That’s one of the fascinating findings from the GC Thought Leaders Experiment, they asked in-house departments to evaluate 1,400 legal matters and the results show that hiring the biggest of the Biglaw firms did not result in better service. Indeed, the Am Law 21-200 did better than the top 20 across several metrics including responsiveness, efficiency, quality of work, and solutions focus. Hell, they did better on every metric they tested for. And what’s more, the differences are amplified when you compare the Am Law top 20 to the Am Law 101-200.

The survey methodology didn’t ask respondents to rank firms, but instead asked them to rate the service on specific matters. Even when controlling for variables such as the size of the matter, the length of the firm/company relationship and the type of legal work, the surprising results were the same:

Note that this isn’t an opinion survey: no one ranked firms. These are 28 companies’ evaluations of over 1,400 legal matters; and because we knew which firms and lawyers handled each matter, we were able to determine which firms performed better or worse, as well as identify trends. We also controlled for many variables (such as type of legal work, length of client/firm relationship, size of legal matter, amount of spend with the firm, and the like) to test and re-test our findings. But the result was the same. On the whole, when clients look to hire firms, bigger or more pedigreed is not necessarily better.

It probably makes sense that some factors, such as cost/efficiency, aren’t the elite firms’ strong suit — after all, clients pay a premium for the best of the best attorneys. But the Am Law top 20 are even losing when it comes to solutions focus — defined as “is the outside lawyer demonstrating creativity, strategic thinking, and a ‘yes, and here’s how’ (rather than ‘no’) mindset?” — which is the most relevant factor when clients evaluate whether they’d recommend the firm. The Am Law 20 scores 4.34 in that metric, compared with 4.53 for the Am Law 21-200 and 4.56 for the Am Law 101-200.

So why are the top Biglaw firms falling behind on this essential skill set?

This, too, may be a by-product of staffing leverage (associate to partner ratio) at the largest and most pedigreed firms: as bigger teams liaise with the client, the lead partner may not learn quite as much about the business or matter. And this may be exacerbated by the reality that in-house lawyers are stretched too thin with less time to work with outside lawyers; more than before in-house teams are expected to focus their time and energy collaborating with internal clients to drive business results.

But if clients are consistently less happy with the elite firms, why exactly do they remain at the top of the heap? The authors, Firoz Dattu and Aaron Kotok, point to several reasons that elite Biglaw firms continue to bring in work, such as the possibility that they have reached a tipping point or the high cost associated with switching firms that have an established relationship between the firm and the company, but most importantly that there’s a lack of information to in-house decision makers:

It’s that the legal market has an information problem: we don’t know which firms are performing better, so we are forced to default to brand (and high cost) as proxies for quality. But that is changing, as discussed in this Above the Law article. Clients, in essence, are finding out that the blue chip firms of the past are not necessarily the blue chip firms of the present (and future). Likewise, the “insurance” rationale for choosing certain firms for high-stakes work based on historical reputation should dissipate over time (but won’t disappear).

Now that the information is out there, it’s up to the biggest Biglaw firms to respond.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4002176&forum_id=2#36246354)

but lol at this changing behavior. you hire the top biglaw firms to cover your ass. if you hired cravath and they fucked up, well at least we hired the best.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4002176&forum_id=2#36618402)