Firm Profiles

Don’t let Kramer Levin’s Am Law 100 rank fool you: While the firm generally places near the bottom of the list on revenue, it scores far higher—typically in the top 30—on profits per partner and average compensation per partner. Its partnership is a select group, too, numbering well under 100, which is relatively small for a top–tier New York firm.

Nor is Kramer one of those Manhattan firms that can trace its roots back to the Industrial Revolution. It was founded in 1968, and has been careful about its growth ever since, keeping to just one office for more than 30 years until it opened a Paris location in 1999. Yet another decade would pass until a third office, in Silicon Valley, opened in late 2011. And this isn’t a firm adding 100 lawyers a year, or, to the relief of many an associate during the recession, laying off 100 lawyers at a clip.

What Kramer has done, instead, is expand by bringing in relatively small groups of lateral hires. The Silicon Valley office—intended to bolster the firm’s intellectual property practice—got a jump start with the hiring of two IP partners from King & Spalding. In its main New York office, Kramer has, over the years, brought in groups with established practices in private equity, securitization, land use, and immigration practices. And it was the hiring of 20 lawyers who had practiced together for 20 years that got the firm’s Paris office off the ground.

Arthur Kramer, the firm’s name founder, was the brother of playwright Larry Kramer, the gay activist. According to The New York Times, Arthur, who died in 2008, was the inspiration for the character Ben Weeks in Larry’s play “The Normal Heart,” about the AIDS crisis. The firm has been very active in pro bono efforts on behalf of various gay and lesbian causes.

The firm has very busy antitrust, bankruptcy, hedge fund, private equity and real estate practices. Its two most widely known partners, Gary Naftalis and Barry Berke, specialize in white collar defense work.

Kramer is not one of the more diverse law firms among the top 100—minorities constituted less than 6 percent of the U.S. partnership in 2011—but it has a solid record on pro bono work. With lawyers averaging 64 hours of nonpaying work, Kramer finished fifty–fourth of 200 firms on The American Lawyer’s 2011 Pro Bono Report. Junior lawyers give the firm above average scores too, albeit sometimes just barely: Kramer finished sixty–first of 126 firms in 2011.

—Updated as of 1/1/12