Today’s Recorder contains an article about 2010 revenues and profits at eight Northern California based law firms.  It also reports on interviews with some of the firms’ leaders about what they are expecting for the future. 

Read the whole thing here.  Notably, head count at six out of the eight firms dropped in 2010. 

One highlight:

“Extreme caution about hiring remains the rule – even at firms like Morrison & Foerster, where revenue per lawyer was up a healthy 6 percent. Chairman Keith Wetmore said MoFo’s biggest challenge was aligning head count with work levels. ‘We’re being very careful not to let groups hire ahead of demand,’ he said. ‘We’ve also managed costs and staff head count aggressively, not replacing people when they leave, restricting travel costs and revisiting our marketing and tech budgets.'”

The National Law Journal recently conducted a roundtable with 3 managing partners at large DC-based firms.  They talked about staffing, rates, client demands, lateral recruiting, the political landscape and the future of the legal business model.   A summary of the discussion appears here.   

You should read the whole thing, but a few highlights:

• IP litigation was unexpectedly slow in 2010, but is expected to increase in 2011
• things have stabilized, but not likely to get significantly better in 2011
• the expected increase in the government regulatory area did not materialize and the results of the mid-term elections suggest that it may never materialize
• no one is expecting layoffs and salaries and bonuses have been — and are expected to continue to be — unfrozen
• clients are expected to continue exerting pricing pressures; the billable hour will not disappear, but the use of alternative fee arrangements will continue to increase
• we can expect to see a continuing of the trend of increased merger activity and lateral movement by partners and practice groups to competitors 

Two commercial enterprises, U.S. News and Best Lawyers, have released a set of rankings of over 8,000 law firms.   Rather than assigning a numerical rank to each, they divide specific practice areas of firms into one of 3 tiers.  They actually assign each practice area both a local and a national tier ranking.  81 different practice areas are included in the rankings. 

The publishers claim to have surveyed more than 9,000 clients and just about the same number of attorneys. They also apparently factored in the 3.1 million individual attorney evaluations that the Best Lawyers enterprise compiled.  They also claim to have considered: attorney experience, number of clients, billing ranges, the number of matters, pro bono work, and diversity also counted.

This set of rankings follows the recent release of a similar commercial enterprise called Chambers Associate (published by Chambers and Partners).  These rankings and surveys, along with other more established ones like The Vault Reports Guide to America’s Top 100 Law Firms and the American Lawyer surveys — http://www.americanlawyer.com/ (see Surveys and Rankings section of the left side bar menu) ought to be viewed with a healthy amount of circumspection. 

In making you aware of this potential new research resource, we are not offering an endorsement of it nor are we intending to vouch for ts methods or conclusions.  We encourage you to examine its particular methodology and think critically about its conclusions — just as you would with any other survey or rankings list. 

Berkeley Law students can find other students’ prior summer evaluations (along with their contact information) in the b-Line (click on the “Summer Evaluations” shortcut from the b-Line homepage).