Biglaw, Rankings

Just How Accurate Are Am Law's Rankings?

Have you ever wondered how Am Law gets all of its data?

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Ranking dice USEWith all the talk of prestige out there, it helps to define our terms. When it comes to law schools, there’s general consensus on the T14 setting the bar for prestige. But what makes for a prestigious law firm? Most of us would cite the Am Law rankings, whose annual Am Law 200 functions as the de facto who’s who of Biglaw. But how useful are those rankings? For that matter how accurate are those rankings?

The Am Law rankings have taken some punches lately from Bruce MacEwen of Adam Smith, Esq. MacEwen first mused that the rankings are no longer conceptually useful because they promote the idea that the firms grouped in the rankings are all similar when in reality they vary wildly as businesses.

He’s not wrong that rankings embed value judgments. Consider how those rankings anoint firms based on profits per partner as opposed to more nebulous metrics about the nature of a firm’s practice. Take the ATL Top 50 Law Schools. At Above the Law, we know our rankings embed value judgments: we tell you we’re heavily privileging a law school’s ability to get a student a job.

Kimberly Kleman, Editor-in-Chief of The American Lawyer, took aim at MacEwen’s criticisms:

There are no value judgments, eh? Well, that’s a matter of philosophy. There may not be any value judgments in listing revenue per lawyer, but there certainly is a value in creating a 100- and 200-firm conceptual cutoff as though that’s where firms magically stop being important. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but don’t pretend it’s not a value judgment.

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Anyway, Kleman suggests the alternative to her rankings would be a return “to the days when it was all smoke and mirrors and clients didn’t exactly know why their firms were charging this….” Interesting.

Apparently MacEwen found this point interesting too, because after having a friendly summit with Kleman (where she bought him coffee), he blindsided her by taking on her central defense: are Am Law rankings just smoke and mirrors themselves?

Yesterday, MacEwen sent out this call to firms to help him get to the bottom of just how accurate Am Law really is, specifically, by figuring out the extent of firm cooperation in getting Am Law the correct numbers:

The AmLaw rankings have been with us for over thirty years, and despite the evergreen complaints about their design, purpose, impact, and reliability, to our knowledge no one has ever tried to systematically ask AmLaw firms themselves whether and to what extent they actually comply in reporting accurate data. We think it’s time to take a look.

We believe this is a vital issue for the industry, and we hope you would agree. Love them or loathe them, the AmLaw rankings are the Fortune 500 of Law Land: The #1 listing of record, without comparable peer.

To look into this, we’ve created a very short questionnaire, available here, which invites you to characterize your firm’s level of participation in AmLaw’s annual survey.

Perhaps the market is ripe for this survey. Just this year, Dentons loudly objected to Am Law, citing inaccurate numbers in its rankings. As Big Law Business reports:

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The AmLaw rankings are the most widely used financial data available to law firms, although their accuracy has sometimes been criticized by industry observers. This year, the legal giant Dentons launched an advertising campaign against the publication that challenged its accuracy when the law firm contested its profits per partner of $495,000 this year.

In the first interview Dentons’ leaders gave to reporters about the ad, which has until now gone unpublished, CEO Elliott Portnoy said: “They made up a number that bears absolutely no resemblance to reality.” Its Chairman Joe Andrew called the figure “concocted.”

Am Law ultimately revised the number up to $680,000. What’s $185,000 among friends?

So if you’re the appropriate person to answer MacEwen’s question (or you know how to forward this to that person), get on it! Here’s the survey again.

Perhaps the “Starbucks Accords” didn’t bring lasting peace between MacEwen and Kleman, but if we get reliable transparency out of it, we all win.

How Reliable are the AmLaw Numbers? [Adam Smith, Esq.]
In Ahab-like Quest, Consultant Seeks Transparency in AmLaw Rankings [Big Law Business / Bloomberg BNA]

Earlier: Study: Elite Law Grads Get Jobs Easier And Other Obvious Observations
World’s Biggest Law Firm Wants To Blow Up The Whole Am Law 100 Rankings

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