwide and in September boasted the number 2 spot for global revenues (Kirkland was number 1). In this case the difference is primarily due to higher numbers of salaried partners at Kirkland and restricted use of the same title at Lathams.

What is the partner to fee earner ratio for AM Law 200 firms?

To give you a sense of how partner numbers impact the size of a firm, firms in the AM Law 200 typically have somewhere between 2.3 and 3.6 fee earners per partner, not including legal support or business services staff.

A Wealth of Knowledge: Our Market Insights, On Demand

Fri, 20 Nov 2020 00:01:00 GMT

Company announcement from Pirical’s CEO Jason Ku

I’d like to share some thoughts about what we’ve been seeing in the market, and then some exciting news about how Pirical is responding.

Since 2015 Pirical has been using data to answer knotty people strategy questions

People Analytics, using data about people to continuously improve your business, continues to mature as a practice and we have been at its coalface with our legal sector clients for several years now.

I am proud of the reputation Pirical has built for busting people management myths, identifying biases, and driving profitability.

We have used firms’ data to identify tens of millions of pounds worth of HR opportunities.

We have helped spur market-wide collaboration on diversity and inclusion with our breakthrough benchmarking exercises.

We have set awesome data-driven recruitment metrics, including showing that kids who outperform their school’s average A-level results make better lawyers .

As our customers have embraced more data-driven management, and experienced better financial outcomes from People Analytics, Pirical has been called upon to answer more questions, supply more beautiful board-ready stories, and refresh insights on a regular cycle.

It’s been an amazing, lively journey and I’m grateful for the hard work of our staff to this point, and to our customers who have entrusted us to go on this journey with them.

Our most popular product isn’t what I expected

The business case for using Pirical has always been clear: we drive impact by asking the right questions, finding hidden insights in data, and presenting the call to action in a simple and beautiful way. Towards this we have relentlessly focused on making our work faster, more insightful, and more impactful.

But we have found that customers' needs are changing.

Having worked now with the majority of the top firms, customers are increasingly asking us to share our wealth of experience.

Customers want us to help benchmark their firm, to see how they’re doing in context. And we’re more often being asked what else they could or should be doing with their data.

It used to be that customers would ask us to help with analyses that answered specific questions. But now, in 8 out of 10 customer discussions, I am asked ‘what else is Pirical working on that I need to know about?’

It’s about opening up what we know

As we tackled more and more People Analytics topics, and as the Pirical team grew, we needed new ways to manage and make use of everything we had learned.

First, we established a Knowledge Engineering team tasked with building technology that helps us manage everything-we-know, and record how-we-came-to-know-it (think Knowledge Management System on steroids).

Then we established a Data Operations team to help standardise the way we processed and derived insights from each customers’ data, so we could benefit from similarities and make sure we were comparing apples-to-apples.

More recently we set about thinking, what if we could give all of our customers direct access to Pirical’s knowledge?

Towards this ambition we started to design a cost-effective service that can deliver all of Pirical’s accumulated People Analytics insights for the legal sector, On Demand. And so, as Pirical’s knowledge continues to grow, so will that of our customers.

The tech and expertise to deliver this vision of an On Demand Service has been 5 years in the making

I won’t dwell on the technology story, because we prefer to focus on the value created, except to say that it has been no small feat.

Since 2015 we have developed a suite of cutting-edge analytics and data engineering capabilities. Concretely, Pirical is now one of only a handful of companies worldwide deriving steady commercial value from knowledge graphs, a novel way of storing data popularised by applications such as Wikipedia and Amazon Alexa.

Most comparable solutions to Pirical are plug-ins to a single data system. They expect complete data. They expect standardised data. They are only as good as you are at jamming your square-shaped world into their round-shaped holes.

But Pirical has always met our customers where they are, in the real world, where data is nuanced and multidimensional. The legal sector has its own data-personality that cannot be standardised with off-the-shelf HR reporting. As a rule, insights that lead to impact can only be derived when domain experts are leading both the processing and the analysis.

With this post, I want to publicly credit the team’s ingenuity at scaling the ways we can handle the volume, complexity and idiosyncrasies of our customers’ data, and say thank you for their efforts.

Our On Demand People Analytics Service is being used by law firms today

Folks, we built it. Pirical On Demand (POD) is now live with customers.

Having been co-developed and piloted by top law firms in recent months, POD is now and will be the core of our analytics offering going forward.

Pirical On Demand is filled with pre-built answers to the most common questions we've answered for clients over 5+ years.

Today’s users can access insights on demand that answer their most critical people strategy questions. Not only that, but they can access hundreds more insightful analyses they didn’t expressly ask for, but we know will create enormous value for them.

This is only day 1 and the team will continue to build this service alongside our customers, responding to their changing demands as we have done since we started.

Today I am pleased to mark the official launch of a revolutionary service that has been long in the making, and - most importantly - is already in the hands of our customers.

Best wishes,

Jason

The Australian Legal Market in Numbers (Infographic!)

Thu, 30 Jul 2020 22:00:00 GMT

Did you know? Australia is one of our fastest-growing countries for Pirical Legal Professionals users.

Let’s show you around and give you some interesting facts about the 100 largest Australian firms for your next Zoom call. ��

If the charts on this page don’t load, you may need to refresh the page.

In some ways, the Australian legal market is very similar to the UK. The country’s major legal hub, Sydney, just like London houses about 40% of the lawyers in the country. But one thing that’s different is the relative importance of the country’s second- and third-ranked cities. Melbourne and Brisbane host nearly 50% of the population between them. (By contrast Manchester and Birmingham in the UK have just 7% combined.)

So what? In Australia the 13,000 practising lawyers in its major law firms are highly concentrated in just a few major cities. Take a look at our interactive map.

The 20 biggest firms, by fee-earning population, have about 8,000 lawyers on their books.

At the senior levels, HWL Ebsworth has the most Partners in Australia , followed by MinterEllison and King & Wood Mallesons.

The gender profile of the lawyers in Australia follows a similar profile to that of the UK, except the gap at partnership level is even more acute.

We’d love to show you how the search and statistics functions of Pirical Legal Professionals can transform your legal recruitment and sales enablement efforts.