Gibson Dunn has pushed past the $3bn revenue milestone after growing turnover 12.3% in 2023 to $3.07bn against a 13.4% rise in profits per equity partner (PEP) to $5.58m.  

A strong performance across transactions, litigation and regulatory and investigations propelled the New York-headquartered firm to its 28th consecutive year of revenue growth.  

The rise in PEP was helped by a 7.9% decrease in equity partners, even as overall lawyer headcount grew by nearly 9% to 1,835 and the nonequity tier grew by 44% to 160 partners.  

Gibson Dunn’s chair and managing partner Barbara Becker described 2023 as a year of “monumental deals” in the firm’s annual report, pointing to investment in key practice areas including appellate, AI, capital markets, funds, finance, M&A, privacy and cybersecurity, and private equity, as well as the fintech and digital assets practice the firm launched in 2022.  

Over the course of the year Gibson Dunn added 115 lateral associates and of counsel – down on the 220 it hired the year before. It also added 29 lateral partners, including projects duo Ben Shorten and Trinh Chubbock in London from Shearman & Sterling and Darko Adamovic in Paris, who joined at the helm of a nine-lawyer energy and infrastructure team from Linklaters.  

The firm continued its expansion in the Middle East with the hire of a seven-partner team led by Megren Al-Shaalan in November to open an office in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, having hired a trio of partners from Shearman to open in Abu Dhabi at the start of the year. Gibson Dunn now has 45 lawyers across the Middle East, where it also has an office in Dubai.  

At the start of the year the firm promoted 32 lawyers to partner in the US and another five across its offices in Europe and the Middle East. The cohort included 16 women – 43% of the total, in line with 2022’s 44%.  

Standout work for the firm’s litigation team in 2023 included securing two victories for clients in the US Supreme Court: one for Slack in a first-of-its-kind case addressing the right to sue under Section 11 of the Securities Act of 1933, and another for Meta in a pair of watershed cases concerning the scope of free speech online.

On the transactions side, the firm closed one of the largest tech deals in history with VMware’s sale to Broadcom and announced one of the largest deals of the year, representing Pioneer in its sale to ExxonMobil.