T14 US Law Firms

We introduced the T14 US Law Firms, a designation for the fourteen firms that anchor the very top of the American legal market. The branding borrows from the most famous use of the term "T14" in American legal circles, the T14 US Law Schools, a long-standing and remarkably stable grouping of elite institutions such as Yale, Harvard and Stanford. We apply the same logic here: rather than chasing the Am Law 100 or Global 200 rankings that shuffle every year on small movements in revenue, the T14 Law Firms US settles on a durable shortlist of the firms whose history, prestige and influence over the practice of law place them in a tier of their own.

The list spans the storied nineteenth-century Wall Street institutions that built the playbook for modern corporate law, several of which are still informally known as "white shoe" firms after a style of shoe popular at Ivy League schools in the 1950s, much as the UK has its Magic Circle. It also includes the litigation and M&A boutiques that built outsized reputations on a fraction of the headcount of their full-service rivals, and the modern, private-equity-driven powerhouses whose revenues now dwarf every other firm on earth. It is worth noting that this is an unusually turbulent moment for the American legal market: partner pay has exploded at the very top of the profession, several long-standing lockstep firms have abandoned single-tier partnerships in just the last two or three years, and a handful of T14 members struck deals with the Trump administration in 2025 to avoid punitive executive orders, a development that continues to generate debate within the profession. This list captures a snapshot of that moment as much as it does a settled hierarchy. Below, we introduce each of the T14 Law Firms US in turn.

Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld

Akin Gump was founded in Dallas in 1945 by Robert Strauss, who would go on to chair the Democratic National Committee and serve as a US ambassador, and Richard Gump. The firm grew through a series of name changes before settling on its current form and is now headquartered in Washington, D.C., with a particularly large Texas presence across five offices. Akin Gump employs around 900 to 1,000 lawyers and reported gross revenue of roughly $1.5 billion for 2024, placing it 38th on the Am Law 200. What sets the firm apart from most of its peers on this list is its lobbying and public policy practice, one of the largest and most bipartisan in Washington, staffed by more than 75 lawyers and professionals, including several former members of Congress and senior government officials. Beyond government relations, Akin Gump is particularly well regarded for bankruptcy and restructuring, energy, government contracts and white-collar defence, advising clients ranging from Fortune 500 companies to foreign governments.

Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton

Cleary Gottlieb was founded in 1946 when six partners, including future federal judge Henry Friendly, left the old-line firm Root, Clark, Buckner & Howland to start their own practice. It was an early mover internationally, opening in Paris in 1949 and Brussels in 1960, well before most American firms ventured abroad, and today operates from around 16 offices spanning major financial centers in Europe, Asia and Latin America. The firm employs roughly 1,200 lawyers and reported revenue in the region of $2 billion, ranking among the top 35 firms in the country by gross revenue. Cleary built its reputation on sovereign and cross-border work, including the largest sovereign debt restructurings in history for Greece and Argentina, alongside leading practices in banking and finance, antitrust and M&A. Long known for a strict lockstep compensation system, the firm has recently begun offering eye-catching lateral packages of up to $20 million and introduced a nonequity partner tier, with Jeffrey Karpf taking over as managing partner in January 2026.

Cravath, Swaine & Moore

Cravath's roots trace back to 1819, when Richard M. Blatchford opened a solo law practice in Manhattan, though the firm's modern identity was forged in the early twentieth century when Paul D. Cravath devised the Cravath System, a model of hiring top law graduates, training them through structured rotations and promoting almost exclusively from within. That system, including its lockstep compensation, was copied by white-shoe firms across the country for the next century. Cravath has deliberately stayed small, with around 500 lawyers split between its New York headquarters and offices in London and Washington, D.C., and reported gross revenue of roughly $1.2 billion in 2024, with profits per partner near $6.85 million. In 2021 the firm broke with decades of pure lockstep pay and later created a salaried, nonequity partner tier, changes its leadership has described as necessary to retain top performers. Cravath remains best known for mergers and acquisitions, antitrust and high-stakes litigation, having represented IBM through a 13-year antitrust battle and a roster of blue-chip clients dating back to the nineteenth century.

Davis Polk & Wardwell

Davis Polk was founded in 1849 by a 21-year-old lawyer named Francis N. Bangs and counts among the original Wall Street white shoe firms; nineteenth-century partner Francis Stetson helped J.P. Morgan build out General Electric, and Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase remain clients to this day. The firm operates from ten offices, including New York, Washington, D.C., Menlo Park, London, Madrid, Hong Kong and Tokyo, and employs around 1,300 lawyers. It posted a record 2024, with revenue surging 25% to $2.54 billion and profit per equity partner jumping 26% to $7.8 million, among the highest figures of any law firm in the world. Davis Polk remains an all-equity partnership, with every partner holding a genuine stake in the firm, though it has recently moved away from pure lockstep toward a more performance-sensitive model. The firm is best known for capital markets, where it has long been considered a market leader, alongside M&A, financial regulation and restructuring; it advised the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve during the 2008 financial crisis and currently leads Purdue Pharma's bankruptcy proceedings.

Debevoise & Plimpton

Debevoise & Plimpton was founded in 1931 by Eli Whitney Debevoise, a descendant of the cotton gin inventor, and William E. Stevenson, an Olympic gold medalist, with Francis T.P. Plimpton, father of writer George Plimpton, joining the masthead two years later. Unusually for a major Wall Street firm, its first overseas office was Paris, opened in 1964, well ahead of London, which followed in 1989 and remains the firm's second-largest office today. Debevoise employs around 900 to 1,000 lawyers across nine or ten offices and reported revenue of roughly $1.8 billion, ranking 35th on the Am Law 200. The firm is particularly well known for private equity, the insurance sector, international arbitration, and white-collar defence and investigations, having represented clients including members of the Sackler family in the Purdue Pharma opioid litigation. Debevoise was one of the last major firms to maintain a single-tier, lockstep partnership, a tradition it finally ended in June 2025 when it introduced a nonequity partner tier.

Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher

Gibson Dunn traces its founding to 1890 in Los Angeles, where John D. Bicknell and Walter Trask set up practice before merging in 1903 with the firm of former city attorneys William Ellsworth Dunn and Albert Crutcher to form what was then the largest law firm in the city. Today the firm has grown to roughly 2,000 lawyers across more than 20 offices worldwide and posted gross revenue exceeding $4.2 billion for 2025, an increase of around 18% that pushed it into the world's top five firms by revenue. Under chair and managing partner Barbara Becker, who relocated from New York to London in 2025 to drive the firm's European push, Gibson Dunn has notched nearly three decades of consecutive revenue growth and built a rapidly expanding London office through aggressive lateral hiring from Magic Circle rivals. The firm is best known for high-stakes litigation, having been named Litigation Department of the Year by The American Lawyer four times, alongside leading practices in white-collar defence, appellate and constitutional law, private equity and M&A.

Kirkland & Ellis

Kirkland & Ellis was founded in Chicago in 1909 by Stuart G. Shepard and Robert R. McCormick, the future publisher of the Chicago Tribune, with Weymouth Kirkland and Howard Ellis joining a few years later and eventually giving the firm its name. From a relatively modest Chicago practice, Kirkland has grown into the largest law firm in the world by revenue, employing more than 4,200 lawyers globally. In 2025 it became the first law firm in history to cross $10 billion in annual revenue, posting $10.56 billion, up 20% year on year, with average profit per equity partner reaching a record $11.1 million. Kirkland popularised the nonequity partner tier now used across much of Big Law, helping it scale its headcount while concentrating profits among a relatively stable group of equity partners. The firm is the dominant name in private equity and leveraged buyouts, and also leads in big-ticket M&A, restructuring and complex litigation. Its alumni include US Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and former attorneys general William Barr and Robert Bork.

Latham & Watkins

Latham & Watkins was founded in Los Angeles in January 1934 by Dana Latham, a tax lawyer who later served as Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, and Paul Watkins, a labor lawyer. The firm grew slowly for decades before transforming into a corporate, finance and private equity powerhouse, and today employs more than 3,500 lawyers across roughly 30 offices in 14 countries, making it the second-highest-grossing law firm in the world. For 2025, Latham reported record global revenue of $8.3 billion, an increase of nearly 19%, with profit per equity partner rising to $8.65 million. Its London office, the largest of any US firm in the City, crossed $1 billion in revenue for the first time in 2025, a milestone shared only with Kirkland & Ellis among American firms. Latham is best known for mergers and acquisitions, private equity, capital markets, banking and finance, and a substantial energy and infrastructure practice, and like several other firms on this list, agreed in 2025 to commit significant pro bono resources to causes favoured by the Trump administration in order to avoid a punitive executive order.

Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison

Paul, Weiss traces its origins to a general commercial practice started in New York in 1875, taking its modern shape after several mergers, including the 1946 addition of Lloyd K. Garrison and Randolph Paul, and was historically known as a litigation firm before pivoting decisively toward corporate work under chairman Brad Karp, who has led the firm since 2008. Today Paul, Weiss employs more than 1,000 lawyers across offices including Washington, D.C., London, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Toronto, and posted 2024 revenue of $2.63 billion, a 32% increase, with profit per equity partner reaching $7.5 million. The firm is a leading adviser on large public M&A and private equity transactions, having counselled Chevron on its $53 billion acquisition of Hess and advised on the $21 billion WWE-UFC merger. In March 2025, Paul, Weiss became the first major firm to reach an agreement with the Trump administration over an executive order targeting the firm, a decision that prompted the departure of several senior litigation partners and remains a point of debate within the legal profession.

Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom

Skadden was founded on April Fools' Day, 1948, by Marshall Skadden, John Slate and Les Arps, with Joseph Flom joining soon after as the firm's first associate and going on to build it into a dominant force in mergers and acquisitions. Skadden pioneered hostile-takeover advisory work in the 1970s and 1980s, advising on landmark deals such as the 1989 takeover of RJR Nabisco, and in 2015 became the first law firm to handle more than $1 trillion in global M&A in a single year. The firm now employs around 1,700 to 1,800 lawyers across some 21 offices, eight of them in the United States, and reported gross revenue of roughly $3.6 billion, placing it among the top five highest-grossing firms in the world. Beyond M&A, where it advised on Mars's $36 billion acquisition of Kellanova and Microsoft's $75 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard, Skadden is also highly regarded for litigation, antitrust, capital markets and tax, and has consistently ranked at the top of Vault's M&A rankings for decades.

Simpson Thacher & Bartlett

Simpson Thacher was founded on New Year's Day 1884 in New York by three former law clerks, John Woodruff Simpson, Thomas Thacher and William Milo Barnum, with the firm taking its current name in 1904 after Philip Bartlett joined the masthead. Built on landmark work for clients such as General Electric in its early years, the firm is today regarded as the world's leading legal adviser in private equity, having represented sponsors in the five largest leveraged acquisitions ever completed, including KKR's 1988 buyout of RJR Nabisco, the deal immortalised in Barbarians at the Gate. Simpson Thacher employs close to 2,000 lawyers across roughly 13 to 15 offices, having recently opened in Boston and Luxembourg and announced plans for Singapore, and for 2025 reported global revenue of $3.55 billion, up 22.5% and breaking through the $3 billion mark for the first time, with profit per equity partner climbing to around $8.6 million. Alongside private equity, the firm is known for M&A, capital markets and litigation, and advised the underwriters on Google's landmark 2004 IPO.

Sullivan & Cromwell

Sullivan & Cromwell was founded in 1879 by Algernon Sydney Sullivan and William Nelson Cromwell, the latter credited with developing the modern holding-company structure, and the firm went on to advise J.P. Morgan on the creation of Edison General Electric and the formation of U.S. Steel around the turn of the twentieth century. Known for a conservative, generalist training model and historically sparing use of lateral hires, Sullivan & Cromwell employs roughly 850 to 1,000 lawyers across 13 offices in the Americas, Europe, Asia and Australia, and reported 2024 revenue of around $2.05 to $2.3 billion, with profit per equity partner at $6.74 million, figures that place it among the most profitable law firms in the world relative to its size. The firm remains the dominant adviser to global financial institutions, having worked on every one of the six largest recent US bank mergers, alongside a leading M&A and capital markets practice; it advised on the $250 billion SpaceX-xAI merger, the largest deal involving a private target in history, and has more recently been building out a private capital practice in London to compete more directly with Kirkland and Paul, Weiss.

Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz

Wachtell Lipton was founded in 1965 by four NYU law school classmates, Herbert Wachtell, Martin Lipton, Leonard Rosen and George Katz, at a time when established white-shoe firms were reluctant to hire Jewish lawyers. Lipton went on to invent the "poison pill" takeover defence in the early 1980s, and the firm built its entire model around that insight: rather than chasing scale, Wachtell takes on only the largest and most consequential M&A mandates, bills many of them on a transaction basis rather than by the hour, and operates from a single Manhattan office with no other locations anywhere in the world. With roughly 270 lawyers, it is by far the smallest firm on this list, yet for 2025 it reported the highest profit per equity partner of any law firm in America, $12.15 million, alongside the highest revenue per lawyer in the industry, on a profit margin reported to be around 78%. Wachtell has held the top spot in profit per partner for all but a handful of years over the past quarter-century, and its lawyers act on both sides of takeover battles for clients including AT&T, Pfizer and JPMorgan Chase.

Weil, Gotshal & Manges

Weil, Gotshal & Manges was founded in New York in 1931 by Frank Weil, Sylvan Gotshal and Horace Manges, and has been headquartered in the General Motors Building overlooking Central Park since 1968. The firm built its reputation through the 1990s and 2000s on a market-leading restructuring practice, serving as debtors' counsel in six of the ten largest bankruptcy filings in US history, including Lehman Brothers, General Motors, Enron and WorldCom, alongside a longstanding private equity practice serving clients such as Advent, Bain Capital and Ardian. Weil employs around 1,100 to 1,200 lawyers across offices in North America, Europe and Asia, having opened new bases in Los Angeles and San Francisco in 2024, and reported revenue of just over $2 billion for 2025, with profit per equity partner at $5.3 million. While still firmly inside the American legal elite, Weil's growth has lagged some of its faster-moving Wall Street peers in recent years, prompting a wave of private equity lateral hiring in 2025 and a leadership transition aimed at re-accelerating the firm's pace of growth.

Taken together, the T14 Law Firms US trace an unbroken line from the founding of Wall Street's earliest corporate practices in the nineteenth century through to the private-equity-fueled mega-firms of today. Several of the oldest names on the list, Cravath, Davis Polk, Sullivan & Cromwell and Simpson Thacher among them, still trade on relationships with clients first won well over a century ago, while Kirkland and Latham have rewritten the industry's scale in barely two decades. What unites all fourteen, despite enormous differences in size, structure and growth strategy, is an unmatched record of handling the largest and most consequential transactions, disputes and policy matters in American business, and it is this combination of history, profitability and influence that earns each of them a place in the T14 US Law Firms.