Although the data is a little old, that’s the big city with the most Michelin-starred restaurants per capita.
Courchevel (wherever that is).
That’s the small town with the most Michelin-starred restaurants per capita. (I was just kidding. Everyone knows that Courchevel is a ski town in France. Either everyone knows it, or Google is a wonderful thing.)
I was thinking about collecting similar data for law firms.
We all know that Bigg & Mediocre has 100 lawyers who are ranked in their field by Chambers or the Legal 500! But Bigg & Mediocre has 3,000 lawyers, for heaven’s sake. If you pick up the phone, call B&M, and ask for a lawyer, you have about a three percent chance of talking to someone who’s any good.
Okay, okay: I admit this is all silly. First, Chambers and the Legal 500 call folks and ask respondents to identify lawyers who are good in their field. That’s hardly a perfect system. (Sometimes, it’s even worse than that. The raters sometimes ask firms to identify in-house lawyers who can give feedback on the firm’s work. How many lawyers at firms couldn’t identify at least a couple of in-house lawyers who would say something nice about them? Name your brother-in-law, for heaven’s sake, or your cousin.) This process creates a bias in favor of big firms, and it doesn’t necessarily extract information from anyone who’s in a position to judge lawyering skills. Additionally, reputation is sticky: You might have been a great lawyer 10 years ago; the ratings guide may insist that you’re still good 30 years from now, long after you’ve retired and met your maker.
Second, nobody is silly enough to call Bigg & Mediocre and ask for a lawyer. That’s a crapshoot if ever there was one. The local managing partner to whom your call is directed will think, “Eureka! Jarndyce hasn’t billed a minute of time in the last 18 months. Now this clown is calling and asking me for the name of a lawyer! I’ll sing the praises of Jarndyce and finally put Jarndyce to work after all this time. I don’t really care about the new client anyway; it’s not a long-time institutional client, so I’ll give this client what it deserves.”
(Do you think I’ve been playing this game for too long, or what?)
In any event, why isn’t some firm advertising that it has the largest percentage of Chambers-ranked lawyer per capita?
That may not say much, but it says something.
To people who are convinced by the ratings system, that statistic says that the firm is the most consistently high-quality joint that you could hire. If you get assigned a random lawyer at Small & Grate, the lawyer is likely to be pretty good. If you hire a specific lawyer at Small & Grate, the randomly selected rest of the team is likely to be pretty good.
That statistic also gives law firms something to advertise.
Firms are regularly boasting that they have “100 Lawyers Ranked By Chambers” or “30 Illinois Super Lawyers” or “50 Lawyers In The Legal 500” or “We Recently Hired A Lateral Who You Never Heard Of In Some City You Don’t Care About.”
I think my boast is just as good: “Lawyer For Lawyer, We Were Just Rated The Best In The World!”
Come on, admit it: That’s not bad.
And my boast would work for lots of firms: The best in the country according to Chambers; the best in each of the 50 states according to Chambers; the best in the country according to the Legal 500; the best in each of the 50 states according to the Legal 500; the same for The Best Lawyers In America, and Super Lawyers, and probably a couple of other lawyer-rating outfits that aren’t coming to mind.
Come on, guys! You’re missing a trick.
Count up the number of accolades per capita and start boasting!
Mark Herrmann spent 17 years as a partner at a leading international law firm and is now deputy general counsel at a large international company. He is the author of The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law and Inside Straight: Advice About Lawyering, In-House And Out, That Only The Internet Could Provide (affiliate links). You can reach him by email at inhouse@abovethelaw.com.