Law360 (December 13, 2021, 11:06 AM EST) -- To our readers:

Last month, Law360 Pulse began our quest to measure what makes a law firm successful with our brand new Social Impact Leaders ranking. Now, in our continuing effort to help firms understand how they stack up against their competitors, we're back with our Prestige Leaders, a look at firms' financials and reputation.

Our goal is to look holistically at law firms and assess them across a broad range of categories to highlight what they're doing well and what they could improve. Earlier this year, we identified a list of 10 attributes that would show readers what they'd want to know about the strengths and weaknesses of a particular firm, if, say, they were seeking work there or looking to hire outside counsel.

We're doing this with data from our Law360 Pulse surveys — collected directly from the firms we're ranking and attorneys at those firms — and from across our parent company, LexisNexis, which has been gathering data on the law and the legal industry for decades. We'll then give the results to you, our readers, with analysis and insights into what it means to be a successful law firm in 2021.

Today's publication marks the second of three parts of our new ranking, with one still to come. The Prestige Leaders ranking, in which we take a look at some traditional measures of firm success, includes four important pillars: profits per partner, a firm's reputation as a place summer associates want to work, sentiment analysis around a firm's mentions in the legal news, and Law360 awards a firm has won. We chose to use PPP both because we felt it would help level the playing field for midsize firms, and because it's now often viewed as a measure of law firm success and financial health — and it's been shown that higher PPP helps firms attract and keep top talent, making it an ideal marker of a firm's prestige.

Next month, we'll kick off the new year with our most comprehensive ranking to date, combining results from Social Impact and Prestige Leaders with assessments of firms' work in the transactional and litigation spaces to give you, our readers, a fully rounded picture of what makes a successful law firm.

This project is a work in progress, and something we hope to expand and deepen in the coming years with new data points as they become available to us. We welcome your feedback, which you can send to us at surveys@law360.com.

Thanks for coming along on this journey with us!

Kerry Benn

Director of Series, Surveys and Data

Law360 Pulse

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