Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz continues to lead our Value Per Lawyer (VPL) rankings. The firm has held the top slot each year since this metric was introduced six years ago.

A firm’s VPL is its Compensation–All Partners (CAP) divided by its head count. The metric is intended to calculate how much, on average, each of a firm’s lawyers contributes to total partner compensation. We express this two ways: as a dollar amount and as the number of lawyers needed to generate $10 million in partner compensation. At Wachtell, for instance, each lawyer contributes an average of $1.6 million to partner compensation, and it takes an average of 6.25 lawyers to generate $10 million.

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