Law-firm data changes constantly. Here is what we collect, where it comes from, how we show its age, and what we do when sources disagree.
Where the numbers come from
AmLaw 200
The American Lawyer
Revenue, PPP, attorney headcount
Chambers USA
Chambers and Partners
Practice area band rankings
Above the Law
Bonus tracker, firm announcements
First-year compensation
Firm recruiting materials + Chambers Associate
Employers and legal research publications
Summer programs, offer rates
Law-firm data is messier than it looks.
A firm opens an office. Two firms merge. A chair changes. A salary scale moves. One source counts equity partners while another counts everyone with a partner title. A profile can be accurate when published and wrong a month later.
BigLaw Bear's job is not to pretend that uncertainty does not exist. It is to show students useful information with a source, date, definition, and way to report a correction.
For factual firm data, we prefer:
We do not treat an old profile as current merely because it remains online.
When a field cannot be verified, the honest answer is blank, unavailable, estimated, or dated. A confident wrong number is worse than a missing one.
Office lists should begin with the firm's current locations page. We normalize names so students can filter consistently, for example:
The source may call the same market Palo Alto, Menlo Park, or Silicon Valley. We preserve a usable market label while keeping the underlying address and source URL when available.
For each office record, we can store the source URL and verification date. A firm's displayed office count should come from the office records, not from an old number typed into a biography.
Mergers and office openings create temporary disagreement. We check the firm's site, announcement, and current contact pages before reconciling the list.
Managing partner, chair, lawyer count, partner count, and associate count are especially perishable.
Leadership titles also vary. A firm may have co-chairs, a global managing partner, an executive committee chair, or several leaders with different responsibilities. We use the firm's title rather than forcing every structure into one label.
Headcount needs a definition and date. "Partners" may mean equity partners, all partners, or lawyers in a directory search. If the source does not make the definition clear, we should not present the number as precisely comparable across firms.
These fields should carry a verification date and, where supported, a field-level citation.
Compensation may include:
The directory labels the figure it displays. A reported first-year total should not be mistaken for base salary.
We use firm announcements, written recruiting information, and credible compensation reporting. Market-scale changes spread unevenly, so a general salary article never overrides a firm's current written offer.
Students should confirm salary, bonus eligibility, office, start date, and class-year treatment directly with the employer.