Paul Weiss follows Kirkland in pulling financial disclosures

Paul Weiss has followed Kirkland & Ellis in deciding to stop sharing its financial results with The American Lawyer, the publication behind the benchmark Am Law rankings.

The New York-headquartered firm informed the publication of its decision on Thursday, according to the Financial Times.

The move follows a bumper year for Paul Weiss. Revenue rose almost 24% to $3.26 billion in 2025, from around $2.6 billion the previous year, while profit per equity partner reached $8.63 million.

Kirkland announced its own withdrawal earlier this month, saying sharing the figures did not provide "meaningful value" to clients. Reports suggested firm leaders had become wary of how clients viewed its headline partner profit figure, which can give a misleading impression of what many of its more junior lawyers earn.

The decisions challenge a reporting tradition stretching back more than four decades. The American Lawyer published its first revenue ranking in 1985, moving beyond the headcount tables previously used to measure firms’ size. Skadden topped that inaugural list with revenue of $129 million.

The holdouts

Kirkland and Paul Weiss join several established holdouts. Slaughter and May and Wachtell do not share their financial results with the media.

Freshfields stopped issuing headline financial results from 2024, although its accounts published on Companies House continue to provide a window into the business.

As a traditional general partnership instead of an LLP, Slaughters is not required to publish its accounts.

A historic spat

Withholding figures has also led to public clashes over the estimates publications produce instead.

Dentons stopped disclosing its numbers in 2014, triggering an acrimonious dispute with The American Lawyer over its subsequent estimates. The firm launched a website, Accuracy100, and took out adverts attacking the publication’s calculations.

Dentons accused the magazine of making “erroneous extrapolations to draw grossly inaccurate conclusions” after it reported a fall in the firm’s profitability.

The publication later revised its PEP figure upwards from $495,000 to $680,000 after Dentons supplied financial information validated by its auditor, KPMG.