Best Lawyers® is expanding its widely-respected lawyer survey to include legal communities around the globe. Starting with Canada, which was added in 2006, at least 20 other countries will be included in our listings of outstanding lawyers by the end of 2008. Wherever we go, we bring the same rigorous peer-review methodology and the same absolute integrity that have made Best Lawyers the premier lawyer-referral service in the United States for over a quarter century.
When lawyers from a new country are added to the Best Lawyers database, the selection process is divided into two parts: nomination and polling. We begin the nomination process by asking lawyers listed in The Best Lawyers in America® to nominate lawyers in the country whose work they know and respect. We then contact those nominees and ask for additional nominations in their country and in their specialty. We also solicit nominations from the chairmen and marketing officers of major law firms in the country.
We then conduct a rigorous survey of the lawyers in that country using what we call a “cascading poll” – that is, a poll that adds additional nominees and solicits votes on them as it progresses. In the first round of voting, the ballot lists only the names of lawyers who have been identified through the nomination process.
All voters are asked to submit additional nominations. These new names become the basis for a second round of voting. The voting pool for the second round includes all new nominees who have been nominated from outside their firm and those lawyers previously nominated from within their own firm who received consistently high marks on the first ballot.
Because ballots always request additional nominees, each round of voting creates a new list of nominees and a new voting pool. The number of rounds required to reach a general consensus (i.e., an agreement that the list contains all the appropriate names) depends on the size of the legal community involved. In general, polling ends when no new high-scoring names emerge from additional ballots. At that point, we evaluate all of the votes that have been entered, giving particular weight to votes from those lawyers who have themselves received the highest votes, to determine which names should be included in the Best Lawyers listings for that country.
Once a list is established, a new poll is conducted each year following the methodology for new editions of The Best Lawyers in America.
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Inclusion in Best Lawyers is based entirely on peer review. For 25 years, the top lawyers in the U.S. have helped make The Best Lawyers In America the leading legal referral guide by candidly evaluating the work of other top lawyers in the same specialties and geographic areas.
Lawyers are nominated to Best Lawyers in three ways. First, all of the lawyers in the previous edition of Best Lawyers are automatically nominated into the next edition. Second, during the voting process, voting lawyers are asked to nominate any outstanding lawyers who have not yet been nominated. These lawyer nominations are generally for lawyers at other firms and register as votes as well as nominations.
Finally, now that most large firms have marketing departments, Best Lawyers allows marketing directors to nominate lawyers from their own firms. We ask only that they exercise prudence. Nominating too many lawyers not only creates an unwieldy ballot but can also prejudice voters against all the nominees from a firm. Nominating under-qualified lawyers can cast a firm’s best candidates in an unfavorable light. Click here for Best Lawyers nomination forms.
In most cases, nominees who are not selected for inclusion in Best Lawyers automatically remain on the ballot for the next two editions.
In established specialties, the voting pool consists primarily of lawyers listed in the previous edition of Best Lawyers. Nominees who get particularly high votes may also be asked to vote. When new specialties are added, the voting pool consists of listed lawyers in related specialties and/or listed lawyers in the same specialty in another jurisdiction, as well as nominees who receive particularly high votes.
In large legal communities (such as New York City and Washington, D.C.), lawyers are asked to vote only on lawyers in the same specialty and in the same legal community. In medium-size legal communities (such as Columbia, South Carolina, or San Jose, California), lawyers may be asked about lawyers in related specialties in the same community or in the same specialty across the entire state. In small legal communities (such as Corpus Christi, Texas, or Rapid City, South Dakota), lawyers may be asked about all of the lawyers in the same community across the full range of specialties.
Best Lawyers is published annually. Each year, lawyers in half the states (by population) are called and asked to vote by phone; lawyers in the other half are asked to vote by e-mail or fax. The next year, the process is reversed, so that every voter has an opportunity to vote “in person” every two years.
Whether by telephone, e-mail, or fax, we ask voting lawyers the same question, “If you could not handle a case yourself, to whom would you refer it?” Lawyers are asked to give nominees A-B-C letter grades – A for a lawyer the voter would certainly refer a case to, B for a lawyer the voter would probably refer a case to, and C for a lawyer the voter might hesitate to refer a case to. Lawyers are allowed to give pluses or minuses in order to make their votes more precise.
Once all of the evaluations have been compiled, the letter grades are converted into numerical equivalents and then averaged. Eccentric votes – far better or far worse than the others – are excluded from this calculation. The numerical average required for inclusion varies according to the average for all the nominees within the specialty and the geographic area. In close cases, the editors make final decisions based both on comments that are made about a nominee during the polling process and on the grades of the voting lawyers (votes can be given more or less weight depending on the voter’s own grades and on how closely that voter predicts the outcome for the other nominees in the specialty).
As soon as the selections are finalized, the selected lawyers are checked against state bar association sanction lists to make sure that every lawyer is in good standing with the ethics committee of his or her state bar. Then letters of congratulation are sent to all the listed lawyers. At the same time, marketing directors receive summaries of the survey results for their firms, including lists of returning listees, new listees, and quantitative information comparing the firm’s survey results to those of other firms in the city, state, region, or nation.
Ultimately, of course, a lawyer’s inclusion on these lists is based on the subjective judgments of his or her fellow attorneys. While it is true that the lists may at times disproportionately reward visibility or popularity, we remain as confident today as we were twenty years ago that the breadth of our survey, the candor of our respondents, and the sophistication of our polling methodology largely correct for any biases and that these lists continue to represent the most reliable, accurate, and useful as well as the most transparent guide to the best lawyers available anywhere.
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