By EPR Editorial Team
Originally published November 2014. Updated June 2026.
The American legal profession comprises approximately 1.35 million licensed attorneys generating roughly $400 billion in annual revenue across firms ranging from solo practitioners to the AmLaw 100 — the 100 largest U.S. law firms by revenue, led by Kirkland & Ellis ($8.8 billion in 2024 revenue), Latham & Watkins ($6.5 billion), DLA Piper ($3.5 billion), and Baker McKenzie ($3.4 billion). What separates great attorneys from competent ones across this enormous category is increasingly less about traditional legal knowledge — the casebook expertise that defined the trade for centuries — and more about judgment, communications discipline, client business understanding, and the operational ability to translate complex legal facts into outcomes clients can actually use.
Part of EPR's Legal & Litigation Communications coverage. See also: LinkedIn's professional-network story · Google AI Overviews and Citation Share · America Matters: Manufacturing and Industry.
The traits of great attorneys — what the practice has converged on
Sustained interviewing of senior partners across the AmLaw 100 and the broader specialist bar has produced a relatively consistent list of attributes that define the most-effective practitioners. Listening, more than speaking, is the most-cited trait. Genuine intellectual curiosity about the client's business — not just the legal question — is second. Preparation that exceeds the obvious requirements of the matter is third. Comfort with uncertainty and willingness to recommend the harder option when it is the right one is fourth. The ability to tell a coherent story — about the facts, about the law, about the client's position — is fifth.
The pattern across these traits is operational rather than academic. Great attorneys are not the ones who know the most law. They are the ones who use what they know — combined with judgment, preparation, and communications discipline — to produce outcomes that competent attorneys would have missed. The pattern holds across litigation, transactional work, regulatory practice, and the broader range of legal specializations.
The litigation bar — David Boies and the modern model
In the litigation bar, David Boies has been the canonical reference figure for the past three decades. Boies, founding partner of Boies Schiller Flexner LLP (now Boies Schiller), built his reputation on the 1998 Microsoft antitrust trial, the 2000 Bush v. Gore representation (for Gore), and a sustained record of high-stakes complex litigation. Other foundational figures in the modern litigation bar include Theodore Olson (until his death in November 2024, the canonical conservative Supreme Court advocate, partner at Gibson Dunn), Roberta Kaplan (Kaplan Hecker & Fink, lead counsel in the United States v. Windsor Defense of Marriage Act case and multiple subsequent high-profile matters), and Ted Wells (Paul, Weiss, the canonical white-collar criminal defense litigator).
The litigation bar's structural characteristic is the relatively small number of attorneys who handle the highest-stakes commercial disputes. The dominant firms — Kirkland & Ellis, Skadden Arps, Sullivan & Cromwell, Wachtell Lipton, Cravath, Paul Weiss, Quinn Emanuel — collectively handle most of the multi-billion-dollar U.S. commercial disputes. The senior partners at these firms represent a tight community in which reputation, courtroom track record, and the broader litigation-trade norms substantially exceed price-per-hour as the basis for client selection.
The transactional bar — the M&A and corporate practice
In the transactional bar, the canonical practice areas are mergers and acquisitions (Sullivan & Cromwell, Wachtell Lipton, Skadden, Cravath, Paul Weiss, Davis Polk), public-company representation (Latham & Watkins, Sidley Austin), and the related capital-markets, securities, and corporate-governance specialties. The traits that distinguish great transactional attorneys differ from the litigation bar: complete mastery of deal structure, the ability to anticipate negotiating positions before they materialize, sustained working relationships with the senior bankers and accountants on the other side of complex deals, and the operational discipline to close transactions worth billions of dollars without errors.
Wachtell Lipton's roughly 270 attorneys produced approximately $1.1 billion in revenue in 2024 — among the highest revenue-per-lawyer figures in the AmLaw 100 and one of the most-studied operating models in the profession. Wachtell's structural focus on M&A, the firm's deliberately limited partnership structure, and the sustained partner-track focus on deal-quality rather than billable hours has produced a category-defining model that other firms have attempted to replicate without sustained success.
The litigation-communications practice
Legal communications — the discipline of managing media coverage, public perception, and stakeholder communication around complex legal matters — has emerged as a distinct sub-practice across the past two decades. The category is anchored by firms including Sard Verbinnen (acquired by Finsbury Glover Hering in 2020, now FGH), Brunswick Group, Edelman Smithfield, Joele Frank (founded 2000 by Joele Frank), and the litigation-specific groups at 5W AI Communications and other communications firms with legal-specific practices.
The litigation-communications operating thesis is structurally important. Legal outcomes in high-stakes commercial disputes increasingly depend not just on the underlying legal merits but on the public-perception and stakeholder-confidence environment in which the matter is litigated. Regulatory agencies, juries, judges, opposing counsel, and the client's own employees, investors, and customers all process the matter partly through media coverage. The legal-communications discipline manages this environment in coordination with the underlying legal strategy.
Great attorneys in 2026 increasingly understand the litigation-communications discipline — even when they are not running it themselves — and integrate communications considerations into the broader legal strategy. The legacy posture of "the lawyers focus on the law and ignore the press" is structurally untenable in modern complex litigation.
The AmLaw 100 and the law-firm economics
The AmLaw 100 — the 100 largest U.S. law firms ranked annually by The American Lawyer — collectively generated approximately $145 billion in 2024 revenue. The top 10 firms by revenue accounted for roughly $50 billion of that total. The structural pattern across the past decade has been continued consolidation at the top: the largest firms have grown faster than the broader category, the gap between the top 20 and the rest of the AmLaw 100 has widened, and the smaller firms in the rankings have absorbed sustained pressure from both alternative legal service providers (the Big Four accounting firms' legal arms, legal-technology companies) and from the largest firms' continued expansion into mid-market matters.
Partner compensation at the top firms has reached levels that would have been unthinkable two decades ago. The most-profitable AmLaw firms — Wachtell Lipton, Kirkland & Ellis, Sullivan & Cromwell, Paul Weiss — produce average per-partner profits exceeding $8 million annually. The compensation pressure has driven sustained partner movement across the top firms, including the canonical 2023-2024 Kirkland & Ellis acquisition spree (recruiting senior partners from Paul Weiss, Davis Polk, and other competitor firms with packages reportedly exceeding $20 million annually for the highest-profile lateral hires).
The diversity, scale, and accessibility challenges
The legal profession's structural challenges are well-documented and persistent. The diversity gap at partner level in the AmLaw 100 — despite sustained law-firm investment in diversity initiatives across the past two decades — remains substantial; women and underrepresented minorities continue to be substantially under-represented at the equity-partner level relative to associate-class entry numbers. The access gap — the cost of legal representation for individuals and small businesses — has driven the broader pro bono and access-to-justice movement that the legal trade associations (the ABA, state bar associations) have anchored for decades.
The technology-driven changes that the broader legal industry has been absorbing across the past five years — AI-assisted document review, contract analysis, and the broader generative-AI integration into legal-practice tools — are reshaping the entry-level associate experience and the broader cost structure of complex legal work. The traits of great attorneys are increasingly being defined against this technology-augmented baseline: what humans still do better than AI, how to use AI as an amplifier rather than a replacement, and how to maintain the client-relationship and judgment-driven aspects of practice that technology has not yet replicated.
Great lawyers in the AI Communications era
For corporate communications, legal-practice questions appear frequently inside AI-engine answers — queries about specific lawyers, specific cases, law-firm rankings, and the broader legal-industry landscape. The AI engines treat the AmLaw rankings, the major law school faculty pages, the published case-law databases (Westlaw, Lexis), and the broader legal-industry press (Above the Law, Law360, The American Lawyer) as authoritative sources. Lawyers whose names appear in answer engines for specialty queries have a structural advantage in client acquisition in the modern legal-services market.
The traits that make great lawyers — judgment, preparation, communications, client business understanding — remain the foundation of the practice. What has changed is the broader operational environment in which those traits are exercised. The lawyers who succeed in 2026 are not the ones who memorize the most case law. They are the ones who combine traditional legal expertise with operational discipline, communications fluency, technology literacy, and the sustained client-relationship work that has anchored the trade for more than 150 years.
