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An increase in the partnership ranks prevented a substantial bump in gross revenue from translating into higher profits per partner at Perkins Coie last year, according to The American Lawyer's reporting.
Though the Seattle-based firm's gross revenue rose 11.1 percent to reach $608 million in 2012, profits per equity partner dropped 1 percent, to $1.015 million—a sharp departure from the 14 percent jump in profits Perkins Coie enjoyed in 2011.
Managing partner Robert Giles says the falloff in profits was a product of expansion efforts the firm has undertaken in recent years. "Growth costs money," Giles says. "We brought a lot of people in and started paying them before we started getting collections."
Perkins Coie's overall attorney head count rose 10 percent in 2012, to 823. After making 32 lateral hires, the firm has eight more equity partners and 25 more nonequity partners than it did in 2011. While most of the new arrivals joined with nonequity status, Giles says the firm isn't intentionally expanding those ranks. "We don't get too hung up on equity partner vs. nonequity partner," he says. "We just feel there are markets we can get larger in."
New York, where Perkins Coie opened a three-lawyer office in March 2011, is one of those markets. Located at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, the office is now home to 18 attorneys, including a four-lawyer, three-partner corporate trusts team that jumped over from Pryor Cashman last March. In July the firm took on an additional 25,000 square feet of space to accommodate the growing New York operation.
Perkins Coie also beefed up its Chicago location, adding two IP litigation partners from Loeb & Loeb, two private equity partners from K&L Gates, and two finance partners from O'Keefe Lyons & Hynes.
Giles says the firm's patent practice had a strong 2012 on both the litigation and prosecution fronts, with much of the work coming from such Pacific Northwest–based clients as Amazon Inc. and Nintendo of America Inc. He cites the firm's insurance coverage group—which has expanded in recent years via a series of lateral hires, including a five-lawyer, two-partner group that came over from Dickstein Shapiro in 2011 and a three-attorney, two-partner team that joined from now-defunct Howrey in 2010—as another top performer last year.
This report is part of The Am Law Daily’s early coverage of 2012 financial results of The Am Law 100/200. Click here to see an interactive chart comparing this firm's 2012 finances to those of other Am Law 100 and Second Hundred firms that The Am Law Daily and its sibling publications have reported on to date. Final rankings and full results for The Am Law 100 will be published in The American Lawyer’s 2013 issue and on AmericanLawyer.com. The Am Law Second Hundred will be published in the June issue.
