How Williams & Connolly Topped The Litigation Charts 

Whether you’re a law firm wanting to size up the competition and scope out potential business opportunities, a legal department wanting to know more about the experience and bench strength of your panel firms against other firms, or a legal recruiting firm looking for the next rainmaker lateral partner, legal data can provide deep insights to augment and direct your decision making. 

To continue our mission of improving access to legal data and to show the power of data for legal professionals across the legal services and legal support spectrum, UniCourt recently released our inaugural TrueLaw Litigation Index – 2019 Law Firm Ranking. 

Based purely on court data from PACER that’s been organized, cleaned, and normalized with artificial intelligence and other public data sets, the TrueLaw Litigation Index features the top 200 civil litigation law firms across all U.S. District Courts for all practice areas. 

In this article, we’ll take a deep dive into the top ranking law firm for all of 2019 — white-shoe, D.C.-based Williams & Connolly, LLP — looking at the breakdown of the firm’s cases, the inside story of how it topped the litigation charts last year in federal District Court, and who its top clients were across different industries.

The Williams & Connolly Story

Recognized internationally as one of the world’s premier litigation powerhouses, the law firm that professional services firms “turn to when they’re in trouble,” and as the firm that has represented the interests of previous Presidents including Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, it comes as no surprise that Williams & Connolly topped out as the most active law firm in federal trial courts across the U.S.

What is surprising, however, is that of the firm’s 4,438 cases it handled last year, 4,347 were representing one single client: BP, and more specifically, BP America Production Company and BP Exploration & Production, Inc. What’s more surprising is that one single rainmaker at the firm, Kevin M. Hodges, handled all of these BP cases, which stem from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill that happened a little over a decade ago.

The cases that Hodges has litigated on behalf of BP have spanned across the Southeast, with the lion’s share of cases being filed in Louisiana, Florida, and Mississippi. Here below is a breakdown of the top 10 jurisdictions where Williams & Connolly handled cases for all of its different clients in 2019:

1. Eastern District of Louisiana: 2970
2. Northern District of Florida: 674
3. Southern District of Mississippi: 444
4. Southern District of Florida: 106
5. Southern District of Texas: 99
6. Middle District of Florida: 26
7. Southern District of California: 22
8. Western District of Louisiana: 14
9. Southern District of Alabama: 13
10. Southern District of New York: 11

To add to the intrigue of our first TrueLaw Litigation Index report, it’s worth noting that last year’s runner up, Nations Law Firm, is the plaintiff firm that filed nearly all of the 4,000-plus lawsuits against BP that were defended by Williams & Connolly. Further, the third-, fourth-, and fifth-placed firms, Liskow & Lewis, Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP, and Maron Marvel Bradley Anderson & Tardy LLC, also defended BP against the litigation brought by Nations Law Firm, which accounted for the overwhelming majority of their caseloads in federal court. 

Because these firms are still going toe-to-toe in District Courts this year, we will closely track this growing body of litigation involving BP.     

Digging Deeper With Legal Data

Three of the basic data points you can quickly glean actionable information from are (1) what types of cases a firm handles, (2) who their top clients are, and (3) who their top lawyers are. 

Looking at the types of cases a law firm has handled provides a snapshot of where the firm is in terms of practice coverage and utilization. And beyond the yearly view for 2019 that we’ve captured for Williams & Connolly, broadening that snapshot across a span of years allows you to see how a firm has evolved over time based on shifts in the legal market, moves by laterals in and out of the firm, mergers and splits, and outsized events like the Deepwater Horizon spill, leading to burgeoning or dwindling case volumes. Here are the top 10 case types Williams & Connolly handled last year:

1. Personal Injury: 4200
2. Marine: 144
3. Medical/Pharmaceutical Product Liability: 27
4. Patent: 11
5. Antitrust: 11
6. Real Property Product Liability: 10
7. Product Liability: 8
8. Contract: 4
9. Security/Commodity/Exchange: 3
10. Racketeer Influenced & Corrupt Organizations Act: 2

In addition to uncovering a law firm’s hottest practice areas and those that might be dropping off, reviewing a firm’s client roster can provide critical competitive intelligence and surface new business development opportunities. Seeing a firm’s list of clients can also reveal new leads for legal support firms who provide advisory services, expert witnesses, and other litigation support services tailored to specific industries and types of businesses that are regularly embroiled in court cases.

When it comes to Williams & Connolly, in just the last year alone, the firm represented an impressive cross-section of high-profile clients in U.S. District Courts in the financial and professional services industry, biotech and pharmaceuticals, and media and broadcasting. The firm also represented other notable clients like Lockheed Martin, Stryker, and CVS in litigation, as well as defending Reed Smith in a $150 million action brought by LabMD that was voluntarily dismissed this past July. Here below are a handful of the clients Williams & Connolly represented in 2019:  

Finance:

1. Bank of America, N.A.
2. BofA Securities
3. Ernst & Young LLP
4. Merrill Lynch
5. MoneyGram

Media and Broadcasting:

1. American Broadcasting Company
2. CBS
3. Disney
4. Fox Broadcasting Company
5. NBCUniversal

Biotech and Pharmaceuticals:

1. Anacor Pharmaceuticals
2. AstraZeneca
3. Bristol Myers Squibb
4. Eli Lilly and Company
5. Foamix Pharmaceuticals
6. Genentech
7. LEO Pharma
8. Merck
9. Par Pharmaceutical
10. Pfizer

Legal data, and attorney data in particular, provides actionable intelligence that can power targeted legal marketing efforts and business development initiatives for a range of firms in the legal industry. From legal recruiting firms and business development professionals in law firms searching for the perfect lateral candidates, to litigation finance firms looking for lawyers with profitable litigation portfolios to invest in, there are numerous use cases for leveraging attorney data for discovering new business opportunities. Including Williams & Connolly’s prolific defense attorney, Kevin M. Hodges, here below are the top 10 litigators for the previous year:

1. Kevin M. Hodges: 4347
2. Emily Renshaw Pistilli: 21
3. Joseph G. Petrosinelli: 10
4. John E. Schmidtlein: 7
5. Liam J. Montgomery: 6
6. Jonathan B. Pitt: 6
7. Ashley W. Hardin: 5
8. Enu A. Mainigi: 5
9. David I. Berl: 4
10. Benjamin M. Greenblum: 4

To make the most of legal data, what’s important is not to look at data points like top case types, top clients, and top attorneys in a vacuum, but to combine them together to add in the depth and color to get the full picture of the business opportunities and intelligence that’s available. 

As with the detailed dimensions of what we can see for Mr. Hodges’ work related to who his clients were, where he’s litigated, and what types of cases he’s worked on, the same level of analysis could also be performed for any law firm listed in the TrueLaw Litigation Index or any of the litigators who made it rise above the rest of the competition. Moreover, other key data points like the statuses of court cases, whether judgments, settlements, or dismissals were reached, and much more could be included to build a tailored window into a lawyer or law firm’s law practice.

To learn more about how we built the TrueLaw Litigation Index – 2019 Law Firm Ranking using normalized court data from PACER, check out our recent blog post. And stay tuned for a more detailed breakdown of the other law firms and litigation trends contained in the report.

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Josh Blandi is the CEO and co-founder of UniCourt, a SaaS offering using machine learning to disrupt the way court data is organized, accessed, and used. UniCourt provides Legal Data as a Service (LDaaS) via its APIs to Am Law 50 firms and Fortune 500 businesses for accessing normalized court data for business development and intelligence, analytics, machine learning models, process automation, background checks, investigations, and underwriting.