Firm Profiles

While its practice areas include everything you’d expect at a major market law firm—from litigation and antitrust to corporate real estate and intellectual property—Arnold & Porter’s trump card has always been its status as an “insider” among the Washington, D.C., law firms. Its three founders (among them Abe Fortas, who would later become a U.S. Supreme Court justice and Thurman Arnold, the legal polymath—professor, antitrust crusdader, federal appeals court judge) had all been high–ranking officials during the New Deal era. That tradition continues with more than 80 of the firm’s partners having served in government positions within the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the U.S.Department of Justice, and even Congress. Arnold & Porter was D.C.’s second–largest firm by lawyer head count in 2011 (roughly 60 percent of the firm’s lawyers work out of Washington), and the firm’s strengths have long included its regulatory, policy, and appellate work.

Arnold & Porter has been a fairly regular presence on The American Lawyer’s A–List, which tracks the top 20 U.S. firms according to revenue per lawyer, diversity, pro bono work, and associate satisfaction. But while the firm ranked in the top ten on that list in 2008 and 2009, it dropped to seventeenth in 2010 and fell off entirely in 2011. One reason might be slumping morale among associates: Arnold & Porter ranked 109th of 126 firms on The American Lawyer’s 2011 Midlevel Associates Survey (it was 106th of 137 firms in 2010).

Like some of its fellow D.C. firms, Arnold & Porter has one of the most active pro bono practices among The Am Law 100, ranking fourteenth in 2011, with attorneys averaging just over 111 hours of pro bono work. Diversity has long been another of the firm’s strong suits. Indeed, Arnold & Porter was the first major D.C. firm to name an African American partner, and by 2011 nearly 20 percent of its U.S. attorneys identified themselves as a minority (including almost 10 percent of the firm’s partners).

—Updated as of 1/1/12