First Look at the 2006 AmLaw 100

The American Lawyer's famous AmLaw 100 has been out for about a week now, and it's time to release some preliminary number-crunching. I'll also have some more qualitatively analytic pieces in the next week or so, but here are the hot data dots for now:

• As widely reported, 11 firms broke the $1-billion revenue barrier
• 23 were over $750-million in revenue
• 49 were over $500-million in revenue
• The median firm's revenue was $487-million
• The average revenue was $567-million, reflecting the obvious skew at the left end of the curve.

Meanwhile, in terms of revenue growth in year over year terms (2006 vs. 2005), excluding a few firms with mega-contingency fees:

• The average growth was 11.60%
• Median was 11.75%

In chart form (click each chart to open a bigger version in a separate window):

As I said, these are only very preliminary looks from "Adam Smith, Esq." 

Coming soon I hope to have an analysis of the compound annual growth rate ("CAGR") for revenue per lawyer for the AmLaw 100 firms, as well as my commentary on the story " Is Shedding Partners the Right Way to Improve Profitability?"  My view of the latter, in a nutshell?  Wrong question.