Ranking the most liberal and conservative law firms among the top 150, 2025 edition — Excess of Democracy

UPDATE Sept. 30: Due to a data collection error, the data for Gibbs & Bruns has been revised.

One of my most popular posts remains “Ranking the most liberal and conservative law firms.” That post is from 2013. Another popular one is my update in 2021. Here’s another iteration.

At the outset, “ranking” a firm or calling it “conservative” or “liberal” is imperfect, I know, but I picked a title twelve (!) years ago and I’m sticking with it…. Better to call it, “which law firms contribute the most to Democrats or Republicans.”

First, I looked at around 150 law firms. I broke them out into two groups. The first are the AmLaw 100. The second are a group of 50 firms that fit the NLJ500 or Legal 500 plaintiffs’ firms, or comparable plaintiffs’ firms. (Two firms appear in both lists, Paul Weiss and Quinn Emanuel.)

Second, unlike my 2013 ranking (where I looked at contributions to Barack Obama’s or Mitt Romney’s presidential campaigns), I expanded the window as I did in 2021. I focused on contributions to the Joe Biden and later Kamala Harris campaign (including its victory fund) and the Donald Trump campaign (including its victory fund); the major party organizations (DCCC, DSCC, DNC, NRCC, NRSC, and RNC); and two major aggregators of campaign contributions, ActBlue (Democratic) and WinRed (Republican). These are obviously a significant cohort of all campaign contributions. I looked at the 2023-2024 period, a two-year window, instead of the four-year window in 2021.

Third, I did not look at just attorney contributions, but I looked at any contributions from those employed by these firms. There are often different titles for attorneys (partner, counsel, summer associate, etc.) that are self-reported and are tougher to capture. And I thought it would be useful to include all contributions, even from consultants, paralegals, administrative assistants, and others employed by the firm for a broader portrait of the firm. As I mentioned, attorneys use a variety of titles, and others are ambiguous (e.g., “consultant”). I have run tests at a few of the larger law firms, and I looked at only those who unambiguously identified themselves in some “attorney”-like capacity. At these firms, 95% to 98% of the dollars given come from unambiguously labeled attorneys (and the number is probably higher if some ambiguous categories fit the actual practice of “attorney”.) It does not strike me that at many firms—if any—it would materially change the allocation if I did another refinement to include only those who unambiguously identified themselves in some attorney capacity. Again, this is a judgment call. I also looked for common misspellings, abbreviations, or alternative names for the firm to capture the most contributions.

So, that said, I’m sure there are errors in the data, but it’s a fairly good snapshot.

All told, I captured about $52 million in contributions to Democratic-affiliated groups compared to about $4 million for Republican-affiliated groups in 2023-2024. 92.45% of contributions went to Democrats, about a 12-to-1 ratio, up from the 6-to-1 ratio back in 2020.

Below is a visualization of the AmLaw100 law firms. (By “percentage of contributions,” I mean by dollar figures, not individual instances.)