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Boutique law firms in the U.S. - statistics & facts

Boutique law firms are law firms where all attorneys specialize in a single niche area of law, at the expense of all other areas of legal practice. This is to be contrasted to general practice firms, who provide a variety of unrelated practice areas under one common administrative structure. Key areas of law serviced by boutique firms in the United States include intellectual property, labor and employment, litigation, and technology and venture capital. Since the great recession of 2008, boutique firms have become increasingly important in the U.S. legal market.

What is a boutique law firm?

There is some confusion about what constitutes a boutique firm, with the term sometimes being used as a catchall phrase covering all small- or mid-size law firms (often, those with under 100 attorneys). While the majority of boutique firms are in fact small- or mid-sized, this equivalence is incorrect as the term properly refers to any firm which concentrates exclusively on a single area of law. Consequently, there are some larger firms that are also categorized as boutique. For example, boutique labor and employment firm Littler Mendleson employed 986 attorneys and reported total revenue of approximately 660 million U.S. dollars in 2021, while in the same year boutique technology and venture capital firm Cooley employed 1,267 lawyers and reported an annual revenue of almost two billion U.S. dollars.

Specialized firm, specialized prices

The specialist nature of boutique firms means that often the leading firms can command high prices, even compared to the leading BigLaw firms. In 2020 and 2021, boutique litigation firms Irell & Manella and Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan reported some of the highest revenue per lawyer figures of any law firm in the United States. Likewise, leading intellectual property firms Finnegan and Fish & Richardson both reported a revenue per lawyer of over one million U.S. dollars, as did leading technology firms Cooley, Fenwick & West and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. This profitability does not extend to all legal areas serviced by boutique law firms though.
This text provides general information. Statista assumes no liability for the information given being complete or correct. Due to varying update cycles, statistics can display more up-to-date data than referenced in the text.
Published by Statista Research Department, Sep 21, 2022

Key insights

Size of the legal services sector in the U.S
347bn USD
Share of U.S. attorneys spending less than 10 hours per week with clients
46%
Most common billing method used by attorneys in the U.S.
Hourly rate
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