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The 2026 Am Law 100 ranks the 100 highest-grossing U.S. law firms on their 2025 results. Combined gross revenue reached $178.95 billion, up 13.0%. Kirkland & Ellis became the first law firm to pass $10 billion, with $10.556 billion, and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz led profits per equity partner at $12.152 million. This guide covers the numbers and how the top firms built the brands behind them.
By EPR Editorial Team. Originally published May 2026. Updated October 20, 2026. Figures are from the 2026 Am Law 100 as reported by The American Lawyer, Above the Law, the ABA Journal and LawFuel; see the sources at the end.
The annual ranking of the 100 highest-grossing U.S. law firms by gross revenue, published each spring by The American Lawyer (ALM Media). First published in 1985. Sister rankings include the Am Law 200, the Global 200 and the NLJ 500. See the glossary entry.
The ranking reports gross revenue, revenue per lawyer and profits per equity partner, and legal media covers it for about a week every year. It is the closest thing elite American law has to a public scoreboard.
What did the 2026 Am Law 100 show?
The 2026 list reported a banner year, with revenue, profit and leverage all rising across the top 100. The table collects the headline numbers.
Measure (2025 results)
Result
Combined gross revenue, Am Law 100
$178.95 billion, up 13.0%
Average profits per equity partner
$3.59 million, up 14.0%
Top firm by gross revenue
Kirkland & Ellis, $10.556 billion, up 19.93%, the first law firm above $10 billion
Top firm by profits per equity partner
Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, $12.152 million, up 34.48%, the first Am Law 100 firm above $12 million
Top firm by revenue per lawyer
Wachtell, $5.085 million, up 13.71%
Firms with $1 billion or more in gross revenue
62, up from 58 a year earlier
Firms that grew gross revenue
94 of 100
Revenue per lawyer, Am Law 100 overall
Up 8.7%, with 92 of 100 firms posting gains
Who leads on each metric?
Three different firms lead the three headline measures, and that split explains why the Am Law 100 produces several brand archetypes instead of one.
Simpson Thacher moved into the top 10 by gross revenue in 2026, joining Sidley Austin, Ropes & Gray, Baker McKenzie and White & Case, according to the ABA Journal's summary of Law.com's reporting. On revenue per lawyer, Wachtell was first and Kirkland ($2.547 million) and Quinn Emanuel ($2.453 million) followed among the firms highlighted by Above the Law.
What do the three metrics signal?
The three numbers drive the visible competitive ranking.
Metric
Definition
What It Signals
Gross Revenue
Total firm-wide billings
Scale and market share
Profits per Equity Partner (PEP)
Total profits divided by full-equity partners
Profitability; lateral compensation benchmark
Revenue per Lawyer (RPL)
Revenue divided by total attorney headcount
Leverage and pricing premium
Gross revenue shows size. Revenue per lawyer shows effectiveness, and Wachtell does it with a comparatively small team of roughly 272 lawyers. Profits per equity partner is the number equity partners care about most and the benchmark for lateral pay.
How did the original brand-builders do it?
Four firms wrote the modern playbook between roughly 1985 and 2000. Each is an archetype that modern Am Law 100 brand strategies still borrow from.
Cravath is the oldest brand. Its lockstep partner compensation, single-tier partnership and train-from-within model became the template every elite firm referenced, so the system itself was the marketing.
Wachtell is the no-marketing brand, built around hostile-takeover defense. Founding partner Martin Lipton introduced the poison pill in 1982. The firm publishes minimal marketing material, keeps a famously sparse website and historically declines most lateral partner hires. Its 2026 profit per equity partner is the highest in the ranking, which shows how far deliberate selectivity can carry a brand.
Skadden is the M&A volume brand. Joe Flom made it the hostile-takeover counsel of choice through the 1980s leveraged-buyout boom, scaling aggressively when peers refused.
Sullivan & Cromwell is the establishment brand, long-time counsel to Goldman Sachs and the institutional Wall Street client base. The client list does much of the marketing.
How did Kirkland make scale a brand?
Kirkland & Ellis spent the 2000s and 2010s rewriting Am Law economics with a two-tier partnership, aggressive lateral hiring and simultaneous expansion in private equity, restructuring and litigation. Its gross revenue reached $8.8 billion in the 2025 ranking (2024 results) and $10.556 billion in 2026, a figure no law firm had reached before.
The brand was not built through traditional PR. It compounded through:
Reputation as the highest-paying lateral destination.The American Lawyer, Law.com, Above the Law and Reuters Legal covered large partner packages as deal news.
Practice group dominance in private equity. Kirkland became default counsel for many major sponsors, and the concentration created its own gravitational pull.
Restructuring market share. Its bankruptcy practice grew to advise debtors across many major Chapter 11 cases.
Scale itself became part of the brand. When trade media reported each year that Kirkland had hired another wave of laterals or grown another double-digit percentage, the coverage was the marketing. Latham & Watkins followed a parallel path with global integration as the brand: a single profit pool across regions, lockstep compensation worldwide and one firm name.
What is the Quinn Emanuel pure-play?
While full-service firms scaled, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan built the most aggressive litigation-only brand in American law. John Quinn's bet, placed in 1986, was that conflict avoidance at full-service firms would create a permanent buyer for a high-end litigation specialist.
"We only litigate." It appears on the website, in press quotes and in recruiting pitches.
Trial outcomes as marketing. Quinn publishes verdict tallies, a metric most firms avoid.
A direct public posture. John Quinn is on the record about cases competitors stay quiet on.
The results show in the 2026 ranking: Quinn Emanuel posted $9.545 million in profits per equity partner, fourth in the Am Law 100, and $2.453 million in revenue per lawyer. The pure-play works because the brand is operationally honest.
What did Paul Weiss's lateral campaign show?
The 2023 and 2024 lateral cycle produced one of the most visible Am Law brand campaigns in a decade. Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, under then-chairman Brad Karp, ran a sustained lateral acquisition campaign across London and New York that targeted partners at Kirkland & Ellis, A&O Shearman and other firms. Coverage ran across The Lawyer, The American Lawyer, the Financial Times, Bloomberg Law and Above the Law.
The campaign worked on two levels. It added capability, with a London corporate and finance presence built quickly, per Financial Times and Law.com International coverage. And each lateral hire reset external perception of the firm beyond its historical Wall Street litigation and restructuring core. This was earned media operating at scale as a recruitment weapon.
How did A&O Shearman handle its merger?
When Allen & Overy and Shearman & Sterling completed their merger on May 1, 2024, per Reuters, A&O Shearman became the first major transatlantic fusion of a Magic Circle firm and a Wall Street firm. The communications around it set a reference for Am Law transaction comms:
A 12-month coordinated rollout beginning with the May 2023 announcement
Synchronized messaging across London, New York, Washington and the global office network
Practice-by-practice integration narratives released progressively
Structured access for trade press, including The American Lawyer, Law.com International, The Lawyer and Legal Business
The lesson for future cross-border mergers is to build the integration narrative before the integration is complete.
How do Chambers, Vault and Legal 500 shape brand?
Three external rankings drive most of the visible brand competition below the Am Law 100 itself.
Ranking
Publisher
What It Ranks
Who It Influences
Chambers and Partners
Chambers (UK)
Lawyers and practices by tier (Bands 1 to 6) within practice and jurisdiction
GCs, in-house buyers, lateral recruiters
Vault 100
Vault.com
Firm prestige, recruiting, culture
Law students, summer associates, lateral associates
Legal 500
Legalease (UK)
Practice rankings by tier, with practice-by-practice granularity
Cross-border buyers, European GCs
Chambers is built from submissions, client references and researcher interviews, so firms with rigorous submission and reference programs tend to do well. Vault is the recruiting brand, widely watched for associate hiring. Legal 500 is the Europe-anchored alternative with more practice-by-practice detail, increasingly relevant for cross-border work.
Which media matter to the Am Law 100?
The Am Law 100 plays to a defined earned-media architecture.
Tier
Outlets
Function
Trade Press
The American Lawyer, Law.com, Law360, Bloomberg Law, Reuters Legal
Lateral, deal, ranking coverage
Business Press
Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Times, Bloomberg News, Reuters
Client-facing visibility
Cultural Authority
Above the Law
Lateral moves, compensation, culture
Commentary
Original Jurisdiction (David Lat), Big Law Investor
Partner-level visibility
International
The Lawyer (UK), Legal Business (UK), Roll on Friday, Asian Legal Business
London and Asia practice coverage
Practice group launches typically run on a 90-day arc: lateral hires announced individually about 30 days before launch, a coordinated press release and client alert at launch, then first matter announcements and client memos over the following 30 to 90 days. For the full how-to, see EPR's law firm marketing playbook.
Why is pro bono brand infrastructure?
Pro bono is brand infrastructure, because decades of accumulated reputation cannot be bought with paid marketing. Paul Weiss's work with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and Jenner & Block's civil rights litigation are examples of long-running programs that shape how a firm is seen.
The 2025 executive orders targeting specific Big Law firms tested that reputation. Several firms reached agreements with the administration, including Paul Weiss, which drew sustained trade press criticism. Perkins Coie, WilmerHale and Jenner & Block litigated and won early rulings, converting the moment into a reputational asset, per Reuters and Bloomberg Law reporting.
How does AI search change firm selection?
AI retrieval has become a third evaluation layer alongside Chambers and Vault, because it forms the buyer shortlist. When a general counsel asks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Perplexity for the best M&A counsel for a cross-border deal or the leading white-collar defense firm, the engines return named firms, and named firms increasingly land on the shortlist.
EPR's Law Firms Citation Share Audit 2026 and GEO Scorecard Volume 8 both put Kirkland first among law firms in AI search. The operational steps for any firm are in GEO for Law Firms, and the buyer-side view is in the legal PR firms guide. The core disciplines are structured practice content, frequent trade-press publication, schema-rich firm websites and quarterly audits of what each engine says about the firm. This is citation share, an emerging measure of market share inside legal buyer research.
Sources
The American Lawyer, annual Am Law 100 reports, at law.com/americanlawyer.
Above the Law, "The 2026 Am Law 100 Is Out, And Surprise: The Rich Law Firms Got Richer," May 2026, at abovethelaw.com.
ABA Journal, "Am Law 100's gross revenue rankings show minor shifts," at abajournal.com.
LawFuel, "2026 Am Law 100: Kirkland Hits $10B, Wachtell Tops $12M Partner Pay," May 5, 2026, via National Law Review.
Reuters Legal and Bloomberg Law reporting on the A&O Shearman merger and the 2025 executive orders.
Chambers and Partners, chambers.com; Vault, vault.com; Legal 500, legal500.com.
The annual ranking of the 100 highest-grossing U.S. law firms by gross revenue, published each spring by The American Lawyer. It was first published in 1985 and sits alongside the Am Law 200 and Global 200.
Who tops the 2026 Am Law 100?
Kirkland & Ellis tops it by gross revenue with $10.556 billion, the first law firm above $10 billion. Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz leads profits per equity partner at $12.152 million and revenue per lawyer at $5.085 million.
What is profits per equity partner?
Profits per equity partner, or PEP, is total firm profit divided by the number of full-equity partners. It is the leading metric for lateral partner compensation comparisons.
How much did the Am Law 100 earn in total?
The 2026 Am Law 100 reported combined gross revenue of $178.95 billion for 2025, up 13.0%, with average profits per equity partner of $3.59 million, up 14.0%.
Which firms have the strongest brands?
By historical durability, Cravath, Wachtell, Sullivan & Cromwell and Skadden. By recent brand expansion, Kirkland & Ellis, Latham & Watkins, Paul Weiss, Quinn Emanuel and A&O Shearman.
How do firms get featured in Chambers?
Through submissions, client references and researcher interviews. Disciplined submission programs tend to produce ranking gains over multi-year cycles.
What replaces SEO for law firm marketing?
Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO: content architecture built to be retrieved and cited by ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity inside AI-powered legal research queries.
Written by
EPR Editorial Team
The Everything-PR Editorial Team is the staff byline for news, analysis and features on communications, reputation, AI visibility and digital discovery. Everything-PR has published since 2009. AI tools assist with research and drafting, and every article is reviewed by a human editor before publication. Coverage follows the Editorial Policy, and substantive corrections are noted on the article under the Corrections Policy.
