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Largest firms are leaner than they were a decade ago but considerably more efficient. At the same time, smaller firms are beefing up their legal staffing.
PUBLISHED APRIL 2025
The recent release of this year’s AmLaw 100 placed two Kansas City firms—Polsinelli PC and Husch Blackwell—among the nation’s elite. And for each, 2024 produced record billings.
So their body counts must be going up, right? Not exactly, counselor. Like other large firms around the nation, they have leveraged a light-speed increase in the capabilities of law firm technology to run leaner while running bigger.
Polsinelli, No. 59 on the AmLaw 100, boasted a staff of 248 lawyers in the Kansas City area last year, down from 290 a decade ago. No. 79 Husch Blackwell, meanwhile, reported 136 in this market, down from 153 in 2014.
Some of that has come with chess pieces moving on the board through firmwide restructuring as new practices have been launched, new offices opened, and smaller firms have been acquired.
That trend isn’t limited to those AmLaw stars; of this region’s Big Five firms, the overall number of lawyers here fell from 1004 a decade ago to 871 last year—a dip of nearly 14 percent. Also driving that were declines in Stinson LLP (down to 223 from 255) and Lathrop GPM (down to 136 from 153). Only Spencer Fane, which boosted its ranks to 150 from 132 in 2014, sports a larger legal staff today.
The trend, however, does not hold as you move down the hierarchy of firm size. Of those ranked Nos. 6-25 on Ingram’s annual list of the Top Area Law Firms here, the overall number of lawyers rose by nearly the same percentage as the Big Five decline: from 623 to 710 combined, up 13.96 percent.
The American Bar Association does not yet have 2024 stats for the number of lawyers overall in the Kansas City market, but if the Top 25 are an indication, law firm leadership in this region is figuring out how to get it done more efficiently across the board—especially compared to firms nationwide.
For the Top 25 here, while lawyer numbers were off 4.17 percent combined (thanks to the disproportionate heft of the Big Five), the numbers of practice lawyers nationwide rose over that same decade, but by a mere 3.08 percent.
Those trend lines are unlikely to shift much in the coming years because the pipeline for new talent—in the form of freshly minted law degrees—is constricted. Today, the country has 197 ABA-certified law school programs (a slight drop from 201 in 2014), and with classes running at near capacity at most, there’s little bandwidth for expansion.
On a regional level, the seven law schools operating in Missouri and Kansas issued new degrees for between 725 and 780 students over each of the past five years. Nationwide, the 29,366 J.D.s granted was nearly identical to the 29,392 in 2023.
