Legal Practice – Page 41 – Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog

The Value of Trial Experience to a Young Lawyer

Post author:Emily Lonergan
Post published:June 18, 2013
Post category:Legal Practice Negotiation Public

As a new lawyer, I struggled to come up with blog topics. Being only two years out of law school, I don’t pretend to have near the amount of knowledge or experience as the frequent contributors and readers of this blog. I contemplated a post about the recent United States Supreme Court decision in Missouri v. McNeely, but Dean O’Hear would cover that topic in a much more eloquent and researched fashion. I then contemplated a post about the privacy implications regarding the recent news on the NSA collecting phone records (or even more recently—the criminal defendants demanding the records as exculpatory evidence). However, as a past student of Professor Boyden’s Law of Privacy class, I’m inclined to believe his post on that issue would make a much more interesting read. I finally decided on a topic that has monopolized my attention this Spring and Summer: jury trials. While a post on jury trials authored by Professor Blinka would likely be deemed so sage as to be cited by the Wisconsin Supreme Court, I’ll tackle the area from what I’ve learned as a new lawyer.

America’s Largest Law Firms Keep Getting Larger

Post author:J. Gordon Hylton
Post published:June 13, 2013
Post category:Legal Practice Public

Even with a seemingly endless stream of stories in the lawyer press about lay-offs at large corporate firms, the largest law firms in the United States continue to grow larger and larger.

In the National Law Journal’s recently released list of the 350 largest law firms in the United States, two Chicago-based law firms have broken through the 4000 lawyer barrier. DLA Piper leads the list with 4036 lawyers while Baker and McKenzie is close behind at 4004.

There is a considerable gap between these two firms and the next largest firm, although three law firms–Jones Day (New York), Hogan Lovells (Washington, D.C.), and Latham & Watkins–each have more than 2000 attorneys. An additional 17 firms had more than 1000.

In spite of the leap upward by DLA Piper and Baker and McKenzie, the overall growth of the top 350 was quite sluggish with only a 1.1% increase in total size since 2011. (The 2013 ranking are based on 2012 employment numbers.) Nine of the 21 largest firms are actually smaller now than a year ago and a 10th firm is exactly the same size. DLA Piper, in contrast, grew by 7.7% as it added 290 additional lawyers. However, much of its growth game through the acquisition of other law firms including firms in France and Australia.

Six Milwaukee firms made the list of 350. The top five combined declined by a single lawyer over the last year. The six are, with their national ranking:

31. Foley and Lardner (872 lawyers, down 2 from the previous year)

107. Quarles & Brady (413, same as the previous year)

202. Reinhart Boerner Van Deuren (203, up 1 lawyer)

207. Michael Best & Friedrich (198, up 2 lawyers)

233. Godfrey & Kahn (170, down 2 lawyers)

309. (5-way tie) Whyte Hirshboeck Dudek (130 lawyers, new to the list)

Even when the economy is sluggish, the dramatic growth in the size of corporate law firms, especially the largest firms, relentlessly continues. This phenomenon has been one of the most significant developments in the legal profession over the past four decades.

When I was in law school in the fall of 1976, I had an interview with the Nashville firm of Bass, Berry, and Sims. At the time, it was the largest law firm in the city of Nashville with a grand total of 17 lawyers. Today, the firm is still the largest law firm in Nashville, but it now has more than 200 lawyers (even though it did not choose to offer one of those positions to me).

I also remember, sometime around 1980, how amazed observers of the legal profession were that the Houston law firm of Fulbright & Jaworski (now Norton Rose Fulbright) had passed the 400 lawyer mark, something that had been unthinkable only a decade or two earlier. Now Piper has passed the 4000 lawyer mark.

Where this ends, nobody seems to know, but can the 10,000 lawyer firm be that far away? Of course, when this happens it will more likely be the result of a series of mergers rather than through entry level hiring.

New ABA Statistics Show that the Growth Rate of the Wisconsin Bar in the Last Ten Years Has Been Below Average

Post author:J. Gordon Hylton
Post published:June 13, 2013
Post category:Legal Practice Public Wisconsin Law & Legal System

According to new statistics posted on the American Bar Association website, the number of lawyers in Wisconsin grew from 13,813 in 2003 to 15,538 in 2013, an increase of 12%. For the country as a whole, the number of lawyers increased from 1.06 million in 2003 to 1.27 million a decade later, an increase of 20%.

The only year in which the number of lawyers in Wisconsin actually decreased was from 2007 to 2008, when the total fell by 113 lawyers, from 14,561 to 14,448.

The states with the largest percentage growth in the number of lawyers over the past ten years are:

Nevada +54%
Alabama +47%
Utah +36%
Arizona +42
Delaware +36%

In two states, the number of lawyers has actually declined since 2003: the Rhode Island total has dropped by 19% (from 5,135 to 4,173), while that for Massachusetts has fallen by 8%. Massachusetts actually hit its decade low total in 2007, while the bottom was reached in Rhode Island in 2009. In both states the total has increased in recent years.

The three states with the most slowly growing bars are Vermont +3%, Nebraska +4%, and Alaska +8%.

The largest total number of lawyers is in New York (166,317), followed by California (163,163), Texas (82,607), and Illinois (62,496). The smallest number is in North Dakota (1,560), followed by Wyoming (1,681), and South Dakota (1,905).