A-List

To be named of the 20 firms on the prestigious A-List, The American Lawyer starts with the three different surveys that rated firms' performances for the previous fiscal year. Firm rankings are converted to points by inverting the score. The values are then weighted to find the overall scores. The following are the four components of The A-List: Revenue per Lawyer, Pro Bono, Associate Satisfaction, Diversity and Percentage of Women Equity Partners.

The true A-List consists of the first 20 ranked firms as published in The American Lawyer.  The entire list comprises 200 firms and is available in ALM Legal Compass, however firms 21-200 are listed as relative ranking and shown for illustrative purposes only.

REVENUE PER LAWYER (RPL) RANKINGS come from The Am Law 100 and 200 reports, which are based on the previous fiscal year. A firms rank for The Am Law 200 is inverted to come up with its points for the A-List. For example, the number one firm gets 200 points, and the number 200 firm receives one point.

PRO BONO RANKINGS are derived from the per capita hours and number of firm lawyers (number of lawyers in U.S. offices only as of December 31) who performed at least 20 hours of service annually. The rankings for the Pro Bono list are inverted to come up with point values for the A-List, as described for the RPL points, above.

ASSOCIATE SATISFACTION RANKINGS are determined from The American Lawyers annual survey of midlevels (third-, fourth-, and fifth-year associates). Any firm with at least 10 midlevels may participate in this survey. In 2008, for example, 157 firms returned at least ten responses, which qualified those firms for a national ranking. Because there were fewer than 200 firms on the Midlevel Survey list, for the purposes of the A-List, the top-ranked firm received a score of 200 and the bottom-ranked received a score of 44.

DIVERSITY RANKINGS come from The American Lawyers Diversity Scorecard (a scorecard based on data collected in the Am Law 200/NLJ 500 survey), which ranks firms based on their percentage of U.S. lawyers who are from a minority group. In the past, rankings were based only on the minority percentage of all U.S. attorneys. Starting in 2010 we revised our rankings to stress the importance of hiring and promoting minority attorneys to partnership positions. Our new diversity score was created by adding the minority percentage of all U.S. attorneys at the firms surveyed to the minority percentage of all U.S. partners at those firms.

Am Law 200 firms that did not participate in one or more of the other surveys did not receive any points for those surveys.

FEMALE EQUITY PARTNER rankings come from The Am Law 200 Survey and are based on the percentage of firms equity partners who were women during the previous fiscal year. The rankings for women equity partners are inverted to come up with the point values for the A-List, as described above for RPL points.

To come up with the overall A-List score, The American Lawyer doubled the points for both revenue per lawyer and pro bono and added them to the points for associate satisfaction, diversity and women equity partners. Firms were then ranked by their total scores. Only the top 20 form The A-List.

THE FORMULA FOR THE A-LIST RANKINGS

Firms scores per the five criteria described above are based on their ranks in each survey result. To obtain a score of 1-200 for each criteria, the ranks are subtracted from 201. The scores for each criteria, and the final overall A-List score, are normalized (converted to a range of 1-100 points). Normalizing the scores to a 1-100 range was added in 2017.

For example:

A pro bono rank of 74. To convert to a score of 1-200: 201-74= 127 points for pro bono. Normalized to a range of 1 100 this becomes a pro bono score of 63.5. (127/200 * 100 = 63.5).

An RPL rank of 75. To convert to a score of 1-200: 201-75= 126 points for RPL. Normalized to a range of 1 100 this becomes an RPL score of 63.0 (126/200 * 100 = 63.0).

In this example, assume the firm had the following scores for the remaining criteria: 50.0 for diversity, 63.5 for associate satisfaction and 63.0 for women equity partners.

To determine an overall score, sum the results of the five criteria, giving double weight to pro bono and RPL scores:

(63.5 * 2) + (63.0 * 2) + 50.0 + 63.5 + 63.0 = 429.5

To normalize the score of 429.5 to a range of 1 100, divide the overall score by a possible score of 700 and multiply by 100. This results in a Total A-List score of 61.4. (429.5/700 * 100 = 61.4)

The firms are then ranked based on their Total A-List Score.