The Am Law 100’s full 2026 figures are still months away. But the preliminary numbers are already rewriting the rulebook — and the conversation on r/BigLaw is predictably chaotic.
John Bowie LawFuel publisher
In the rarefied atmosphere where partners measure success in eight-figure payouts and associates measure it in how many weekends they haven’t seen since the bar exam, one number looms above all others: profit per equity partner, or PEP.
PEP is the metric that makes managing partners beam, headhunters salivate, and mid-level associates stare at their billable hour trackers with a particular brand of existential dread.
The 2026 Am Law 100 rankings — reflecting 2025 fiscal performance — haven’t been formally published yet. But early reports are already in, and if you thought the 2025 numbers were eye-watering, with 4.6 trillion (that’s ‘illion’ with a ‘T’) brace yourself.
Kirkland & Ellis has become the first law firm in history to crack $10 billion in annual revenue, posting $10.56 billion for 2025 — up 20% year-on-year.
PEP at the Chicago colossus hit $11.1 million, also up approximately 20%. Since 2020, Kirkland’s average partner profits have risen 80%. Let that arithmetic sink in for a moment. A Kirkland equity partner today earns roughly what a senior Magic Circle partner in London earns in four years.
The PEP-Talk Numbers
To understand where we are, it helps to recall where we were. The 2025 Am Law 100, capturing 2024 performance, delivered a vintage year by any measure. Aggregate revenue across the top 100 firms climbed 13.3% to $158.3 billion.
Average PEP rose 12.3% to $3.15 million. Sixty-eight firms recorded double-digit PEP growth, more than double the prior year.
At the summit of the 2025 rankings sat the now-familiar trio: Kirkland at $9.253 million (up 16.23%), Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz at $9.036 million (up 6.22%), and Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan — the litigation-only disruptor — at $8.643 million (up nearly 19%).
The rest of the top ten: Davis Polk at $7.8 million, Simpson Thacher at $7.664 million, Paul Weiss at $7.541 million, Gibson Dunn at $7.175 million, Latham & Watkins at $7.135 million, Cravath at $6.85 million, and Milbank at $6.812 million.
Even the 20th spot clears $4.9 million. In London, meanwhile, Magic Circle partners are clearing around £2.1–2.2 million. The transatlantic pay gap, already oceanic, is widening.
The Crown Changes Hands
For most of the past quarter-century, PEP supremacy was Wachtell’s almost by divine right given that the firm held the top spot for 22 of 25 years.
Kirkland dethroned it in the 2023 rankings (covering 2022 performance), lost it briefly, then reclaimed and extended its lead through 2024 and now into 2025 with a haul that would have seemed fantastical a decade ago.
The contrast in business models is what makes this rivalry so interesting to study. Wachtell operates with fewer than 90 equity partners, zero offices outside Manhattan, and a profit margin that reportedly runs at 78%, the highest in the Am Law 100.
It does not chase volume, as readers on forums like Reddit have noted. It waits for the truly consequential M&A mandate and then charges accordingly, with revenue per lawyer reported at $4.47 million, the highest in the industry.
This is a Ferrari. Kirkland, meanwhile, is building the world’s largest fleet of Ferraris and teaching them to race.
Kirkland’s 2025 growth, which saw it add roughly $1.75 billion to its top line in a single year, an amount equivalent to the entire annual revenue of the 30th-largest law firm. And that growth came despite only a modest 3.8% increase in equity partners (to 595), which partly explains the dramatic per-partner improvement.
David Lat, (pictured) writing for Bloomberg Law’s legal commentary, had in January predicted both Kirkland and Wachtell would break $10 million in PEP for 2025 given their dramatic deal flow increases. Kirkland’s preliminary result confirms that.
Wachtell’s final figure is still awaited but given that it ranked second in M&A league tables in 2025, (and top of the heap in the London M&A rankings) guiding deals worth $621 billion (nearly triple its 2024 total), the boutique aristocrat may well be staging a counter-offensive.
The $9 Million Club Gets Its Third Member
If Kirkland’s $11.1 million is the headline grabber, the more structurally interesting story from late 2025 involves Quinn Emanuel quietly joining the nine-figure-average club. In October, the firm confirmed it expects PEP of $9 million for 2025, a 4% increase from its already formidable 2024 figure becoming just the third firm to reach that threshold.
Quinn Emanuel is, of course, the outlier in this discussion. It does no M&A. No capital markets. No private equity. Just litigation — but litigation of the high-octane, bet-the-company variety, with billing rates for partners reportedly topping $2,000 per hour.
Co-managing partner Michael Carlinsky (pictured) noted candidly that clients want partners personally engaged, and they are getting them: Carlinsky himself billed around 2,100 hours in 2025, outpacing six of his associates. The firm, which has jumped from 28th to 18th in Am Law revenue rankings since 2020, plans to report at least $2.7 billion in 2025 revenue.
The message is not subtle: in an era when everyone else is building litigation practices to diversify, the litigation-only model has quietly become one of the most profitable in the world.
What the Forums Are Saying
On r/BigLaw, where the arrival of new PEP data is treated with the same anticipatory excitement as a particularly juicy lateral announcement, the reaction to Kirkland’s preliminary figures has been characteristically layered.
The top-voted responses oscillate between genuine awe (“revenue has more than doubled since 2020 and PEP is up 80%”) and a sardonic awareness that the numbers only mean something depending on which side of the equity divide you’re standing on.
The recurring thread is the PEP talk – if PEP is up 80% at Kirkland since 2020, first-year salaries are up roughly 12% over the same period (from $190,000 to $215,000).
The maths, as one user noted with surgical brevity, “does not slap in your favour unless you’re already a partner.” Bloomberg Law’s own analysis confirms the divergence: seventh-year associate total compensation (salary plus bonus) rose by just $20,500 between 2021 and 2024 — the smallest three-year gain in at least a decade. For the same period, average equity partner profits rocketed.
The 2025 Am Law 100 reports that non-equity partners now comprise 50.9% of all partners at the top 100 firms — the first time the non-equity tier has constituted an outright majority. The equity golden ticket, always selective, is narrowing further.
Non-equity partners averaged $687,824 in 2024 — significant by most standards, but a far cry from the equity distributions being celebrated in the headlines.
Why PEP Is Both Everything and Nothing
It’s worth noting however that while PEP the most important number in BigLaw it is also the most manipulable.
PEP is self-reported, for a start. Firms control how many equity partners they count and a decision to move people from equity to non-equity status is, from a purely mathematical standpoint, indistinguishable from a genuine improvement in profitability.
The across-the-board contraction in equity partner headcounts, which are down 2.1% globally among the top 100 firms even as total lawyer numbers grew, is not coincidental. As Global 100 data confirms, this reshaping of partnership structures concentrates profits among fewer hands.
None of which detracts from what is clearly a genuinely extraordinary run of performance. Rate increases, sustained demand across both litigation and M&A, AI-driven efficiency gains in commodity work, and a deal market that refused to buckle have combined to produce profit margins that would embarrass most hedge funds.
The Thomson Reuters 2026 report confirmed that the average US firm posted 13% profit growth in 2025. That is not a narrow spike, but a rising tide.
But what does it mean in terms of the 2026 PEP rankings?
With Kirkland’s 2025 result confirmed and Quinn Emanuel’s $9 million figure officially in, the race for the 2026 Am Law rankings (which will capture 2025 performance) is already being dissected. Several dynamics are worth watching:
Wachtell’s revenge tour. The firm’s M&A deal flow in 2025 was exceptional, nearly tripling its 2024 totals. With its tiny denominator and 78% margin, even modest revenue growth translates into dramatic PEP improvement. Lat’s Bloomberg prediction that Wachtell would reclaim the No. 1 spot in PPEP for 2026 looks live.
Davis Polk’s ascent. The all-equity shop posted 25.81% PEP growth in 2024 to reach $7.8 million. Its 2025 performance in an active M&A year will be closely watched by rivals and laterals alike. In January, the firm also announced a shift away from pure lockstep compensation toward a more performance-based structure — a significant cultural signal.
Paul Weiss’s momentum. It recorded the largest revenue increase in the Am Law 100 in 2024, at 31.6%, adding $1.28 billion in new revenue. Its PEP of $7.54 million reflects a practice that has turbocharged itself through lateral hiring and litigation expansion.
The Magic Circle gap. For UK and international readers, the transatlantic chasm deserves its own moment of reflection. Clifford Chance reached £2.11 million in PEP for FY 2024/25. Linklaters posted pre-tax profits above £1 billion for the first time. These are genuine achievements. They are also roughly one-fifth of Kirkland’s figure.
For the Associates Reading This At 11pm
The data is unambiguous for early-career lawyers trying to navigate the BigLaw labyrinth. High PEP firms have deeper pockets for market salaries, currently anchored at $225,000 for first-years, scaling to $365,000 for eighth-years under the Cravath scale, and they can also absorb the inevitable cost of associate arms races. They generate the most complex, highest-value work.
They offer the best platform for lateral mobility and the only credible path to equity partnership if that remains your north star.
The honest caveat, which r/BigLaw will furnish in vivid detail shows the path to the equity club has never been narrower, the leverage model has never been more deliberately constructed, and the PEP number you’re marvelling at is, in significant part, a product of the billable hours you are currently billing.
The partner on the other side of that equation is averaging $11.1 million at one firm and the journey there involves, by industry estimates, 2,000–2,500 billable hours annually with perhaps another 500 in non-billable shadow work.
But then, as one commentator noted with the bleak cheerfulness that characterises the genre: “The yacht doesn’t pay for itself. Neither does the associate who doesn’t make partner.”
The Bottom Line
We are, by any historical measure, in the golden age of BigLaw profitability. The Am Law 100’s full 2026 rankings will land in spring, and current trajectories suggest they will contain at least two firms above $10 million in PEP, a possible new No. 1 in Wachtell, and a cohort of challengers, including Davis Polk, Paul Weiss, Simpson Thacher, all pushing hard at the top tier.
Whether this is sustainable depends on whether deal markets remain active, rate growth continues to outpace cost inflation, and AI genuinely delivers efficiency rather than simply headcount reduction.
For now, the PEP machine is running hot, the numbers are record-breaking, and the equity partners, all 595 of them at Kirkland alone, are, as they say in the less formal precincts of BigLaw X, absolutely eating.
