BigLaw’s Litigation Gold Rush: When Even Deal Shops Start Hiring Courtroom Warriors
Norma Harris, LawFuel contributing writer
The masters of the M&A universe are discovering what the rest of us have known all along – that litigation pays, and it doesn’t evaporate when the dealmakers take a sabbatical.
Fresh data from Bloomberg Law reveals that some of the legal industry’s most ludicrously profitable firms, the ones that built fortunes advising private equity titans, are now scrambling to stockpile litigators like they’re preparing for the apocalypse.
Four heavyweights – Kirkland & Ellis, Paul Weiss, Davis Polk, and Paul Hastings – have inflated their litigation benches by at least 22 percnt since early 2024. (The next firms filling out the top 10 in the list are Sheppard Mullin, Squire Patton Boggs, Covington & Burling, Alston & Bird, Debevoise & Plimpton and Morgan Lewis). It is noteworthy that these are firms that climbed to the top of the profitability charts primarily by perfecting the art of billing seven figures for corporate transactions, not courtroom combat.
“We did not anticipate that litigation would be the driving factor from a demand standpoint this year,” said Owen Burman, a senior consultant at Wells Fargo’s legal banking group.
The Deals Binge Meets Its Hangover
The numbers tell a rather sobering story for the transaction junkies. While BigLaw spent the better part of a decade building empires servicing private equity clients and their deal orgies, the music has stopped. The pandemic-era boom that saw transactions hitting volume records and firms frantically hired anyone with a pulse and a law degree, now looks like ancient history.
Despite the occasional mega-deal that generates breathless headlines, overall transaction volume remains stubbornly stagnant.
Private equity, that supposed engine of dealmaking prosperity, has struggled to offload portfolio companies at anything resembling historical rates. Global private equity deals in 2023 and 2024 remained below levels not seen since 2018, according to Bloomberg data.
Meanwhile, litigation has become the most consistent driver of lawyer demand since at least 2023, according to Thomson Reuters Institute data.
The courtroom practice notched 10 consecutive quarters of year-over-year growth in billable hours, averaging 2.8 percent demand growth per quarter. M&A work, by contrast, declined by an average of 1.8 percent.
Kirkland’s Mass Tort Pivot
Kirkland, one of LawFuel’s most prestigious law firms, whose litigator headcount exploded by nearly a third since last year and has made a conspicuous push into mass torts and products liability defense.
The firm snagged more than 20 litigators, including 12 partners, from King & Spalding in May 2025, specifically to bolster these capabilities. In total, Kirkland added over 100 litigators in 2025 alone while its litigation team won 12 significant trials during the same period.
“The message is clear: For high-end, bet-the-company litigation, the demands are increasing,” said Michael Carlinsky, co-managing partner of Quinn Emanuel, the litigation-only shop that brought in nearly $2.5 billion in revenue last year.
Quinn Emanuel ranked as the country’s 18th largest firm by revenue, up 10 spots over three years—a trajectory that suggests the courtroom crowd is having the last laugh.
The Profitability Myth
Despite the aggressive moves by high-profit firms, BigLaw as a group still hasn’t grown litigation departments to their pre-pandemic size. Litigators constituted more than 30 percent of lawyers at the most profitable firms in 2019, according to Citi Global Wealth’s Law Firm Group. That figure plummeted to 27.2 percent in 2022 before recovering slightly to 28.8 percent in 2024.
The conventional wisdom, that litigation is simply less profitable than corporate practices, turns out to be rubbish.
Gretta Rusanow, (pictured) head of advisory services at the Citi law firm group, found that firms with the second-highest concentration of litigators were also the second-most profitable. They accomplished this by maintaining high productivity and realization rates, effectively demolishing the critique that litigation practices collect a lower share of their bills.
“It bucks the convention that having a heavy dependence on litigation is a drag on your profitability,” Rusanow said.
The Economics of Balance
Paul Hastings chair Frank Lopez articulated what should be obvious to anyone who’s taken a basic business course: diversification matters. At his firm, litigation revenue has surged 60 percent over four years.
“We really do have this focus on diversification, and taking a portfolio approach to our practices,” Lopez said. “In a softer market, litigation is either cycle agnostic or countercyclical. It’s incredibly stabilizing. And even in a good market, it’s important for us to drive revenue.”
The economics at Paul Hastings tell the tale: litigation work is just as profitable as corporate transactions. “The litigation department isn’t supporting the corporate department or vice versa,” Lopez emphasized. “The economics are consistent across the board.”
First-Year Feeding Frenzy
The country’s most profitable firms are also leading the charge in recruiting first-year litigation associates.
Sullivan & Cromwell, Simpson Thacher, Akin Gump, Ropes & Gray, and Skadden hired the largest first-year litigation classes as a percentage of their total litigation headcount. Six of the 10 firms leading this recruitment drive rank in the top 15 by profits per equity partner.
Sheppard Mullin, which grew its business trial litigation group by more than 17% through Q3 2024, has capitalized on rivals’ neglect of their litigation practices.
“One of the ways in which partners at firms feel they’re not supported is the firm is not hiring entry-level associates or appropriately staffing their offices,” said Sascha Henry, who co-leads the firm’s practice group. “Those are things we feel really strongly about and are committed to.”
Cooley’s Redemption Arc
Cooley LLP provides perhaps the most dramatic illustration of this pivot. The tech-heavy, West Coast firm suffered one of the worst hangovers from the pandemic deals binge, laying off 150 attorneys and staff at the end of 2022, primarily from transactional practices.
Yet the firm has methodically built up its litigation capabilities. Since 2019, Cooley has worked to balance its East Coast and West Coast litigation benches, now fielding about 100 litigators on each coast and picking up major Google legal work this year.
Ian Shapiro, chair of its global litigation group, made the strategic imperative clear: “At the very top of our firm, it’s a strategic imperative for us to have the greatest degree of balance possible between our corporate and transactional and litigation businesses”.
The Verdict
Forty of the top 50 US law firms by revenue reported litigation headcount growth, with an average 5.3 percent increase. The courtroom practice has proven itself mostly immune to the spikes and valleys that plague transactions work. When managed correctly, it delivers profitability that matches deals work, with considerably less exposure to economic cycles.
It is clear that the firms that ignored or underinvested in litigation are now paying the price in lateral recruitment costs and lost opportunities. Those that maintained robust litigation practices, or are building them now, are positioning themselves for stability in an increasingly volatile market.
One might even call it prudent risk management—though in BigLaw, that’s usually called “finally reading the room.”
