Norma Harris, LawFuel contributing editor
While the rest of Big Law was still muttering about market uncertainty, Norton Rose Fulbright quietly had one of those years that makes equity partners smile into their morning flat white.
The firm racked up more than US$2.8 billion in global gross revenue for 2025 – a tidy 16% jump. But the real headline? Profits per equity partner shot up 27% to nearly US$2.1 million. You read that right. Nearly $2.1 million. Per partner. Per year.
The hero of the story? The Americans, of course. US revenue climbed more than 23% to US$1.2 billion, with US PEP leaping an even cheekier 32%.
“Virtually every practice at our firm had an up year,” global managing partner Jeff Cody (Dallas-based, naturally) told Bloomberg Law. Project finance, M&A, disputes – the usual suspects all fired on all cylinders. But the firm is also leaning hard into the shiny new thing: AI data-centre work, which Cody cheerfully calls “a big play.”
Exhibit A: Norton Rose lawyers sorted the ground lease for Crusoe Energy on OpenAI’s monstrous $500 billion Stargate project in Texas. Exhibit B: They helped Texas AG Ken Paxton extract a $1.4 billion settlement from Google and walked away with a cool $156.5 million in contingency fees for their trouble. Not a bad Tuesday.
Early last year the firm hit the brakes on US lateral hiring while President Trump was lobbing executive orders at Big Law. Once the dust settled, they floored it again – 12 new US partners already in 2026, on track for 25–30 by year-end. That’s more than double last year’s haul.
Across the pond (or the verein, technically), global manager partner Peter Scott highlighted cross-border wins like the Qualcomm matter in the UK. The firm also quietly integrated its Australia and EMEA arms last July, waved goodbye to its smaller South African practice, and is now laser-focused on keeping attrition stupidly low.
Cody’s take on retention? “Our folks get a lot of offers. They just don’t take them.”
Must be nice.
