Top Litigation Firms by Law School Pedigree
2015 Top Litigation Firms by Law School Pedigree
In a world where college dropouts battle for domination (Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg, Kanye, etc.), the law remains the only profession in which, even decades after graduation, your peers actually care about where you went to school. With that in mind, we present the first installment of a new ranking, Top Litigation Firms By Pedigree. This ranking takes a novel look at the interplay between law school and law firm rankings, focusing on litigation practice. More rapidly compared to other Biglaw practices, litigation appears to be where conventional wisdom is being disrupted. For example, consider the proliferation of high-end boutiques, the explosion of technology-assisted doc review, and the growing relevance of litigation finance firms. Our Top Litigation Firms By Pedigree ranking looks at how longstanding assumptions about attorney credentials are holding up in this new environment.
This ranking is presented in partnership with our friends at Lake Whillans Litigation Finance.
Lawyers as a group dislike uncertainty, and “prestige”—whether of schools or firms—serves as an organizing principle and social validator, letting everyone know where they stand. The lawyer hive mind consistently orders itself in precise ways: consider how the U.S. News “T14” is basically set in stone and how the Vault rankings remain remarkably stable year after year. As late as 2015, Biglaw remains as clubby as Bertie Wooster.
There are two broad ways to think about this phenomenon:
- The practitioners of law at the highest level exist in a sort of closed loop and that is how it should be. The filter of “prestige” is a necessary thing. While the most talented and capable people will presumably succeed regardless, we need some way to differentiate among the rest. But when a person’s talent level is fundamentally unknowable, prestige might not be a perfect tool, but it is what we have. The assumption that one must be doing something right in order to become associated with prestigious institutions is rational.
- This obsession with credentialism is harmful to the profession. This nebulous concept of “prestige” is too dubious a metric upon which to base the choice of a school or employer.
Whichever camp you fall in, there is no gainsaying the outsized role prestige plays in both the educational and professional wings of the legal industry.
A glance at these rankings shows that boutiques dominate the top of the list, “outperforming” their larger competitors in terms of credentials. Of course, some might say it’s inapt to compare boutiques and Biglaw as they have such distinct recruitment models. (For example, large firms don’t have to fill up summer associate classes.) Yet if Biglaw serves as the talent funnel for the high-end boutiques, then either the prestige of law school really does correlate with eventual attorney quality OR the boutiques are as beholden to the entrenched credentialism as the rest of the profession, only maybe more so.
The List
Rank | Firm | Attorney Count | Median Rank | Mean School IQR |
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Bancroft PLLC | 15 | 2 | 4.8 |
2 | Willenken Wilson | 13 | 4 | 3.9 |
3 | Kellogg Huber | 69 | 4 | 4.5 |
4 | Bartlit Beck | 79 | 4 | 6.0 |
5 | Lankler Siffert | 26 | 4 | 6.3 |
6 | Morvillo Abramowitz | 35 | 6 | 5.1 |
7 | Keker & Van Nest | 82 | 6 | 5.9 |
8 | Sanford Heisler | 28 | 6 | 5.9 |
9 | Robbins Russell | 30 | 7 | 6.1 |
10 | Williams & Connolly | 117 | 7 | 6.4 |
11 | Covington & Burling | 401 | 8 | 7.5 |
12 | Bird Marella | 35 | 8 | 8.1 |
13 | Boies, Schiller & Flexner | 227 | 8 | 12.2 |
14 | Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher | 490 | 9 | 9.2 |
15 | Zuckerman Spaeder | 76 | 9.5 | 9.8 |
16 | Yetter Coleman | 32 | 10 | 10.4 |
17 | MoloLamken | 22 | 10 | 10.9 |
18 | Jenner & Block | 257 | 10 | 11.6 |
19 | Morrison & Foerster | 380 | 10 | 11.6 |
20 | Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan | 201 | 10 | 13.5 |
21 | Goldman Ismail | 18 | 11 | 9.6 |
22 | Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr | 633 | 12 | 12.9 |
23 | Kobre & Kim | 45 | 13 | 14.0 |
24 | Weisbrod Matteis | 19 | 13 | 14.2 |
25 | Hughes Hubbard & Reed | 218 | 13 | 16.1 |
26 | Susman Godfrey | 100 | 15 | 11.3 |
27 | Gibbs & Bruns | 32 | 15 | 15.0 |
28 | Arnold & Porter | 399 | 15 | 16.4 |
29 | Beck Redden | 46 | 15 | 28.0 |
30 | Paul Hastings | 347 | 16 | 16.9 |
31 | Horvitz & Levy | 36 | 16 | 17.4 |
32 | Browne George | 14 | 16 | 17.5 |
33 | Crowell & Moring | 277 | 20 | 20.8 |
34 | Fish & Richardson | 266 | 20 | 23.6 |
35 | Alston & Bird | 398 | 20 | 24.3 |
36 | Steptoe & Johnson | 308 | 20 | 24.6 |
37 | Winston & Strawn | 514 | 20 | 26.2 |
38 | Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner | 283 | 20 | 27.4 |
39 | Locke Lord Bissell & Liddell | 289 | 27 | 31.3 |
40 | Bickel & Brewer | 44 | 28 | 34.8 |
41 | Kilpatrick Townsend & Stocktown | 288 | 29 | 25.2 |
42 | Faeger Baker Daniels | 356 | 29 | 31.7 |
43 | Barnes & Thornburg | 292 | 29 | 41.9 |
44 | McKenna Long & Aldridge | 268 | 36 | 38.0 |
45 | Levine Lee | 10 | 36 | 39.7 |
46 | Baker & Hostetler | 456 | 36 | 41.3 |
47 | Lee Tran & Liang | 30 | 38 | 34.1 |
48 | Pepper Hamilton | 291 | 49 | 43.8 |
49 | Jackson Lewis LLP | 252 | 56 | 57.0 |
50 | Blank Rome | 285 | 61 | 59.3 |
51 | Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart | 401 | 61 | 60.1 |
Methodology
To determine our list of eligible litigation firms, we identified all the Amlaw 100 firms where the majority of attorneys are classified as litigators plus the most relevant litigation boutiques. We factored in the findings of various trade journals, such as the NLJ Litigation Hot List.
We assigned median and average values to the litigators' law school alma maters in order to generate the ranking. (We relied on the US News rankings, as it ranks essentially all law schools, in contrast to our own ATL Top 50 Law Schools.)
- “Attorney Count”: Number of litigation attorneys at law firm. Includes lawyers with JDs from a US institution working in US offices.
- “Median School Rank”: Median US News ranking of law schools attended by firm's lawyers.
- “Mean School IQR”: Mean of middle 50% of US News rankings of law schools attended by firm's lawyers.
Questions about our rankings?
Contact us at
[email protected].
This feature is presented by Lake Whillans Litigation Finance. Lake Whillans is a litigation finance firm providing funding for companies in litigation or arbitration. To learn more about us, and litigation finance generally, visit us at our website, lakewhillans.com. To ask a specific question, suggest a topic, or simply say hello, drop us a line at [email protected].