NY bar · law-firm ranking

Top 100 Law Firms by NY Registered Attorneys

New York's attorney bar registry lists 290,787 currently-registered attorneys, of whom 218,900 (75.3%) report a firm or organization affiliation. This ranks the 100 firms with at least five attorneys, computed at request time directly from the public OCA registry.

108,464
distinct firm records
3.8%
held by the top 10 firms
Latham & Watkins Llp
#1 by NY headcount

What the firm ranking shows

Latham & Watkins Llp leads with 1,145 NY-registered attorneys, but BigLaw concentration is more diffuse than assumed - the top 10 firms hold 3.8% of affiliated headcount, while a long tail of 108,454 smaller organizations holds the remaining majority.

1,145
attorneys at the #1 firm, Latham & Watkins Llp
3.8%
of affiliated headcount held by the top 10 firms
75.3%
of active attorneys report a firm affiliation at all

Firm names are merged only for exact entity-suffix/punctuation variants (Module 47 entity-resolution); materially different spellings are never merged.

# Firm or Organization Active NY Attorneys
1 Latham & Watkins Llp 1,145
2 Kirkland & Ellis Llp 1,140
3 Simpson Thacher & Bartlett Llp 1,033
4 Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison Llp 879
5 Davis Polk & Wardwell Llp 873
6 The Legal Aid Society 714
7 Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher Llp 688
8 Sidley Austin Llp 676
9 White & Case Llp 644
10 Debevoise & Plimpton Llp 626
11 Sullivan & Cromwell Llp 614
12 Greenberg Traurig, Llp 580
13 Milbank Llp 546
14 Willkie Farr & Gallagher Llp 533
15 Ropes & Gray Llp 511
16 Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom Llp 480
17 Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton Llp 480
18 Paul Hastings Llp 471
19 Mcdermott Will & Schulte Llp 461
20 Weil, Gotshal & Manges Llp 422
21 Cravath, Swaine & Moore Llp 420
22 Goodwin Procter Llp 395
23 Proskauer Rose Llp 390
24 Morgan Stanley 389
25 Morgan, Lewis & Bockius Llp 363
26 Jones Day 358
27 Cooley Llp 356
28 New York City Law Department 352
29 Mayer Brown Llp 350
30 Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson Llp 334
31 King & Spalding Llp 328
32 U.S. Securities And Exchange Commission 326
33 Covington & Burling Llp 314
34 Dechert Llp 307
35 Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, Llp 306
36 Holland & Knight Llp 295
37 Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld Llp 263
38 Freshfields Us Llp 260
39 Legal Aid Society 256
40 Brooklyn Defender Services 256
41 Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer (Us) Llp 247
42 Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer Llp 244
43 New York County District Attorney'S Office 236
44 Clifford Chance Us Llp 232
45 Dentons Us Llp 226
46 Dla Piper 224
47 Dla Piper Llp (Us) 220
48 New York State Office Of The Attorney General 219
49 Barclay Damon Llp 215
50 Wilson Elser Moskowitz Edelman & Dicker Llp 214
51 Lowenstein Sandler Llp 213
52 Alston & Bird Llp 213
53 Nixon Peabody Llp 208
54 Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe Llp 207
55 Ernst & Young Llp 205
56 Venable Llp 202
57 Troutman Pepper Locke Llp 201
58 Linklaters Llp 201
59 Reed Smith Llp 200
60 Cahill Gordon & Reindel Llp 198
61 Retired 197
62 Blank Rome Llp 196
63 Norton Rose Fulbright Us Llp 194
64 Fox Rothschild Llp 194
65 Allen Overy Shearman Sterling Us Llp 192
66 U.S. Department Of Justice 191
67 Katten Muchin Rosenman Llp 190
68 Goldberg Segalla Llp 190
69 Duane Morris Llp 185
70 Pryor Cashman Llp 182
71 New York Legal Assistance Group 181
72 Google Llc 180
73 Hodgson Russ Llp 176
74 Hogan Lovells Us Llp 175
75 Kings County District Attorney'S Office 173
76 Bank Of America 173
77 Morrison & Foerster Llp 172
78 Clifford Chance 170
79 Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman Llp 165
80 Hunton Andrews Kurth Llp 165
81 Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz 164
82 New York State Unified Court System 163
83 Kpmg Llp 163
84 The Bronx Defenders 162
85 Loeb & Loeb Llp 162
86 Akerman Llp 162
87 Baker & Mckenzie Llp 159
88 Seyfarth Shaw Llp 156
89 Goldman Sachs 150
90 Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton Llp 150
91 Thomson Reuters 149
92 Office Of The New York State Attorney General 148
93 None 146
94 Harris Beach Murtha Cullina Pllc 145
95 Winston Taylor Llp 143
96 American Express 143
97 Jackson Lewis P.C. 142
98 Finra 138
99 Cozen O'Connor 138
100 Wilmerhale 136

What the ranking shows

The top firm in this list typically employs hundreds of times more NY-registered attorneys than the median affiliated firm. BigLaw concentration is real but more diffuse than commonly reported: the top 10 firms account for 3.8% of affiliated headcount, while the long tail of 108,454 smaller organizations holds the remaining majority.

Roughly 75.3% of currently-registered NY attorneys list a firm or organization in their bar record. The remainder are either solo practitioners, in-house counsel without a registered employer, or attorneys whose registration omits the optional firm-name field.

Methodology

We count how many currently-registered NY attorneys list each firm name in their bar record, then rank firms by that count. Only firms with at least five affiliated attorneys are included, filtering out solo practices and one-off registration variants. Firm names are shown exactly as recorded in the registry, with no fuzzy matching or normalization applied.

Because the firm-name field is self-reported and not validated by NY OCA, two records of the same firm may appear under near-duplicate names (LLP vs LL.P., comma vs no comma, with vs without "& Co"). We merge exact entity-suffix/punctuation variants of the same name (see "How firms appear in the OCA registry" below) but never merge materially different spellings or abbreviations, the ranking stays intentionally conservative and prefers under-counting to a fabricated match.

What this ranking cannot tell you

Bar registration records active membership, not current employment. An attorney listed at a firm may have moved months ago without updating the registry. Conversely, attorneys at NY offices of national firms may be registered in another state and not appear in this dataset at all.

The ranking includes only the NY-registered portion of each firm. A firm's true global headcount is typically several multiples of its NY count. Public-sector employers (district attorneys, public defenders, government agencies) are intentionally excluded by the company-name pattern of large law firms, though some appear when their attorneys explicitly list their employer.

How firms appear in the OCA registry

The firm-name field on each NY OCA registration record is a free-text string the attorney enters during biennial registration. There is no enforced normalization, no firm-ID lookup, and no validation against an authoritative firm registry. As a result, a single firm can appear under several spellings, most commonly with or without a trailing "LLP"/"LLC"/"PLLC"/"PC" and with punctuation or capitalization differences (e.g. "Kirkland & Ellis LLP" vs. "KIRKLAND & ELLIS"). This ranking merges exactly those cases, same firm name once the entity-type suffix and punctuation are stripped, and sums their attorney counts under one entry. It does NOT merge abbreviations or materially different spellings ("K&E LLP" is not linked to "Kirkland & Ellis"), that would risk conflating two different firms without a verified alias, so it stays intentionally conservative there and prefers under-counting to a fabricated match. If your firm's name is split across rows in a way this doesn't catch, reach out and we'll add the canonical alias to our maintained alias map.

Government employers (district attorney offices, public defenders, federal agencies) and corporate in-house counsel teams may appear in this list when the attorney enters their employer as their employer. They are not filtered out, we treat any organization with five or more NY-registered attorneys as a legitimate ranking entry. The Legal Aid Society is a frequent top-list entrant for exactly this reason.

Caveats specific to BigLaw NY counts

National law firms operate from many cities. Their NY-registered headcount typically reflects only the lawyers based in the firm's NY office plus a small population of remote or traveling NY-licensed partners. A firm with 1,500 lawyers globally might show 600 NY-registered attorneys here. Treat the counts as "NY-bar membership", not as global firm size or revenue scale.

Practice area is not captured. A firm with 800 NY attorneys could be predominantly transactional (M&A, capital markets), litigation-heavy (commercial disputes, white-collar defense), or evenly split. The OCA registry has no practice-area field; for that data, consult Chambers, the National Law Journal 250, or the firm's own attorney directory.

How to use this ranking responsibly

The right use of this list is scale - finding firms with substantial NY presence when you need access to specific NY-bar expertise (litigation in NY state courts, regulatory matters before the NY DFS or AG's office, NY real-estate transactional work). The wrong use is treating headcount as a proxy for quality, fit, or value.

For verifying any specific attorney at any of these firms, click the firm's name (when linked) or use the attorney search by name. The live status of every individual is searchable in real time at the NY OCA Attorney Search.

Source: NY Office of Court Administration, Attorney Registrations Attorney Registry (companion to Bar Membership Data) · 2024 Counts reflect attorneys marked 'Currently registered' who listed a firm or organization at the time of the most recent OCA refresh. Firms with fewer than 5 registered attorneys are excluded.