Two commercial enterprises, U.S. News and Best Lawyers, have released a set of rankings of over 8,000 law firms.   Rather than assigning a numerical rank to each, they divide specific practice areas of firms into one of 3 tiers.  They actually assign each practice area both a local and a national tier ranking.  81 different practice areas are included in the rankings. 

The publishers claim to have surveyed more than 9,000 clients and just about the same number of attorneys. They also apparently factored in the 3.1 million individual attorney evaluations that the Best Lawyers enterprise compiled.  They also claim to have considered: attorney experience, number of clients, billing ranges, the number of matters, pro bono work, and diversity also counted.

This set of rankings follows the recent release of a similar commercial enterprise called Chambers Associate (published by Chambers and Partners).  These rankings and surveys, along with other more established ones like The Vault Reports Guide to America’s Top 100 Law Firms and the American Lawyer surveys — http://www.americanlawyer.com/ (see Surveys and Rankings section of the left side bar menu) ought to be viewed with a healthy amount of circumspection. 

In making you aware of this potential new research resource, we are not offering an endorsement of it nor are we intending to vouch for ts methods or conclusions.  We encourage you to examine its particular methodology and think critically about its conclusions — just as you would with any other survey or rankings list. 

Berkeley Law students can find other students’ prior summer evaluations (along with their contact information) in the b-Line (click on the “Summer Evaluations” shortcut from the b-Line homepage).  

The well-known legal business consulting firm Hildebrandt Baker Robbins just published a report of its Peer Monitor Index, which includes information about key law firm business metrics for January – March of 2010.

You can read a summary of the report here.  You can read the whole thing here.   

Among other things, the report concludes that, on average, demand for legal services (measured by billable hours) for the first quarter of 2010 was flat.  Also, while demand in the Silicon Valley market increased by 1%, it decreased by 5% in SF and LA. 

We’ve blogged about the Peer Monitor system before, but to refresh you , it is a service that allows law firms to access their peers’ financial data (in the aggregate) in exchange for supplying their own data to the system for others to access (on a normalized and aggregated basis).  There are 35 Am Law 100 firms, 35 Am Law 200 firms and 30 NLJ 250 firms in the system.  You can find more information about the Peer Monitor system here.

Thought you might be interested in this short (about 6 min.) interview with the person who runs the Peer Monitor. 

You can access the podcast at Thomson Reuter’s Legal Current blog here.  (Hat tip: legal industry consultant Hildebrandt’s blog).    

FYI — We’ve blogged about the extremely helpful Peer Monitor Index before here and here.  The Peer Monitor system is essentially a service that allows law firms to access their peers’ financial data (in the aggregate) in exchange for supplying their own data to the system for others to access (on a normalized and aggregated basis).  There are 35 Am Law 100 firms, 35 Am Law 200 firms and 30 NLJ 250 firms in the system.