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#The ATL Power 100 By Office (2015)

Back in July, we launched the ATL Law Firm Reputation Survey, asking those of you working in Biglaw to rate your peers and competitors. Included in these rankings were market-specific questions, inquiring about both the reputation of firms in each survey participant's city as well as each firm's desirability as a potential employer. In creating the survey, we limited our city-specific firm choices to offices with at least 50 lawyers. Our office rankings include the following markets: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Silicon Valley and Washington, DC.

Firms are rated on a scale with 100 possible points:

• Market-specific reputation survey *

“Strength and quality of practice”: 35%

“Potential employer”: 15%

Leverage Ratio of equity partners to all other attorneys: 5%

Growth/decay % change in headcount since 2009: 5%

Percentage of women partners. 5%

“Homegrown” partners Likelihood of incoming associates making equity partner: 5% *

Insider satisfaction ATL Insider Survey: 5% **

Compensation rating: 25% ***

As with the Power 100, we are making value judgments in choosing and assigning weight to these metrics. For example, we are rewarding firms for maintaining low leverage, or for offering a relatively better chance for incoming associates to eventually ascend to partnership.

Also, to be sure, law firms are not homogenous in their approaches to partnership tracks or compensation structures or other aspects that we have sought to measure here, but we have done our best to account for these differences and create a formula that allows for meaningful comparisons.

The perfect "ATL score" is 100. Each firm is awarded a maximum number of points based on the weight of each metric (a maximum of 25 points for highest compensation rating, 5 points for highest growth headcount, etc.). The points are awarded on a sliding scale from highest to lowest. (For certain categories, firms were placed into tiers and points were apportioned accordingly.) Those points add up to the total ATL score seen on the rankings table.

* Survey conducted in partnership with Kinney Recruiting .

** Data for the “homegrown” metric courtesy of Leopard Solutions .

*** Compensation rating accounts for the following 4 factors: first-year salary, recent track record for bonuses, profits per partner (as reported to Am Law ), and survey data.