February 25, 2011 3:45 PM

The Am Law 100: For Paul Weiss, No Credit Crisis Doldrums

Posted by David Bario

Editor's Note, 2/25/11, 6 p.m. -  A portion of the original story has been removed pending further reporting on Paul Weiss's total lawyer head count in 2010.

The picture for many Am Law 100 firms appears to have been mixed in 2010, with many experiencing flat revenues and--if they were lucky--modestly rising profits. But Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison broke free of the credit crisis doldrums with remarkable intensity last year, boosting average profits per equity partner 13 percent, to $3.03 million.

Gross revenue at Paul Weiss also rose in 2010, by 13 percent to $751 million. Average revenue per lawyer rose 20 percent to $1.06 million. (Editor's note: Following a change in our methodology for the 2011 Am Law 200, Paul Weiss's 2009 numbers have been recalculated to reflect a full-year head count. All year-over-year percentage changes are based on those recalculated numbers.)

"We had an extraordinary year across all of our primary practice areas," says firm chairman Brad Karp. In particular, says Karp, Paul Weiss's stable of big bank clients--including Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase, and UBS--kept the firm's litigators busy defending against lawsuits and regulatory challenges in the wake of the financial crisis. Standout litigation victories in 2010 included securing a jury verdict for Citigroup in Terra Firma's $7 billion case over the bank's role in Terra's 2007 EMI acquisition; winning three consecutive product liability jury trials for Pfizer over the pharmaceutical giant's hormone replacement therapy, Prempro; and picking up a $97 million contingency fee as part of an Alaska pension fund board's $500 million settlement with a Marsh & McLennan unit.

Karp says the firm's deal lawyers were burning the midnight oil as well, handling more multibillion-dollar transactions "than we have at any point in our firm's history." (Major Paul Weiss M&A clients include private equity and asset management firms Apollo Management, General Atlantic, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, and Oak Hill Capital Partners, and companies like ADP, Universal American, Time Warner
Cable, Western Coal, and Ericsson.)

The firm's lateral hires in 2010 included Mark Mendelsohn, who played a key role in transforming Foreign Corrupt Practices Act enforcement into a major priority for the Justice Department as Justice's top FCPA
lawyer until last year.

Looking ahead, the outlook is rosy for 2011 on both the litigation and deal fronts, Karp says. "We expect that work, and that level of activity, to continue to be quite robust throughout this year and likely beyond," he says.

 

• Click here for all our ongoing coverage of The Am Law 100.

This report is part of The Am Law Daily's ongoing Web coverage of 2010 financial results of The Am Law 100/200. Results are preliminary. Final rankings and full results for The Am Law 100 will be published in The American Lawyer's May 2011 issue and on AmericanLawyer.com. The Am Law Second Hundred will be published in the June issue.

Results for the 2010 fiscal year reflect a change in the survey methodology. Per-lawyer and per-partner results for 2010 are based on a full calendar year average FTE head count, while published results for previous years were, in most cases, based on an August 31 FTE head count. When possible, we have recalculated fiscal year 2009 numbers to reflect the change in head count and based percentages on those adjusted numbers.

The final published results of last year's Am Law 100 rankings are available here; Second Hundred results are available here.

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