The Outside Counsel Rankings: The Top Law Firms According To In-House Counsel

We unveil a new ranking based on what In-house people say about their outside help.

Every law firm wants to say that they are a “trusted adviser” for their clients, and the biggest firms like to say that they are trusted by the largest corporations for their most important (and valuable) legal work. But it pretty difficult to know which firms are actually trusted. Raw profit numbers don’t tell the full story. Deal tables represent churn more than they necessarily represent high-value, complicated legal work. And most of the “prestige” firms trade on are based on self-congratulatory surveys filled out by other Biglaw lawyers.

I don’t really care if Jones Day attorneys think Cravath is a very good firm. I care if Coca-Cola attorneys think that Cravath is a very good firm. I particularly care if Coca-Cola attorneys think Cravath is a better firm than Jones Day when they have new IP to protect.

Above the Law exists to shine a light on the legal industry, and today we’re in a position to put a different kind of spotlight on law firm prestige. We’ve asked in-house counsel what they thought of their outside law firms. We received responses from over 1,000 in-house attorneys, spread across more than 500 companies based in over 50 cities. We think that looking at how in-house counsel rate Biglaw firms is at least as interesting of a question as how Biglaw lawyers rates Biglaw firms.

We asked these in-house attorneys two simple questions:

1) Which law firms does your company engage for legal services?

2) Please indicate the highest level legal work for which your company will engage the particular firm(s).

We defined the “levels” as:

  • Cost-efficient, bulk tasks
  • Routine matters
  • High-value, complex matters
  • “Bet-the-company” matters

Based on these responses, we’ve put together a list of the top 50 outside counsel, according to the in-house lawyers who use them.

The questions were so blunt that our survey did not lend itself to fine distinctions. Any individual in-house counsel is only going to work with a few firms, and they’re generally going to be happy with those firms because… why the hell else would they keep using them. And we only asked them to comment on firms they actually use. Therefore, our list doesn’t try to force an ordinal ranking onto the firms. We can’t tell you which firm is “number 1.”

But we can tell you, in broad strokes, which firms received generally more important work, and which firms received… less than that. If your Biglaw firm didn’t even make the top 50… well, you might want to make sure that your clients use you for more stuff! There were enough responses about enough firms that we felt comfortable distinguishing a top-tier from a second-tier of still highly respected firms that, perhaps, have not been trusted enough to really show what they can do.

Our top-tier has many of the usual suspects: Cravath, Davis Polk, SullCrom, Wachtell, household names all. But our survey also found that the “litigation boutique” was much more highly respected than some people might think. These are good days to work at Quinn or Susman Godfrey.

Our second-tier does seem to show that size matters. Baker McKenzie, Jones Day, even DLA Piper cracked that list, proving that DLA Piper’s Olympus Mons office is doing great work for Martian corporations trying to secure water rights in Space Court.

It’s a pretty cool list. The ATL Outside Counsel Rankings are brought to you by our friends at the commercial litigation finance firm Lake Whillans. Litigation finance has rapidly evolved from a nascent financial product into an important and thriving fixture of the legal industry. Increasingly, innovative corporate legal departments are exploring litigation financing as a useful tool to help hedge risk, control costs, and provide flexibility.

Check out the full report here.


Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.