Lawdragon 500 Leading Lawyers in America
Posted: January 4, 2008 By KATRINA DEWEY The Beatles or the Rolling Stones? Something in the way she moves … It’s only rock and roll, but I like it, like it, yes I do … The Godfather or Casablanca? I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse. Play it Sam, you played it for her, and you can play it for me. Who’s to say? It’s a matter of personal taste and style which rock band or movie is the best. But among knowledgeable consumers of music and film – often led by critics who have seen thousands of films or concerts – there is consensus on which choices are in the running. The Internet has yet to index that fact. Somewhere down the path to ubiquitous, freely available information formed through a collective effort, we have jettisoned the weighting of judgment and knowledge. Try it. Google “best rock band” and you will find a site called rankopedia.com that allows users to vote their preferences. It informs that the contest is between The Beatles and Led Zeppelin. Wrong, yes. Crazy, no. Also in the top 10 search results are an MSNBC article on the topic (The Beatles) as well as “hits” for The Stooges and the Drive by Truckers. “Best movie ever”? Google’s Top 10 yields a knowledgeable movie database (IMDB) and several journalistic compilations, but also references “The Simpsons” movie. Marty Lipton or Richard Posner? The inventor of the poison pill and much of modern-day corporate law. The nation’s most brilliant jurist and author of the body of law introducing economics to legal decision making. The search for “best lawyer”? There is the website for the peer review service, bestlawyers.com, but also in the top 10 are a host of geographically keyed advertisements of questionable helpfulness and two sites specializing in lawyer jokes. What do you call 10,000 lawyers? An Internet search result. The Internet has scrambled the professional memberships and client representations diligent lawyers have worked decades to attain. Simply by purchasing advertising or using clever word coding to key better results, any mediocre firm can – and does – rank higher in Google search results for “best corporate lawyer” than those who have earned their position as the leaders in the field. Woeth Marty Lipton, the leading U.S. corporate lawyer, who does not come up in the first 10 pages of results (though the best suburbs to live in do). One could debate whether Lipton remains the number one dealmaker given the enormous depth of the New York M&A bench, but it’s not debatable that he is far ahead of lawyers in firms from Miami, Salt Lake City and Philadelphia that precede him in search results. Every lawyer today can be validated through word of mouth, trade association membership and, yes, it’s true, money; best, top, leading and super may mean something or nothing at all. The confusion has led sophisticated clients to consider abandoning the useful tool of online research to inform the right lawyers for their needs. God help the individual consumer. Quantity is not quality and not all opinions are equal. So when it comes to discerning quality, the Internet has become as much foe as friend, bringing us a flood of blogging, flogging and superlatives that obscure arbiters whose entire world is their in-depth knowledge of a topic. Lawdragon brings coherence and judgment to the online search for lawyers. In the past three years, we have talked to tens of thousands of lawyers nationwide about their cases, their clients, their skills, their successes and their failures. Hundreds of thousands of judges, clients and attorneys have had the opportunity to tell us what they think about their counsel. We have vetted that information and made it available to everyone online. That’s what sets Lawdragon apart as we search for the Lawdragon 500 Leading Lawyers in America. Consider our results. We reported on Chris Seeger of Seeger Weiss years before he became one of the five plaintiffs’ lawyers who negotiated the Vioxx pact with luminaries of longer standing. We reported that WilmerHale’s William Lee was held in a nearly unparalleled regard by clients and peers in the IP bar. And we shared with you a general counsel at Starbucks by the name of Paula Boggs, whose exemplary background is translating to incisive in-house management. We also reported on a new general counsel at Lockheed Martin by the name of James Comey, who embodied the best of lawyering in 2007 for the actions he took in 2004 as a top Justice Department lawyer. As reported in the media and his congressional testimony this year, Comey rushed to the bedside of the critically ill Attorney General John Ashcroft to intercept top White House lawyer Alberto Gonzales, who scurried to the hospital to persuade Ashcroft to reauthorize domestic surveillance programs the Justice Department had found unlawful. Lawdragon is where you can find the lawyers making the headlines, as well as those quiet persuaders working behind the scenes. To make our Lawdragon 500, a lawyer must qualify as a finalist, our “first cut” of outstanding practitioners from 100 specialties and all 50 states. We select up to 3,000 such lawyers who live up to a high standard. An attorney generally must have practiced for 20 years, because endurance and sustained achievement is required. We consider leadership in selective bar associations, admittance to “member’s only” trade associations and outstanding performance in cases and matters the attorney has handled. There are disqualifiers as well: a bar record that is not exemplary; having a status other than partner in one’s law firm (with exceptions granted for firms that require even the top lawyers to move to senior counsel status at a certain age); being under investigation (though not an automatic knockout because politics often plays a role in the investigations of lawyers and judges); an absence of recent activity; and lack of respect from peers and clients. Once we’re satisfied we’ve found a lawyer who meets our standard, we go back and check his or her reputation with others who are acknowledged leaders in that practice, as well as those who have been included in prior Lawdragon guides. We ask Lawdragon 500 members if they would respect our credential if that individual was included. It is a powerful standard. The most valuable guides have always been those prepared by journalists. We are the handicappers who know which horse runs best on a given track, what stadium a pitcher struggles in. Lawdragon is ahead of the curve of traditional media organizations. We took decades of experience reporting on legal affairs and made it widely available online so consumers could have improved access to knowledge about the best lawyers. This is our third edition of the Lawdragon 500 Leading Lawyers in America featuring Comey, alongside the redoubtable Ted Olson, who joined him in the White House face-off. Also included are the Vioxx litigators who dueled through a series of test trials to yield the year’s landmark $4.85 billion settlement; the dealmakers who weathered market downturns to accomplish the $45 billion purchase of TXU Corp. by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and TPG; and the lawyers who worked for the Bancrofts and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. to complete the $5 billion purchase of Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal. The year also brought the trial of Scooter Libby, and its showdown between Patrick Fitzgerald and Ted Wells, as well as regional struggles of great importance. Ray Boucher won a $660 million settlement in the interminable litigation by sexual abuse victims against the Los Angeles Archdiocese, while Joseph Power won a multimillion-dollar defamation verdict and settlement for Illinois Supreme Court Chief Justice Robert Thomas. The greatest lawyers and judges endure; they have passion and magic. They make us think, they help us believe. Those categories are difficult for search engines to absorb, but with a company like Lawdragon, there is at least a pathway by which excellence can be included in the relevant criteria. As for movies and music, I like Cream and “Chinatown”, but the Beatles and “Casablanca” are great, too. Here’s looking at you …. View the Lawdragon 500 Leading Lawyers in America [HTML] [2.96MB PDF] Page: 1 of 1 pages for this article
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