Top Outside Counsel 2021

Above the Law's Outside Counsel Rankings: Who You Gonna Call?

For the fourth year, Above the Law asked in-house counsel what they thought of their outside law firms. Of course, there are a multitude of ways of rating and ranking law firms, from deal tables to “profits-per-partner” to “prestige.” But there is no more crucial issue to firms than what clients — or potential clients — think of them. For Biglaw firms, the clients that truly matter are GCs and legal departments at America’s top companies.

Who do in-house counsel call when they need legal help? Who do they call when their company can’t afford to lose? The Above the Law Outside Counsel Rankings have been generated exclusively from surveys to in-house counsel at top companies. Their opinion is a true measure of law firm “prestige,” — the kind that leads directly to business.

Methodology

From February through April of this year, we reached out to corporate counsel and in-house attorneys at thousands of companies, ranging from small and medium-sized private companies to large public corporations. Ultimately, roughly 800 in-house lawyers — from 440 companies and more than 40 cities — shared with us their evaluations of their companies’ outside law firms. Our survey was direct. We asked counsel two simple questions: 1.) “Which law firms does your company engage for legal services?” and 2.) “Please indicate the highest level legal work for which your company will engage the particular firm(s).” The “levels” of work were defined along a four-point scale:

Cost-efficient, bulk tasks (1)
Routine matters (2)
High-value, complex matters (3)
“Bet-the-company” matters (4)

Because of the “blunt instrument” nature of our question, the resultant ratings are inapt for the purposes of an ordinal ranking. Thus, our first tier and second tiers comprise the 75 firms with the highest mean ratings based on this scale. Only firms with a minimum threshold number of ratings — as adjusted for firm size — were eligible for inclusion.

Outside Counsel:
Top Tier Firms

Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer*
Cleary Gottlieb*
Covington & Burling
Cravath
Davis Polk
Debevoise
Fenwick & West*
Gibson Dunn
Jones Day
Keker Van Nest*
Kirkland & Ellis
Latham & Watkins
Milbank*
Munger Tolles*
Orrick*
Paul Weiss
Ropes & Gray
Simpson Thacher
Skadden
Sullivan & Cromwell
Wachtell
Weil Gotshal
Williams & Connolly
Wilmer Cutler
Wilson Sonsini*

*new to top tier this year