Biglaw

You Can Do Good In Biglaw -- These Firms Show How It Can Be Done

Ranking the good Biglaw does.

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Whether it’s 100% deserved or not, Biglaw has… an unfortunate reputation. Like, you go to law school to save the turtles, but the Biglaw money is so good and the student loans so bad that you wind up graduating and working for Wolfram & Hart defending Goliath Corporation over their latest oil spill.

The truth is there’s a lot of money on the table and it can be difficult to turn that down, so maybe you compromise a little of the kind of work you imagined doing when you applied to law school. But the good news is that some Biglaw firms are doing the work to do good — and now there’s a ranking to see how the firms’ efforts stack up.

Law360 has introduced their Social Impact Leaders ranking. The new ranking evaluates Biglaw firms across four pillars: racial and ethnic diversity, gender equality, employee engagement, and pro bono service. (A detailed methodology is available here.)

So, which Biglaw firms are hitting these key metrics? Law360 has ranked the top 100 firms, but here’s a look at those at the top of the ranking:

1. Covington & Burling
2. Orrick
3. WilmerHale
4. Morrison & Foerster
5. Arnold & Porter
6. O’Melveny & Myers
7. Cooley
8. Wilson Sonsini
9. Patterson Belknap
10. Jenner & Block

They’ve also broken out the firms that excel at pro bono work, ranked by the percentage of attorneys who met or exceeded the 50 hours of pro bono work threshold in 2020. (That’s the ABA’s recommendation for yearly pro bono work for all lawyers. Unfortunately, most lawyers at the firms ranked by Law360 do not meet that recommendation.) The top 5 firms by this standard are:

1. Selendy & Gay
2. Orrick
3. Patterson Belknap
4. Jenner & Block
5. Arnold & Porter

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Congratulations to the firms that made the grade. Hopefully this will spur firms to up their social impact games.

Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

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