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The View From Up North: To Rank Law Firms Or Not To Rank…

Is your firm ranked by Lexpert? Should it be?

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Most of you know that Lexpert “ranks” Canadian law firms and lawyers every year. I thought it would be interesting to take a totally unscientific look at the Lexpert rankings and see if anything monumental comes out of it.

Here are the rules for reading this column:

1. It’s all meant in good fun. Don’t send me nasty emails if you don’t agree with something I write.

2. Read Rule #1 again.

A little background for those of you who don’t know. Lexpert has a methodology for divining the best law firms and lawyers by practice areas. I have no idea what the methodology is and I don’t care. I think all ranking methodologies are next to useless. What is important is once you declare you’re going to rank something, and put those rankings into a glossy magazine, people (lawyers and clients) put some stock into them. Lexpert could use a Capuchin monkey to pick names out of a hat and a lawyer would still brag to her mom if she was named one of Lexpert’s leading attorneys.

Lexpert has four categories: Most Frequently Recommended, Consistently Recommended, Repeatedly Recommended, and Everybody Else. Okay, it doesn’t use Everybody Else, but you get the drift. You’re either in one of the Recommended categories, or you’re on the outside looking in…

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It ranks lawyers in approximately sixty areas, including M&A, Corporate Finance, Commercial Litigation, Labour, Environmental, etc. Thus, for instance, a firm might be Most Frequently Recommended for Labour Law, Consistently Recommended for Environmental Law, and Repeatedly Recommended for Securities Litigation.

Today I am only going to look at the biggest Toronto firms and I’m only going to focus on the following three categories: M&A, Commercial Litigation, and Corporate Finance & Securities. We’ll call them the “Big Three.” With all due respect to Calgary and Vancouver, Toronto is where the lofty boys and girls play. Additionally, the Big Three practices are: (i) Scarlett Johansson in a black leather superhero costume; or (ii) Chris Hemsworth speaking in his Thor voice bare-chested, whichever you prefer. They are the sexiest categories. It’s great to market yourself as the top Admiralty firm in Canada, but that’s a cute cousin you pat on the head. The pinnacle firms are where clients take multi-billion dollar transactions and bet-the-company litigation.

So, let’s look at how the biggest Toronto offices do in M&A, Commercial Litigation (Lit) and Corporate Finance & Securities (CF):

Firm

Most Frequently Recommended

Consistently Recommended

Repeatedly Recommended
Bennett Jones 

 

CF, Lit

M&A
Blake, Cassels & Graydon

CF 

M&A

Lit

 
Borden Ladner Gervais

 

 

CF, M&A, Lit
Cassels Brock & Blackwell

 

CF

M&A
Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg

CF, M&A

LIt

 
Dentons Canada

 

 

CF, Lit
Fasken Martineau DuMoulin

 

CF, Lit

M&A
Goodmans

CF

M&A, LIt 

 
Gowling Lafleur Henderson

 

 

CF, M&A, Lit
McCarthy Tétrault

CF

M&A, Lit

 
McMillan

 

 

CF, Lit
Norton Rose Fulbright Canada

 

CF

M&A, Lit
 Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt

CF, M&A

LIt

 
Stikeman Elliott

CF, M&A

LIt

 
Torys

CF

M&A, Lit

 

 

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As you might expect, the Seven Sisters rank best in the Big Three practices. Blakes, Davies, Goodmans, McCarthys, Oslers, Stikes, and Torys are all either Most Frequently Recommended or Consistently Recommended for all Big Three. In fact, no Tier 2 firm makes the Most Frequently Recommended category in any of the Big Three.

With respect to Toronto lawyers, here’s how the major firms fared in aggregate with the Big Three:

Firm

No. Lawyers in Toronto

Most Frequently Recommended

Consistently Recommended

Repeatedly Recommended

Percentage of Recommended Lawyers
Bennett Jones

143

5

5

10

14.0%
Blake, Cassels & Graydon

269

7

8

15

11.2%
Borden Ladner Gervais

272

2

5

1

2.9%
Cassels Brock & Blackwell

206

4

2

7

6.3%
Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg

136

12

6

9

19.9%
Dentons Canada

176

0

0

1

0.6%
Fasken Martineau DuMoulin

227

5

5

2

5.3%
Goodmans

200

11

5

14

15.0%
Gowling Lafleur Henderson

219

1

0

6

3.2%
McCarthy Tétrault

269

12

4

16

11.9%
McMillan

155

2

2

0

2.6%
Norton Rose Fulbright Canada

199

1

1

4

3.0%
Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt

267

12

5

9

9.7%
Stikeman Elliott

203

16

8

13

18.2%
Torys

239

15

9

14

15.9%

 

Some Numbers:

Top firm by total ranked lawyers: Torys (38).

Top firm by Most Frequently Recommended lawyers: Stikes (16).

Top firm by percentage of ranked Toronto lawyers: Davies (27 ranked lawyers out of 136 Toronto lawyers).

Some Observations:

1. The Seven Sisters lead the way. No surprise, again. Between them they have 220 ranked lawyers. The remaining eight firms have a total of 71 ranked lawyers.

2. Bennett Jones is the top “Tier 2” firm with 20 ranked lawyers. By percentage, it actually did better at 14.0% than Oslers (9.7%) did in terms of Percentage of Recommended Lawyers. 

3. International firms, Dentons (with 1) and Norton Rose (6), came last and third last (respectively) in total ranked lawyers.

Some Thoughts:

A. Who cares?

B. Assuming you care, what’s up with the international firms? They only have seven ranked lawyers between them. Yet, somehow they are both highly touted in all Big Three practices. That’s a bit of disconnect in my mind. How do these firms get recognized for prowess in all Big Three areas, yet get very little individual lawyer recognition? The answer is probably in the methodology, which I’m not going to read. Whatever the methodology says, it still wouldn’t make sense.

C. Which leads to the question, where does value fit into all of this? If you’re not ranked by Lexpert in your practice area, are you a terrible lawyer? Obviously not. In fact, you may be the best lawyer in Canada at your speciality. Maybe your firm is poor at marketing. Maybe you’re a technical dynamo, but disinterested in selling yourself.

And, with respect to the value proposition, how often do transactions or litigations merit thousand dollar billing hours? Those are the transactions/litigations Torys and Stikes are chasing. They can’t get a thousand bucks an hour for five million dollar acquisition files. Yet, most corporate lawyers know small acquisitions can be very complex with inter-jurisdictional issues, tax complications, and multiple financing sources. Clients need smart, experienced lawyers to help them successfully navigate those “small” transactions. They don’t want to pay $900 per hour to get the right help.

What I think somebody should do is rank lawyers on a value basis. Not, “this is the Most Frequently Recommended M&A lawyer”, but “this is the Most Frequently Recommended M&A lawyer that can do a $5 million acquisition file for less than $100,000 in fees.” That would allow potential clients to gauge both competency and value when choosing their advocates.

I’m sure the methodology would still be suspect, but at least we’d be talking about what the majority of clients want to know: where can I find a great lawyer without having to mortgage my house to retain her? For the most part, the Lexpert rankings are a dork-swinging contest between giant firms who point to them as corroboration of their superiority. Yet, many clients will never even meet a Torys lawyer, let alone retain one. Lots of sophisticated businesses make due with Canada’s unwashed (i.e., unranked) lawyers. I bet many clients are extremely happy with their lawyers, even if Most Frequently Recommended isn’t tattooed on their foreheads. I bet if you asked they would say they love their lawyers because they provide great service for affordable fees.

Lexpert makes for fun reading. Its rankings might even be helpful to the tiny fraction of companies that can afford a Seven Sisters firm. In many cases, retaining a Most Frequently Recommended firm is seen by senior managers as an insurance policy against losing their jobs if things don’t go well. Put another way, nobody ever got fired for losing a case after retaining Oslers. But what general counsel has the stones to hire an Everybody Else firm to manage a bet-the-company litigation? Even if the GC knows the lawyer she wants to hire. Even if she’s convinced she can get top-notch service from this unranked lawyer and save her company a boatload of money, there is still huge pressure to hire “the best” — which means a Lexpert-ranked litigation firm. Why risk it, especially if you can afford Oslers?

I guess, in that sense, Lexpert provides some value or insurance in these extreme cases. For the most part, however, these rankings are too narrow to help the majority of clients.

Again, what we really need is a meaningful way to rank or gauge the thousands of lawyers that will never show up on Lexpert’s lists. We need to find a way to add costs into the mix, so shoppers can analyze both competence and potential financial impact. I have no idea how to do that. But, if someone can devise a valid methodology and get law firms to participate, wouldn’t these “rankings” be much more useful to clients?

I certainly welcome discussion on the subject (as long as you remember Rule #1).

That’s the View From Up North. Have a top-ranked week.

Steve Dykstra is a Canadian-trained lawyer and legal recruiter. He is the President of Keybridge Legal Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm that places lawyers in law firms and in-house roles throughout North America. You can contact Steve at [email protected]. You can also read his blog at stevendykstra.wordpress.com, follow him on Twitter (@IMRecruitR), or connect on LinkedIn (ca.linkedin.com/in/stevedykstra/).

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