While rivals scramble to merge, the world’s biggest law firm is playing the long game
While rival law firms grapple with mergers and headline tie‑ups, Dentons, the world’s largest law firm by size, is quietly betting that an ‘already there’ strategy will play in its favour.
Dentons’ global chief executive Kate Barton told City PM the firm, like much of Big Law, is focused on globalised client relationships: “We have 87 countries in our footprint….. that’s 35 more than the next nearest competition… so we think we’ve got the footprint.”
After a 35-year career at EY, Barton, a trained lawyer, joined the firm in 2024 to take over the leadership role from her predecessor, Elliott Portnoy, who oversaw years of significant geographic growth. Even though it has 100‑year‑old legacy firms underpinning it, she stressed the “firm’s togetherness is about 14 years old”.
Coming from senior leadership roles at the Big Four giant, she explained that she has been part of the playbook of global scale and people-process-tech integration at a firm with an even bigger footprint than Dentons.
Dentons operates uniquely under a polycentric model, meaning it has no headquarters; instead, the firm splits its management committee across 11 regions. Barton said: “We are pretty pleased with our footprint… we are just now really trying to focus on bringing that to our clients and making sure that we’re serving our clients in that footprint.”
The focus is on its internal strategy to ensure each lawyer across every region can serve clients from one side of the world to the other, with pricing tied to using its global platform. The global boss explained Dentons has “special regimes” where partners can get compensated for how well they use the Dentons platform anywhere around the world.
There is a reason for this internal push to capitalise on this footprint strategy: Dentons wants its revenue to catch up with its scale. The firm may be credited as the largest law firm in the world by scale, but when measured by revenue, it is not even in the top 10.
In the most recent financial results, its US revenue rose seven per cent to $828m, and profits per equity partner (PEP) surged to $1.83m, while its UK, Ireland and Middle East entity generated £336m for the financial year ending April 2026. This arm has also historically not reported its PEP or profitability; however, according to reports, PEP for UK partners stands around £600,000 – £700,000, well below the millions its competitors are pocketing.
Firm banks on ‘team poaching’ to fuel growth
The legal sector has been upturned over the last few years with major mergers between British and US legal firms with the race to join the ‘Global Elite’. In the last year, Australian-British firm Herbert Smith Freehills merged with Kramer Levin, Ashurst with Perkins Coie, and Winston and Strawn’s with Taylor Wessing.
While rivals race into the US via complex mergers, Barton said Dentons has no ‘getting-to-know-you’ integration drag because the US was one of its four founding markets and the firm is already deeply embedded in the country. And as a result, it avoids the two to three years of post‑merger integration others now face in the American market.
Instead, Dentons is on a “team lift” spree, poaching partner groups. Barton said: “Dentons in the US is one of the top three firms that has added direct admissions, and so we’re very proud of that….we continue to do team lifts… [as] groups of partners from other law firms want to come to Dentons because of our unique structure and how we reward partners for using our platform.”
And like the rest of the legal sector, Dentons is also accelerating its push into technology with AI at the forefront. She said: “We’re probably one of the largest institutions in the law firm context that’s using enterprise ChatGPT.”
“We have three endeavours right now, three huge countries that are doing private labelling based on the enterprise version of ChatGPT…similar to like what a Kirkland & Ellis is doing with Palantir,” she added.
However, with the uptick of the new tech, AI hallucinations stories have been hanging over the professional services industry like a dark cloud. The Dentons boss said one of its 10 AI principles is: “You must check your work, with consequences if lawyers don’t follow policy.”
“As a firm, we want to make sure that we are not going to not use AI because that could still happen even if you were using humans.. somebody could make a mistake, so you have to review the work,” she explained.
However, its AI focus has shifted its training for its junior lawyers. In addition to teaching them on prompting skills, the firm is “also doing a lot on emotional intelligence (EQ)”.
“We are really big on what’s the differentiator from the machine, and I think more youthful lawyers are going to do client service faster, and they’re going to have to be able to read the room and connect dots in ways they haven’t done traditionally,” she explained.
Eyes on the Law is a weekly column online and in the newspaper focused on the legal sector.