World's Biggest Law Firm Wants To Blow Up The Whole Am Law 100 Rankings

A global behemoth lashes out at THE premier Biglaw ranking.

Some ATL readers will have noticed a certain ad campaign running on the site lately in which Dentons accuses The American Lawyer of reporting inaccurate profits per equity partner stats for the firm. (Dentons has rather publicly declined to provide Am Law with PPP data.) The ads raise all manner of questions about how the media can and should report on the financial performance of law firms, especially in light of evolving global business models yadda yadda. But what is really amazing about the ads is that they are a scorched-earth assault by the world’s largest law firm on the integrity of the legal industry’s most prestigious publication and its flagship franchise, the Am Law 100.

To take a step back: Dentons is organized as a verein, a legal structure which (basically) allows separate profit pools to share a brand. (It’s a Swiss invention and has to do with money, so no concerns.) Last year, ATL noted the many objections to the fact that the Am Law 100 counts vereins as single entities. As one Biglaw CFO complained, “Shouldn’t my firm include/recognize the revenue from our extensive network of foreign associates that we send/receive work to/from as we don’t share this revenue or profit?” In this view, the vereins receive unwarranted benefit from Am Law’s methodology. And yet, here we are a year later, and super-verein Dentons is making essentially the same objection: that “conventional” LLPs should not be compared apples-to-apples with these emerging global behemoths. Except of course from their p.o.v., this blanket approach actually is to the detriment of the vereins. In a letter to the editor of The American Lawyer, the global chiefs of Dentons argue that:

[I]n the age of global law firms, which span multiple economies, cost structures and earnings practices, it is impossible for a single global number to reflect accurately the diverse standards of living and operational expense in all of the countries in which we operate.

Hard to gainsay that really. (Although one might conclude from the firm’s rhetoric that it believes that to accept Am Law’s “accounting norms” is to be against “multicultural polycentricism” and the gorgeous mosaic that is the Future of Law, which is of course exemplified by Dentons.) As for Dentons’s explicit contention that Am Law simply just made up some completely b.s. number, Am Law responds: “Our reporters estimate figures based on additional reporting.”

We take no position as to whether Dentons is in the right or even if their argument is persuasive, but Am Law’s response leaves something to be desired considering the massive importance given to the Am Law 100 by all of Biglaw. In fairness to Am Law, for a ranking of law firm financial performance, it is not clear what alternative there is to law firm self-reporting (and estimating when firms refuse to self-report).

Anyway, about that ad campaign (which, unsurprisingly, The American Lawyer declined to run in its own pages)…. for those who haven’t had the pleasure (and please do click away!), Dentons has set up a microsite, Accuracy100.com, the upshot of which is that “in light of the data publicly available, there is no logical method that The American Lawyer could have used to generate its published figures.” We encourage you to check out the substance of their arguments yourself, but it is striking how it all reads like something MSNBC might say about Fox News, or vice versa. Here is a top ten list of the various descriptions Dentons employs for Am Law’s published reporting on Dentons’ financials:

10. “inaccurate”
9. [sic]*
8. “meaningless”
7. “manufactured”
6. “erroneous”
5. “without any attribution”
4. “concocted”
3. “grossly inaccurate”
2. “blackmail”
1. “math does not work”

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*regarding Am Law’s use of “vereinwide”

Readers, what are your thoughts on the case of Dentons v. Am Law”?

Accuracy100.com [Dentons]

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