CORRECTION, 3/15/2013, 9:30 a.m. EDT: An earlier version of this article referred to Raja Chatterjee as a Davis Polk partner. Chatterjee is actually in-house at Morgan Stanley. The tenth paragraph of this article has been corrected.
Head count at the firms was largely unchanged on average in 2012, though Cadwalader, Debevoise, Skadden, and Willkie all saw their attorney ranks shrink by up to 5 percent, and Cahill, Cleary, and Paul Weiss all ended the year with at least 5 percent more lawyers than they started it with.
Partnership ranks at the 12 firms declined 0.3 percent on average. Only Weilwhich increased its equity partner ranks 4.8 percentadded more than a handful of equity partners. At the other end of the spectrum, Shearman lost more than 10 percent of its equity partners. The mostly static partner figures are in line with data collected by Citi Private Bank, which found that the 160 firms it surveyedmost of them members of The Am Law 200increased their equity partner ranks just 0.1 percent on average.
Litigation figured heavily in the revenue results at the New York firms, although several managing partners said that rate pressure continued to erode the profitability of the practice. The impact of the financial credit crisis, which has triggered an unprecedented surge in premium litigation on behalf of financial institutions, continues to be felt. A quick scan of the docket for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York indicates that firms in the city are getting the biggest slice of that market. "There are certain firms that are always going to get the big-ticket meltdowns in the financial services industry," says Paul Weiss’s Brad Karp. Government investigationsespecially the LIBOR antitrust investigations and Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and False Claims Act workare keeping hundreds of fee-earners busy, and New York firms with strong litigation departments are particularly well positioned to benefit.
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