I guess it's the same whatever industry you work in, but it's amazing the extent to which professionals in all walks of life often assume that other countries operate on similar lines to their own national market. That is even more the case for UK lawyers' perception of how things work in the US legal profession thanks to shared language and history between the two countries. Yet looking at the annual breakdown from Corporate Counsel of who acts for America's largest companies, it's striking to a UK reader the extent to which the US is, well, another country, legally speaking.

If you were to draw up a similar list in the UK it would be dominated by a small group – certainly the top 50 practices in revenue terms would cast a very long shadow. In contrast, in the larger but also much more fragmented US market there are scores of relatively small regional outfits acting for major corporations, often on substantive matters. This, as you would expect, is particularly prevalent for labour, IP and torts and negligence matters but is also evident to a certain extent for corporate and commercial issues. The Wall Street elite may have a strong (though not unchallenged) grip on banking clients, but there's no magic circle-style monopoly at play on Main Street.

It is also striking how little connection there is between the perceived status of America's most prestigious law firms and the number of instructions they actually receive from the upper reaches of corporate America. In Europe there is still some lingering awe of brands like Sullivan & Cromwell, Cravath and Davis Polk, but these firms act for a relatively small proportion of sprawling, state-bound corporate America. The Corporate Counsel research, which covers advisers to Fortune 100 companies, also underlines how paltry the inroads made by European law firms have been stateside, though that's hardly a shock.

But then European lawyers can easily forget that large law firms remain a minority in the US legal market. In the UK, the top 50 firms employ roughly a third of the solicitors in the country. In the US the top 100 law firms employ less than 10% of the country's attorneys. Maybe India is a better comparison to America's legal market than the UK.

What lessons can be learned for European lawyers? For one, you can't help wondering if firms hoping to build valuable referral links (and maybe even a few European clients looking for new advisers) are giving enough focus to firms like Morgan Lewis, Jones Day and Greenberg Traurig. These are institutions whose brands haven't travelled that well internationally but, on the basis of Corporate Counsel's exhaustive research, don't get their due credit.

An observer of the UK legal market might also wonder why there isn't more mention of firms like Littler Mendelson, which is employment counsel to no less than 22 of America's largest companies. I suspect that despite decades of international expansion in legal services, Europe's law firms haven't begun to get their heads around the scale and range of the US legal market. Readers who want to know more should check out our US briefing in next week's edition of Legal Week.

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