Surveys, surveys, surveys. We seem to be awash these days in surveys. It’s hard to keep track of them all, much less vouch for their validation.
But the results from a recent one from Law360 Pulse caught my eye. Law360 is generally pretty reliable because of the number of subscribers and customers to which it has access and the methodology it typically uses.
The Survey is entitled Prestige Leaders 2021, and the results were released yesterday. It was designed to measure how firms’ marketplace reputations measure up to one another. It’s a first for Law360 and, as far as I know, one of the first of its kind.
The Survey and accompanying Report was based on information obtained from some 700 law firms. Firms were scored on four pillars:
Financial health (profits per partner) Desirability (among perspective associate employees). Number and nature of editorial awards. (Law360 awards for Practice Groups of the Year, Titans of the Plaintiff’s Bar, Rising Stars, Regional Powerhouses, MVPs of the Year, etc.). News representation (examining the amount of positive media coverage firms get).
Law360 added up the scores from these four indexes to develop the overall score. Law360 ranked the top 100 firms.
I recently talked with Kerry Benn, Director of Series, Surveys and Data at Law360, about the methodology and the scoring. Benn told me her team first envisioned this Report sometime ago. Says Benn, “we asked ourselves what is everything you would need to know about a firm to determine its reputation?” They came up with some 75 items but then had to determine which of those could actually be quantified with data in a relevant way. This led to the four pillars.
According to Benn, “it was a daunting task.” The team pulled together data