Announcing Vault's Top 150 Under 150

Vault is excited to release a new list highlighting the best small and midsized firms with 150 or fewer attorneys—Vault’s Top 150 Under 150!

As a counterpart to the highly respected and widely utilized Vault Law 100, which primarily showcases the largest law firms in the country, we developed the Top 150 Under 150 as a resource for students and lateral candidates seeking an experience outside of BigLaw. Firms included on Vault’s Top 150 Under 150 list provide associates with the opportunity not only to work at a top law firm, but also to take on substantial responsibility early in their careers, and maybe even to climb the rungs to partnership a little more quickly.

To determine the Top 150 Under 150, we first developed a list of the best-known and most sought-after U.S. firms with fewer than 150 attorneys. Our editorial and research teams pored through Vault survey data, news stories, trade journals and other legal publications; spoke with lawyers in the field and reviewed other published rankings. Vault editors also assessed each firm for prestige, quality of life and professional growth opportunities, and then narrowed down the results to come up with a list of 150 law firms known for providing top-notch service and delivering big results.

Students and job candidates can filter the list by practice area and region to best identify firms that they are interested in. 

As it would be impossible, and not particularly helpful, to compare an IP boutique with 30 lawyers in Palo Alto to a full-service firm with 145 attorneys in Boston, the firms are not ranked. Rather, the Top 150 Under 150 is a recognition of leading law firms that have fewer attorneys, but no less expertise, than the global megafirms that often dominate rankings and headlines.

View the entire Top 150 Under 150 list here.

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