Research

AI at the front door of the 100 largest law firms.

A census of what a potential client gets on arrival at the websites of the world's 100 largest law firms by revenue, checked by Fulkerson Advisors on September 14, 2026: a chat window, an AI assistant, a text line, or a phone number and a form. None of the 95 sites we could reach offers any kind of chat.

The data is on this page and in a CSV anyone can download. The method is at the end. Corrections go to info@fulkersonadvisors.com.

0 of 95
sites with a chat window, an AI assistant, or a text line on the homepage or contact page: 33%
show a phone number on the homepage or the contact page: 46%
offer a form a visitor could fill in on either page: 85
load a cookie-consent manager. Zero load a chat tool from any vendor.

What does a visitor get at the front door?

None of the 95 firms we could reach offers a chat window on its homepage or its contact page. No live chat, no AI assistant, no text line. Not one.

What a visitor gets instead is a brochure and a directory. 22 of the 95 homepages carry no contact link at all. A phone number appears on 9% of homepages and on 33% once the contact page is counted. A form a person could fill in appears on 46%, almost always on the contact page rather than the homepage. 12% show a client portal or client login. On 36 of the 95 sites, neither the homepage nor a contact page linked from it shows a phone number or a form. The route to a person on those sites is a locations page or a lawyer search.

Instrumented
85 of the 95 sites load a cookie-consent manager. 32 load LinkedIn's advertising tag. 43 load an analytics or marketing-automation tool beyond Google's. The sites are measured closely.
Not conversational
None loads a chat or messaging tool from any vendor, none opens a window on arrival, and none offers a text line. The nearest thing to a conversation is a contact form, and most of the homepages do not carry one.
Built around people
68 of the 95 homepages put a lawyer directory in the main navigation. 24 put a contact link there. The site is designed to help you find a person you already know of, not to start a matter.

The contrast that makes the number sharp is with consumer law. On the same day, the homepage of Morgan & Morgan, the largest personal-injury firm in the United States, opened with a chat window that said it was staffed by a real person and a text line open around the clock. The top of the profession and the mass market have made opposite choices about the front door.

Why is the website of a large law firm a brochure?

Three reasons, in our reading. First, these firms do not get clients from the website. Work arrives through relationships, panels, and referrals, and the site exists to confirm a name someone already has. Second, at a large firm intake is a conflicts check before it is a conversation. An assistant that takes the facts of a matter from a stranger before conflicts are cleared creates a risk the firm does not need. Third, the AI work at these firms is happening inside: drafting, research, document review, and the intake that does exist runs behind the login, on matters the firm has already agreed to take.

That third point matches what we see in practice. The intake agent in our case files runs inside a law firm, on interviews the firm has already accepted, with a lawyer supervising the draft. It is not a widget on the homepage, and the firms in this table have made the same call.

What should a firm, or a company hiring one, take from this?

For a law firm: the front door is open ground. Nobody in the top 100 has shipped a public AI assistant, and the reasons above are real, so the first firm that does it well will have solved conflicts, privilege, and unauthorized-practice risk in the design. That is a governance and engineering problem, not a chatbot purchase.
For a company choosing counsel: do not read the absence as backwardness. Read it as where the AI is, which is inside the firm. Ask what runs behind the login, and what it changed.
For anyone buying an AI intake system: the version that works is internal, scoped to matters already accepted, and measured on the time from interview to a draft a lawyer will sign.

How was this measured?

Population: the world's 100 largest law firms by revenue, taken from Wikipedia's list based on the AmLaw Global 200 rankings as of 2025, read on September 14, 2026. 77 are US firms, 16 are UK or UK-US firms, and the rest are in Canada, China, Australia, South Korea, and Germany.

Websites: each firm's official site as recorded on Wikidata, or the firm's own domain where Wikidata had none, each confirmed by request. 5 of the 100 could not be measured: White & Case (the site challenged or blocked the automated browser), Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer (the site challenged or blocked the automated browser), Yingke (no response from the United States), O’Melveny & Myers (the site challenged or blocked the automated browser), Gordon Rees Scully Mansukhani (the site challenged or blocked the automated browser). The counts are out of the 95 we could read.

Crawl: Google Chrome under automation in a 1366 by 900 window, from Boston, on September 14, 2026 between 7:59 pm and 8:22 pm Eastern, and again at 10:40 pm the same night. For each firm we loaded the homepage, waited, accepted the cookie banner where one appeared so that consent-gated tools could load, scrolled, waited again, then did the same on the contact page linked from the homepage. We recorded every script and frame source, every fixed-position element and its text, the text inside every frame including shadow roots, phone links, forms and their fields, and any client-portal wording.

Definition of a chat window: a known chat or messaging vendor in the page's scripts or frames, or a fixed launcher or frame whose text invites a conversation. Marketing copy that merely mentions chat does not count. The detector was checked against sites known to run Intercom, Zendesk, and HubSpot chat, which it caught, and against a consumer firm with a hand-built widget, which it missed on the first pass, so hand-built widgets can be missed. As a second check, the screenshots of all 95 homepages were reviewed by eye for a launcher in either bottom corner.

What we did not do: send any message, open any widget, log in anywhere, or test non-English versions of the sites.

The data is the table below and the CSV, released under CC BY 4.0 with attribution to Fulkerson Advisors.

All 100 firms.

Ranked by revenue. What a visitor gets on the homepage and the contact page, as observed on 95 of 100 sites.

Download the data (CSV)

Rank	Firm	Country	What a visitor gets
1	Kirkland & Ellis	US	Neither phone nor form on the pages checked
2	Latham & Watkins	US	Neither phone nor form on the pages checked
3	DLA Piper (verein)	UK US	Neither phone nor form on the pages checked
4	A&O Shearman	UK	A form
5	Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom	US	A form
6	Gibson Dunn	US	A phone number
7	Sidley Austin	US	A form
8	Ropes & Gray	US	A form
9	Baker McKenzie (verein)	US	Neither phone nor form on the pages checked
10	White & Case	US	Not measured
11	Morgan, Lewis & Bockius	US	A form
12	Clifford Chance	UK	A form
13	Freshfields	UK	A phone number
14	Linklaters	UK	A form
15	Hogan Lovells	US	Neither phone nor form on the pages checked
16	Simpson Thacher & Bartlett	US	Phone and a form
17	Jones Day	US	A form
18	Dentons (verein)	UK US	Neither phone nor form on the pages checked
19	Goodwin Procter	US	Neither phone nor form on the pages checked
20	Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison	US	A phone number
21	Greenberg Traurig	US	A form
22	Davis Polk & Wardwell	US	A phone number
23	Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan	US	A phone number
24	Norton Rose Fulbright (verein)	UK	Neither phone nor form on the pages checked
25	King & Spalding	US	A form
26	CMS ( EEIG )	EU Germany	A form
27	Paul Hastings	US	A form
28	McDermott, Will & Schulte	US	A form
29	Cooley	US	Phone and a form
30	Sullivan & Cromwell	US	Neither phone nor form on the pages checked
31	Holland & Knight	US	Phone and a form
32	Weil, Gotshal & Manges	US	Phone and a form
33	Mayer Brown	US	Neither phone nor form on the pages checked
34	Milbank	US	A phone number
35	Willkie Farr & Gallagher	US	Phone and a form
36	Covington & Burling	US	Phone and a form
37	Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer	UK	Not measured
38	Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton	US	A form
39	Eversheds Sutherland	UK	Neither phone nor form on the pages checked
40	Debevoise & Plimpton	US	Phone and a form
41	Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr	US	A phone number
42	Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe	US	Neither phone nor form on the pages checked
43	Dechert	US	A phone number
44	Reed Smith	US	Neither phone nor form on the pages checked
45	Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld	US	Neither phone nor form on the pages checked
46	Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati	US	Neither phone nor form on the pages checked
47	Morrison & Foerster	US	Neither phone nor form on the pages checked
48	Yingke	China	Not measured
49	Proskauer Rose	US	A phone number
50	Squire Patton Boggs (verein)	UK US	Phone and a form
51	Alston & Bird	US	A form
52	K&L Gates	US	Neither phone nor form on the pages checked
53	Ashurst	Australia	Neither phone nor form on the pages checked
54	Foley & Lardner	US	A form
55	Winston & Strawn	US	Neither phone nor form on the pages checked
56	Perkins Coie	US	Neither phone nor form on the pages checked
57	King & Wood Mallesons (verein)	China	A form
58	Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton	US	Neither phone nor form on the pages checked
59	Cravath, Swaine & Moore	US	Neither phone nor form on the pages checked
60	Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz	US	A phone number
61	Arnold & Porter	US	Neither phone nor form on the pages checked
62	Troutman Pepper Locke	US	A form
63	Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson	US	A phone number
64	McGuireWoods	US	A form
65	Kim & Chang	South Korea	A phone number
66	Clyde & Co	UK	A form
67	O’Melveny & Myers	US	Not measured
68	Faegre Drinker	US	Phone and a form
69	BakerHostetler	US	Phone and a form
70	Vinson & Elkins	US	Neither phone nor form on the pages checked
71	Polsinelli	US	Neither phone nor form on the pages checked
72	Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough	US	Phone and a form
73	Seyfarth Shaw	US	Neither phone nor form on the pages checked
74	Fragomen, Del Rey, Bernsen & Loewy	US	A phone number
75	Hunton Andrews Kurth	US	Neither phone nor form on the pages checked
76	Pinsent Masons	UK	Neither phone nor form on the pages checked
77	Slaughter and May	UK	Neither phone nor form on the pages checked
78	Katten Muchin Rosenman	US	A form
79	Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner	US	Neither phone nor form on the pages checked
80	Venable	US	Phone and a form
81	Baker Botts	US	Neither phone nor form on the pages checked
82	Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman	US	Phone and a form
83	Fenwick & West	US	A form
84	Simmons & Simmons	UK	Neither phone nor form on the pages checked
85	Fox Rothschild	US	A phone number
86	Gordon Rees Scully Mansukhani	US	Not measured
87	Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith	US	Neither phone nor form on the pages checked
88	Gowling WLG	Canada	A form
89	Barnes & Thornburg	US	Neither phone nor form on the pages checked
90	Blank Rome	US	A form
91	Bird & Bird	UK	Phone and a form
92	Littler Mendelson	US	A form
93	Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart	US	A form
94	Blake, Cassels & Graydon	Canada	Neither phone nor form on the pages checked
95	Cozen O'Connor	US	Phone and a form
96	Husch Blackwell	US	Neither phone nor form on the pages checked
97	Addleshaw Goddard	UK	Phone and a form
98	Taft Stettinius & Hollister	US	A form
99	Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky, and Popeo	US	A phone number
100	Jackson Lewis	US	A form

Questions

Do any of the 100 largest law firms have a chatbot or AI assistant on their website?

As of September 14, 2026, none of the 95 sites we could reach offered a chat window, an AI assistant, or a text line on the homepage or contact page. The AI work at these firms runs inside the firm, behind the login.

Why do large law firms not use live chat or AI intake on their websites?

Because the website is not where their clients come from, because intake at a large firm starts with a conflicts check that a public assistant cannot safely skip, and because the useful AI intake runs on matters the firm has already accepted.

Which law firms do use AI chat for client intake?

Consumer-facing firms. On the day of this census the largest US personal-injury firm greeted visitors with a staffed chat window and a text line. None of the world's 100 largest firms did.

The intake agent behind this question.

We built one for a top-5 US law firm. The case file has the challenge, what was built, and the outcome.

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