Our new survey has revealed China’s leading law firms to be utterly gigantic organizations when it comes to the number of attorneys they employ, but surprisingly small in terms of the revenue they generate.
The Asia 100, published this month by The American Lawyer supplement The Asian Lawyer, includes new financial information on the country’s 25 largest law firms by lawyer head count. The firms collectively employ just under 22,000 attorneys, and they include eight individual firms with more than 1,000 lawyers each. The largest, Beijing-based Yingke, boasts a staggering 4,153 attorneys, making it the world’s second-largest firm during the survey period—just 200 lawyers smaller than Baker & McKenzie. But despite its vast scale, Yingke generated a relatively meager $146 million in revenue in the fiscal year ended Dec. 31, 2014, at a revenue per lawyer of just $35,000—the smallest RPL of the Chinese firms surveyed.
