My friends at The American Lawyer went live this week with their annual Am Law 100 list of the nation's largest law firms measured by gross revenues, as well as all the other rankings based on various ways they slice and dice the data to suss out firms' profitability and revenue-generating capacities. You can find all the rankings as well as thoughtful analysis from my colleagues on our business of law desk on the Am Law 100 landing page. But this morning let me direct you to two articles in particular—one by Patrick Smith summing up 2022 returns and another by Dan Roe asking whether continued rate increases can help offset rising expenses for firms.

Let's start with Patrick's summary of the year that was. He writes that the industry was profoundly shaped by a quartet of factors he dubbed "not quite the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse." They were confounding factors all the same: "Inflation. Recession. War. Interest rate hikes." Here's how Patrick summed up the financial returns last year: