Legal News

Latham & Watkins, Gunning for the Top?

By Dan Slater

Wowza. Could there be a new law firm atop the AmLaw 100 this year? That’s the question the Recorder asked in a story today and might well be the Big-Law parlor game leading up to May, when the rankings are typically released. Why bring the topic up now? Because Latham & Watkins this week released its 2007 revenue numbers. Its gross revenues topped $2 billion — up a whopping 23 percent from last year. It also claimed $2.2 million profits per partner, a similarly eye-popping year-over-year increase.

Skadden Arps has topped American Lawyer magazine’s Am Law 100 list of top-grossing firms for many years, with Latham recently moving into the No. 2 position. Will Skadden stay on top for 2007? We’ll have to wait to find out. We checked in with Skadden and, as is its custom, the firm is keeping mum.

The Latham news intrigues us, partly because the Big Law market is supposed to be trending down (click here and here for previous posts on the supposed cloudy days ahead). The subprime crisis and the credit crunch are reportedly taking their toll on M&A and other deal work and certain types of litigation are down as well.

So what’s in the water fountains at Latham? David Gordon, the firm’s managing partner in New York, told the Law Blog: “Honestly, we just have a lot of good, high-end practice areas — private equity, leveraged finance, project finance, amd litigation was strong last year too. So between the footprint and the pratice areas, it was a year of firing on all cylinders.” (The private equity reference is a head scratcher — money at Latham seems to be not a problem, so what motivated Ronald Hopkinson, a Latham P&E macher, to jump to Cadwalader, as reported this week?)

But according to the Recorder story, other west coast firms are reporting good numbers as well. Still, recruiter Richard Kolodny told the Recorder that the storm is, in fact, on its way.

“In the last five months of the year,” Kolodny told the Recorder, “savvy executive committees at many of these firms started to see the handwriting on the wall in terms of the current economic environment and are now proceeding in a more cautious manner to see what 2008 will bring.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on February 08, 2008 (boomark / email).