The October 2014 issue of The American Lawyer includes its annual rundown of the Global 100 – the top 100 law firms around the world based on revenue – and I must say there’s quite a bit of legal spend going on out there! My ballpark estimate of the total revenue of the top 100 firms is close to $100 billion. Profits per partner at the Global 100 averaged $1.61 million in 2013, which is up (yes, up) 5.3 percent over 2012 (which was up 0.7 percent over 2011), with 70 firms averaging over $1 million. As expected, US firms took the biggest share of profits. Interestingly, some of the largest firms in the world in terms of revenue and/or lawyers fall below the $1 million PPP mark, including Jones Day, K&L Gates, Norton Rose Fulbright, Squire Sanders, CMS Legal, and Dentons. In some cases that may be a tradeoff between stability and profit, and in some cases the verein structure could result in uneven PPP across the firm’s offices.

As one might expect, the lion’s share of all that legal spend goes to firms with their largest number of attorneys based in the US. Of the top 50 firms in the world, 42 find their largest number of attorneys in the US. For the top 100 firms the number is 78, with the UK a distant second. In some cases, however, the US share, while the largest for the firm, is still relatively low. Overall, though, over 97,000 of the lawyers working for the Global 100 work in the US. The UK comes in a distant second with 6900 and China is third with just over 2500. But the number of lawyers working for AmLaw 200 firms in offices outside of the US, and the number of offices outside the US, has expanded steadily since 1998, primarily into the UK, but also significantly into China, Germany, France, Australia, and Canada.

The bottom line: Global Big Law seems to be doing just fine and spreading its wings. Is news of its death premature?