Firm Profiles

For much of the last century, Ropes & Gray was known primarily as a top–tier Boston law firm. But a pair of high–profile mergers during the past ten years has greatly expanded the firm’s reach and its expertise. A 2003 merger with Reboul, MacMurray, Hewitt & Maynard boosted Ropes’s private equity practice, while the 2005 acquisition of Fish & Neave made Ropes a major player in intellectual property. The mergers also gave the firm a major presence in New York City, and significantly added to its attorney rolls, now more than 900 (including 262 equity partners), and to its coffers, with just under $823 million in gross revenue. (Ropes & Gray ranked twenty–seventh on the 2011 Am Law 100).

Other strong points for the firm, which is spread out over ten domestic and international offices, include securities litigation, health law, labor and employment, and tax and benefits. And Ropes’s chair, R. Bradford Malt, does all the tax planning for Mitt Romney, whose former company, Bain Capital, is a major Ropes & Gray client. The firm represented Bain in its $26 billion acquisition of Clear Channel Communications in 2008, its $3.5 billion purchase of The Weather Channel in 2008, and a $1.8 billion transaction for Gymboree Corporation in 2010.

Yet even with all its recent growth, Ropes remains a place where lawyers aren’t continuously monitoring their blood pressure: The firm ranked fifth on The American Lawyer’s 2011 Midlevel Associates Survey and eighth on the 2010 tally. Ropes’s diversity score put in the upper quarter of Am Law 200 firms in 2011 (about 15 percent of the firm’s lawyers are minorities), and it ranked nineteenth on the 2011 A–List, which factors in revenues per lawyer, pro bono, diversity, and associate satisfaction.

Postmerger, Ropes also proved itself well positioned to ride out the recession. While it did cut about 10 percent of its nonlawyer staff (just over 100 positions), the attorney roster actually increased during the crisis, as did the firm’s operating income. Overall, Ropes fared better than many of its peers, placing eleventh (of 84 firms) on The American Lawyer’s Recession Performance Index. Between 2007 and 2009, Ropes saw its gross revenue increase by a compound annual growth rate of 4 percent, its lawyer roster grow by a compounded annual growth rate of 9 percent, and profits per partner increase by 3 percent. Not too shabby for a firm that has seen a lot of new challenges—and a lot of new faces—in recent years.

—Updated as of 1/1/12