| Turnover: | £322.1 |
| Profit per equity partner: | £1.1m |
| Revenue per lawyer: | £629,000 |
| Total number of lawyers: | 576 |
Davis Polk & Wardwell slowed its slide down the table over the past two years, but the Wall Street firm still found itself outside of the global top 30 firms by revenue last year.
It was a static year in terms of turnover, with revenue for 2005 stuck at £332.1m (604.4m). The New York heavyweight also decreased its headcount by 2 per cent, which included a number of high-profile departures over the past 12 months.
Corporate rainmaker Dennis Hersch left in late 2005 to join client JPMorgan, while litigation partner Eric Grossman went to Morgan Stanley as head of litigation. Elsewhere, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer snapped up insolvency partner Nick Segal on his return to London; Davis Polk still has no UK law capability.
The firm operates an all-equity partnership and is one of the last in the US to operate a pure lockstep remuneration system.
As would be expected from one of Wall Street's finest, there have been some standout deals. For just over four months' work from the restructuring team, the firm was awarded $10.3m (£5.66m) in fees from the Delta Airlines Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings. This goes some way in explaining why Davis Polk's lawyers are the fourth most profitable in New York, with average profit per equity partner hitting the all-important $2m (£1.1m) mark in 2005.
Davis Polk also has one of the biggest litigation departments in the US, with 170 lawyers. The firm advised pharma company Roche on its headline-grabbing dispute with Gilead Sciences over the licence agreement for the bird flu vaccine, Tamiflu.
Although the firm had a fair year in corporate in America - it came eighth in Thomson Financial's rankings of firms involved on all US M&A deals - the real action was in Asia. It advised on India's largest IPO, the Rs270bn (£3.16bn) flotation of Reliance Petroleum, serving as international counsel to Reliance.
In China, it acted for Industrial and Commercial Bank of China's $20bn (£11bn) listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in October. Davis Polk for now has three partners in Hong Kong and is yet to open any offices in mainland China. It also has two partners in Tokyo.
| 
