The NYLJ 100 ranks the 100 largest firms by number of lawyers in the state of New York. (Attorney numbers for the public law offices of the Corporation Counsel, attorney general and U.S. and district attorneys are listed in separate charts.) Every private law office in the state is considered, irrespective of where the firm is headquartered or where it claims a home office. Non-U.S.-based law firms are considered equally with domestic U.S. firms; the sole criterion for inclusion in the NYLJ 100 is the size of a firm's New York state presence.

Law offices are ranked by the total number of permanent, full-time-equivalent attorneys (partners plus associates plus “other attorneys”—staff attorneys, of counsel, etc.); where a firm has more than one office in New York state, the attorney totals for each office are added together to arrive at one statewide total. In the case of a tie between or among firms, they are ranked equally and listed alphabetically.

The NYLJ 100 is prepared from two primary sources: data obtained through the annual NLJ 500 survey conducted by The National Law Journal, an affiliate of the New York Law Journal, and the New York Law Journal's own outreach to firms that do not fall within the scope of the NLJ's survey. All data are average full-time equivalent numbers for the period from Jan. 1 through Dec. 31, 2018. Lawyer counts do not include contract or temporary attorneys.

Because attorney numbers are submitted in full-time equivalent terms, in some cases, due to rounding, numbers are slightly higher or lower than the figures submitted by the firms. Numbers reported to the NLJ are the numbers used to prepare this chart. Where a firm did not respond to the NLJ survey, its figures were estimated based on data from affiliate RivalEdge—which tracks attorney lateral movement—as of Dec. 31, 2018, reduced by 5% to estimate average FTE lawyers for the full calendar year.