(Photo: LaMonte Ayers/ALM)

Atlanta now hosts almost one-quarter of the nation's 200 highest-grossing law firms.

Reflecting the increasingly competitive legal market, there are 49 Am Law 100 and Second Hundred firms in Atlanta, with local offices ranging from several hundred lawyers at homegrown giants King & Spalding and Alston & Bird to outposts with only a handful.

Two-thirds of those 49 firms are Am Law 100, including five Atlanta-based ones, and the others are Second Hundred, with four based in Atlanta.

Last year, Am Law firms continued to seek an entree into the local legal market, but at a slower rate than in 2018. Only one new Am Law firm, the Midwest's Shook Hardy & Bacon (No. 104 in the Am Law ranking), entered the Atlanta market in 2019, compared with four new firms the prior year.

Shook landed in Atlanta last June with a trio of product liability defense partners from Alston & Bird, led by Colin Kelly. The office currently has six lawyers.

But Am Law 100 firm McDermott Will & Emery (No. 30) quietly arrived on the scene in March, giving Atlanta 49 Am Law firms.

A handful of the city's Am Law firms have, in recent years, either been absorbed by other firms or they've closed their Atlanta office, but that hasn't happened since the departure of Colorado-based Sherman & Howard (No. 193) in 2018.

McDermott's the Latest

McDermott's Atlanta incursion had been in the works for some time, but the firm didn't announce the new office, which so far has eight lawyers, until mid-May–in part because of the disruptions from the coronavirus pandemic.

"The marketplace was scrambling to deal with the pandemic and the uncertainty it brings to our industry," McDermott's partner in charge of strategy, Michael Poulos, told the Daily Report in May. "We did not think it appropriate to announce a new office in the middle of that."

At that point, the Chicago-based firm had recruited M&A partner Frank Layson from DLA Piper to lead the office. M&A partners Paul Puckett and Sam Snider also joined the office from DLA. McDermott had already hired an intellectual property litigation team from Kasowitz Benson Torres (No. 143 in the Am Law rankings) on March 13.

In addition to the four Kasowitz IP lawyers, led by partner Jeffrey Toney, McDermott added Jones Day partner Todd McClelland, who has a cybersecurity and data privacy practice.

The Atlanta office is McDermott's 13th U.S. office and its first in the Southeast other than Miami. McDermott, which has 21 offices worldwide, most recently entered Wilmington, Delaware, in 2019 and San Francisco in 2018.

Poulos said in May that McDermott had been considering an Atlanta office for over a year and spent months talking to local lawyers before hiring the attorneys from DLA Piper, Kasowitz and Jones Day.

The city's depth of legal talent, with "some exceptional lawyers … whom we knew would integrate fairly easily and completely into our global platform," made it attractive, along with its growing importance as a U.S. economic center, Poulos explained at the time. He noted that Atlanta is a fintech hub, has a strong health care market and has a number of Fortune 500 company headquarters.

Recent Am Law 100 Entrants

McDermott is now one of the largest Am Law 100 firms in Atlanta. The 1,050-lawyer firm reported $1.17 billion in revenue last year and profits-per-equity partner of just over $2 million.

Atlanta hosts only five firms that rank above McDermott's No. 30 spot in the Am Law 100 revenue rankings: DLA Piper (No. 3), Jones Day (No. 10), Greenberg Traurig (No. 14), King & Spalding (No. 21) and Paul Hastings (No. 24).

Other recent Am Law 100 entrants to Atlanta's legal scene are also taking an organic approach to growing their offices. Squire Patton Boggs (No. 37) now has 16 Atlanta lawyers, including government affairs practitioner Amol Naik, who'd been the city of Atlanta's chief resilience officer. Squire opened the office in January 2018 with three partners from Dentons.

Two of Squire's Washington, D.C., lobbyists are affiliated with the office—former Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Georgia), who joined in 2015, and Meg Gilley, who'd been on Kingston's staff when he was in Congress.

Florida-based Akerman (No. 88) has grown to 15 lawyers in Atlanta after opening the office in September 2018. A year later, in September 2019, Akerman took a full floor of space at 999 Peachtree St. N.E. in Midtown to accommodate further growth.

Philadelphia's Fox Rothschild (No. 69) gained an 18-lawyer Atlanta office when it acquired North Carolina-based Smith Moore Leatherwood in November 2018. Since then, the office has grown to 23 lawyers.

Largest Offices

Atlanta's homegrown firms still make up the majority of the city's largest law offices by head count, including several locally headquartered firms that aren't in the Am Law ranking.

With 350 lawyers in its Atlanta headquarters, King & Spalding (No. 21) is the largest firm in the city, followed closely by Alston & Bird (No. 51) with about 330, according to ALM's most recent head count numbers.

Troutman Sanders (No. 70) is next, with about 200 lawyers locally, followed by Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton (No. 78) and Eversheds Sutherland, which each have about 170.

The American Lawyer deemed Eversheds Sutherland a global firm after Atlanta-based Sutherland Asbill & Brennan combined in 2017 with the U.K.'s Eversheds. Consequently, Eversheds Sutherland is ranked in the Global 100 (at No. 34), instead of the U.S. Am Law rankings.

The city's locally based Second Hundred firms with more than 100 lawyers are Morris Manning & Martin (No. 172), Smith Gambrell & Russell (No. 181) and Arnall Golden Gregory (No. 190).

Of the plethora of Am Law firms now in the local legal market, only three headquartered elsewhere have more than 100 lawyers: Jones Day (No. 10) with about 135 lawyers, Greenberg Traurig (No. 14) with about 110 lawyers, and Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough (No. 68) with 145 lawyers.

The other firms in Atlanta with above 100 lawyers are midsize and locally based. General practice firm Taylor English Duma has about 165 lawyers. Three others that predominantly handle litigation defense round out the list: Swift, Currie, McGhee & Hiers with 155 lawyers, Drew Eckl & Farnham with 115 and Hall Booth Smith with about 110.

(Below are charts of Atlanta Firm Financials data.)