Correction, 5/14/2012: DLA Piper was erroneously excluded from this Litigation Department of the Year data analysis. If the firm had been included in the study, DLA would rank first among biggest litigation departments by number of lawyers, with 1500 litigators, and Jones Day would rank second.
Legal industry mavens have long assumed that most of a successful U.S. law firm’s revenue derives from corporate work, with only a minority from litigation. But there hasn’t been a lot of hard data to back up this assumption. Our analysis of self-reported litigation revenues for a broad swath of elite firms suggests that that model is no longer typical. Arguably, it’s also no longer ideal.
