Firm Profiles

They took off with Los Angeles, three middle–aged lawyers who opened up shop in 1951, covering the core California legal food groups: employment, real estate, and litigation. They added corporate and tax along the way and today Paul Hastings’s 900 lawyers are spread across 18 offices on three continents. They do well—profits per partner hover around $2 million—and they do good. Recent years have seen the firm dramatically improve in key noneconomic measures. Associate satisfaction—which had ranked 103rd on The American Lawyer’s 2008 Midlevel Associates Survey—ranked second on our 2010 tally and sixth in 2011. Meanwhile, Paul Hastings has morphed into an industry leader in pro bono, placing second of 200 firms on our 2011 Pro Bono report (with attorneys averaging a stratospheric 130 hours of nonpaying work). Diversity ranks well above average, too: Nearly 20 percent of the firm’s U.S. attorneys are minorities. Paul Hastings was named to The American Lawyer’s A–List—which looks at financial and nonfinancial metrics to identify the country’s most elite firms—in 2010 and 2011.

They haven’t abandoned their roots. Paul Hastings was named The American Lawyer’s Labor and Employment Litigation Department of the Year in 2010 and 2004, and was a finalist for the title in 2006 and 2008 (the contest is held every two years). It’s a bi–coastal real estate power, having absorbed an Am Law Second Hundred firm in 2000 with a lucrative New York practice. And it continues to build on its early push into the Asia–Pacific region, opening a Tokyo office in 1988 and expanding its footprint to Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Beijing in the early 2000s. Paul Hastings did lay off several dozen associates during the recession, but didn’t see the dramatic declines in revenues and profitability that many of its peers did.

—Updated as of 1/1/12