Our value per lawyer metric demonstrates how much, on average, each of a firm’s lawyers contributes to total partner compensation. On average, value per lawyer for The Am Law 100 rose by 6.4 percent in 2014.
A firm’s VPL is its compensation-all partners divided by its lawyer count. We express it two ways: as a dollar amount and as the number of lawyers needed to generate $10 million in partner compensation. Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz had led this ranking since the metric’s inception in 2005. At that firm, each lawyer contributes an average of $1.7 million, and it takes an average of six lawyers to generate $10 million. For more details about VPL, see “ A Guide to Our Methodology.”
