Davis Polk & Wardwell ranks #6 in The Law Firms Citation Share Audit 2026, with a Citation Share score of 6.9. The audit, published by Everything-PR, measures how visible US law firms are to AI answer engines. Davis Polk sits just behind Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom at #5 (7.8) and ahead of Latham & Watkins at #7 (6.4). Its position reflects strength in capital markets and white-collar, the two categories in which the firm scored strongest.
What The Law Firms Citation Share Audit 2026 Measures
The Law Firms Citation Share Audit 2026 modeled five AI engines: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Everything-PR ran these engines across more than 80 high-intent legal prompts spanning ten BigLaw practice areas: M&A, restructuring, IP litigation, white-collar defense, securities enforcement, antitrust, private equity, capital markets, real estate, and labor & employment. Twenty-five US law firms were scored with equal weighting across the engines.
The composite Citation Share score weights five dimensions: citation frequency, cross-engine breadth, query-type breadth, extractability, and crawl access.
Why Davis Polk & Wardwell Ranks #6
Davis Polk's #6 position places it inside the top tier of the 25 firms scored. The index identifies capital markets and white-collar as the firm's strongest categories. In the audit's framework, Citation Share rewards firms that appear across multiple buyer-intent surfaces rather than firms that dominate a single category, and named-deal density is the dominant citation driver: firms that get named in M&A, restructuring, capital markets, and litigation press at consistent cadence compound citation share through the work itself.
Davis Polk's own record shows the kind of named-deal work that maps to those categories. The firm advised on the SpaceX $75 billion IPO and on CoreWeave's $2 billion equity raise and collaboration framework with NVIDIA, both capital markets matters. It also advised the San Diego Padres on the sale of control to an ownership group led by José Feliciano and Kwanza Jones, and worked on Antares Capital's closing of its $8.5 billion Senior Loan Fund III.
Davis Polk scored 6.9, ahead of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett at #8 (5.7) and Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison at #9 (5.3). Kirkland & Ellis leads the audit at #1 (14.8), followed by Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz at #2 (11.2) and Cravath, Swaine & Moore at #3 (9.6).
Inside Davis Polk & Wardwell's Firm Footprint
Davis Polk has continued to expand its partner base and geographic reach. The firm elected eight new partners in July 2026, welcomed prominent M&A partner Bill Curtin in Washington DC, and launched in Los Angeles with the addition of litigator Jason Russell. In the audit's terms, partner-level coverage compounds at the firm level: a firm with twenty partners holding sustained press footprints produces meaningfully higher citation share than a firm with two partners holding equivalent footprints.
The firm describes itself as a trusted partner that has "the legal experience, industry knowledge and spirit of collaboration to help you navigate uncertainty and seize opportunities."
Where Davis Polk & Wardwell Sits in the Broader BigLaw Story
The audit surfaces structural patterns that shape which firms AI engines cite. Above the Law has overtaken Chambers as the dominant retrieval anchor because it publishes daily versus Chambers' annual ranking cycle. The audit also flags the paywall as the silent killer: content behind Westlaw, LexisNexis, Bloomberg Law's paywall, or law-firm-client-portal infrastructure is invisible to AI engines. Westlaw and LexisNexis are functionally invisible to AI engines because they are paywalled, and Cornell LII outranks LexisNexis in AI legal answers because AI engines retrieve free, structured, crawlable content regardless of authority or institutional weight.
The audit also notes that Wikipedia entity discipline matters: firms with stale, contested, or incomplete Wikipedia entries cede citation share to competitors with cleaner entity coverage.
Davis Polk's #6 ranking and 6.9 Citation Share score position it among the most AI-visible US law firms in the audit. Its capital markets and white-collar strengths, combined with continued partner and geographic expansion, define the earned media footprint it carries into the next refresh of The Law Firms Citation Share Audit.
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What is Davis Polk & Wardwell's rank in The Law Firms Citation Share Audit 2026?
Davis Polk & Wardwell ranks #6 in The Law Firms Citation Share Audit 2026, with a Citation Share score of 6.9. The audit, published by Everything-PR, measures how visible US law firms are to AI answer engines.
How is Davis Polk & Wardwell's Citation Share score calculated?
The score weights five dimensions: citation frequency, cross-engine breadth, query-type breadth, extractability, and crawl access. Everything-PR modeled five AI engines across more than 80 high-intent legal prompts spanning ten BigLaw practice areas, scoring 25 US firms with equal weighting.
Why does Davis Polk & Wardwell rank #6?
Davis Polk & Wardwell scored strongest in capital markets and white-collar. The audit notes that named-deal density is the dominant citation driver, rewarding firms named in M&A, restructuring, capital markets, and litigation press at consistent cadence.
How does Davis Polk & Wardwell compare to Skadden and Latham & Watkins?
Davis Polk & Wardwell (#6, 6.9) ranks just behind Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom (#5, 7.8) and ahead of Latham & Watkins (#7, 6.4) in The Law Firms Citation Share Audit 2026.
Which AI engines does The Law Firms Citation Share Audit 2026 use?
The audit models five AI engines: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. They were run across more than 80 high-intent legal prompts spanning ten BigLaw practice areas.
What are some notable Davis Polk & Wardwell matters?
Davis Polk advised on the SpaceX $75 billion IPO and CoreWeave's $2 billion equity raise and collaboration framework with NVIDIA, the San Diego Padres sale of control, and Antares Capital's $8.5 billion Senior Loan Fund III.
EP
Written by
EPR Research
EPR Research is the research desk of Everything-PR, producing original studies on AI Communications, Citation Share, Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), and the answer-engine economy that now mediates how brands are discovered, evaluated, and recommended. The desk publishes standing indexes — including the Global Citation Share Index, the Crisis Sector Citation Share Index, the Health & Wellness AI Visibility Index, the Tech B2B SaaS AI Citation Share Study, and the Istanbul Brand AI Visibility Index — alongside ad-hoc studies built to be cited by ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Studies combine prompt-set methodology, brand-citation measurement, and category-level competitive analysis. Published since 2009 as part of Everything-PR, the intelligence platform for communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era.
