History

Best Lawyers is the oldest and most respected peer-review publication in the legal profession. A listing in Best Lawyers is widely regarded by both clients and legal professionals as a significant honor, conferred on a lawyer by his or her peers. For more than three decades, Best Lawyers® lists have earned the respect of the profession, the media, and the public, as the most reliable, unbiased source of legal referrals anywhere.

Our lists of outstanding attorneys are compiled by conducting exhaustive peer-review surveys in which tens of thousands of leading lawyers confidentially evaluate their professional peers. If the votes for an attorney are positive enough for inclusion in Best Lawyers, that attorney must maintain those votes in subsequent polls to remain on the list for each edition. Lawyers are not permitted to pay any fee to participate in or be included on our lists.

Best Lawyers® peer-reviewed listings are now published in almost 70 countries around the world, and our presence has grown substantially in the international legal community. The nineteenth edition of The Best Lawyers In America (2013) includes 50,178 attorneys in 128 practice areas, covering all 50 states and the District of Columbia, and inclusion in this year’s publication is based on more than 4.3 million detailed evaluations of lawyers by other lawyers.

The Best Lawyers® Board of Advisors includes legal luminaries from almost every major world economy as well as general counsel from global companies with business on every continent. This very distinguished group of professionals contributes to our knowledge of an ever-changing legal marketplace to ensure that all of our initiatives are responsive to both the concerns of the legal profession and the needs of clients.

Because of Best Lawyers® known credibility, our lists reach a broader and more important audience than any other legal publication. More than 17 million readers see Best Lawyers® lists in dozens of city and regional publications in the U.S. including The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and New York Magazine, as well as in major business and general publications around the world, from Les Echos in France, to the Australian Financial Review, Business Day in South Africa, Expansion in Spain, and the Handelsblatt in Germany.

Three years ago, Best Lawyers partnered with U.S.News & World Report, the leading rankings publication in the U.S., to rank law firms in the United States. Jaffe PR has said that the Best Law Firm rankings have “the attention of legal marketers interested in law firm branding. The information requested is extensive and comprehensive and most firms are participating (within reason as many firms will still not release confidential information like compensation). This publication has credibility and name recognition in the marketplace and provides high PR value.”