Firm Profiles

Perhaps it’s no surprise that Cleary’s Manhattan headquarters offers a stunning 360–degree view of the world around it. Almost from the time it was founded in 1946, Cleary has been looking outward. It was one of the first firms to expand into Europe, opening a Paris office in 1949, and has long tightly integrated its overseas operations with those within the United States. Today, more than one–third of Cleary’s roughly 1,200 lawyers are based in Europe, with dozens more in Latin America and Asia. Much of its billion–dollar–a–year revenue (a mark Cleary crossed for the first time on the 2011 Am Law 100 list) derives from its expertise in global matters, including international trade and regulatory work, capital markets, antitrust, and restructuring and bankruptcy.

Alone among the thousand–lawyer firms, Cleary maintains just two stateside offices, in New York and Washington, D.C. Each, however, is a formidable presence: New York is a center for the firm’s busy corporate and litigation practices; Washington is the hub for its antitrust and regulatory work. A perennial top finisher on the Am Law 100 list (ranking in the top 20 since 1986), Cleary has also been a highly profitable firm. It ranked third on that year’s Am Law Profitability Index, which looks at a firm’s ability to convert revenue into profits.

The success hasn’t come at too great a price, either. While long hours are the norm, Cleary is known as a relatively informal, collegial place (spurring that, perhaps, is a compensation system based solely on seniority). There is a lot of promotion from within—90 percent of Cleary’s partners started out as associates at the firm—and Cleary is one of the more diverse large firms around, ranking fourth on The American Lawyer’s 2011 Diversity Scorecard (28 percent of associates self–identify as a person of color and 8 percent as either lesbian or gay). Generally, the firm scores good marks from its junior lawyers, ranking eighteenth on The American Lawyer’s 2010 Midlevel Associates Survey (though this dropped to fifty–ninth in 2011).

While there have been some disappointments—after 18 years trying to boost an underperforming Japan office, the firm finally pulled the plug in 2006—Cleary’s formula has clearly been a winner.

—Updated as of 1/1/12