Social Impact Leaders: A Look At Our New Law Firm Ranking

To our readers:

"How does my firm stack up against our competition?" That's one of the questions we hear from readers all the time at Law360 Pulse. To give firms a new perspective on answering that question, we've created a brand new law firm ranking, which looks at firms from multiple angles so our readers can match their own ideas of success with what they find here.

The legal industry often places a high priority on firms' financial success as a measure of strength, and while that's a piece of the whole, we want to dig deeper. Our goal is to look holistically at law firms and assess them across a broad range of categories to highlight what they're doing well and what they could improve.

Earlier this year, we set out to determine who was likely to make use of a law firm ranking — competitor firms, companies looking to hire outside counsel, lawyers looking for lateral moves, and more. Then we identified a list of 10 attributes that would show readers in one or all of those groups something they'd want to know about the strengths and weaknesses of a particular firm.

We're doing this with data from our Law360 Pulse surveys — collected directly from the firms we're ranking and attorneys at those firms — and from across our parent company, LexisNexis, which has been gathering data on the law and the legal industry for decades. We'll then give the results to you, our readers, with analysis and insights into what it means to be a successful law firm in 2021.

Today's publication of the Law360 Pulse Social Impact Leaders marks the first of three parts of our new ranking, with two still to come. The social impact ranking, in which we take a look at what firms are doing to make the world a better place, includes four important pillars: pro bono work, racial and ethnic diversity, gender equality, and employee engagement. These may not be traditional measures of success, but they play a strong role in the making of firms' internal and external reputations, so we feel it's important to shine a light on them.

Next month, we'll take a look at attributes we think demonstrate a firm's prestige, including the aforementioned financial data. Then, in January, we'll add a final ranking that also assesses the work firms are doing in the transactional and litigation spaces, to come up with a total score for the firms that make our list.

This project is a work in progress, and something we hope to expand and deepen in the coming years with new data points as they become available to us. We welcome your feedback, which you can send to us at surveys@law360.com.

Thanks for coming along on this journey with us!

Kerry G. Benn
Director of Series, Surveys and Data
Law360 Pulse

For a reprint of this article, please contact reprints@law360.com.