NY bar · law-firm ranking

Top 100 Law Firms by NY Registered Attorneys

New York's attorney bar registry lists 284,296 currently-registered attorneys, of whom 214,040 (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.

106,515
distinct firm records
3.7%
held by the top 10 firms
Kirkland & Ellis Llp
#1 by NY headcount

What the firm ranking shows

Kirkland & Ellis Llp leads with 1,088 NY-registered attorneys, but BigLaw concentration is more diffuse than assumed - the top 10 firms hold 3.7% of affiliated headcount, while a long tail of 106,505 smaller organizations holds the remaining majority.

1,088
attorneys at the #1 firm, Kirkland & Ellis Llp
3.7%
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 Kirkland & Ellis Llp 1,088
2 Latham & Watkins Llp 1,084
3 Simpson Thacher & Bartlett Llp 928
4 Davis Polk & Wardwell Llp 852
5 Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison Llp 841
6 The Legal Aid Society 673
7 Sidley Austin Llp 668
8 White & Case Llp 624
9 Debevoise & Plimpton Llp 618
10 Sullivan & Cromwell Llp 589
11 Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher Llp 584
12 Greenberg Traurig, Llp 568
13 Milbank Llp 537
14 Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom Llp 532
15 Ropes & Gray Llp 516
16 Willkie Farr & Gallagher Llp 515
17 Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton Llp 495
18 Goodwin Procter Llp 454
19 Mcdermott Will & Schulte Llp 450
20 Paul Hastings Llp 439
21 Cravath, Swaine & Moore Llp 428
22 Weil, Gotshal & Manges Llp 413
23 Morgan Stanley 389
24 Proskauer Rose Llp 373
25 Jones Day 353
26 Morgan, Lewis & Bockius Llp 346
27 Holland & Knight Llp 340
28 New York City Law Department 337
29 Mayer Brown Llp 334
30 Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, Llp 333
31 Cooley Llp 331
32 Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson Llp 326
33 King & Spalding Llp 322
34 U.S. Securities And Exchange Commission 315
35 Covington & Burling Llp 308
36 Dechert Llp 306
37 Freshfields Us Llp 262
38 New York County District Attorney'S Office 246
39 Legal Aid Society 246
40 Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld Llp 246
41 Brooklyn Defender Services 240
42 Clifford Chance Us Llp 233
43 Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer Llp 233
44 Dentons Us Llp 225
45 New York State Office Of The Attorney General 224
46 Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer (Us) Llp 221
47 Dla Piper Llp (Us) 215
48 Lowenstein Sandler Llp 214
49 Allen Overy Shearman Sterling Us Llp 214
50 Nixon Peabody Llp 209
51 Dla Piper 209
52 Reed Smith Llp 207
53 Ernst & Young Llp 206
54 Barclay Damon Llp 204
55 U.S. Department Of Justice 203
56 Blank Rome Llp 203
57 Wilson Elser Moskowitz Edelman & Dicker Llp 202
58 Cahill Gordon & Reindel Llp 199
59 Troutman Pepper Locke Llp 195
60 Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe Llp 193
61 Norton Rose Fulbright Us Llp 193
62 Venable Llp 191
63 Hogan Lovells Us Llp 189
64 Fox Rothschild Llp 189
65 Linklaters Llp 187
66 Duane Morris Llp 184
67 Winston & Strawn Llp 183
68 Bank Of America 179
69 Hodgson Russ Llp 178
70 Goldberg Segalla Llp 178
71 Pryor Cashman Llp 175
72 Kings County District Attorney'S Office 174
73 Katten Muchin Rosenman Llp 172
74 Google Llc 170
75 Retired 168
76 Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman Llp 166
77 New York Legal Assistance Group 165
78 Hunton Andrews Kurth Llp 164
79 Morrison & Foerster Llp 162
80 Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz 156
81 The Bronx Defenders 154
82 Kpmg Llp 154
83 Clifford Chance 154
84 Seyfarth Shaw Llp 152
85 Thomson Reuters 149
86 None 149
87 Loeb & Loeb Llp 149
88 New York State Unified Court System 147
89 Akerman Llp 147
90 Wilmerhale 145
91 Goldman Sachs 144
92 Alston & Bird Llp 143
93 Jackson Lewis P.C. 141
94 Cozen O'Connor 141
95 Harris Beach Murtha Cullina Pllc 138
96 Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton Llp 137
97 Kelley Drye & Warren Llp 136
98 Finra 136
99 Bond, Schoeneck & King, Pllc 136
100 Rivkin Radler Llp 135

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 3.7% of affiliated headcount, while the long tail of 106,505 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.