Methodology

Inclusion in Best Lawyers® is based entirely on peer review. The methodology is designed to capture, as accurately as possible, the consensus opinion of leading lawyers about the professional abilities of their colleagues within the same geographical area and legal practice area. Best Lawyers employs a sophisticated, conscientious, rational, and transparent survey process designed to elicit meaningful and substantive evaluations of the quality of legal services. Our belief has always been that the quality of a peer-review survey is directly related to the quality of its voting pool.

Lawyers are not allowed to or required to pay a fee to be listed, nor is any purchase required.

For additional information that may not appear in this section, please see our Frequently Asked Questions page.

Nomination Process

To be included in the Best Lawyers peer review process, an attorney must first be nominated. Clients, other lawyers, and marketing teams are the primary sources of nominations for Best Lawyers, but anyone can submit a nomination; we only ask that a lawyer not nominate himself or herself.

All lawyers in the previous edition of Best Lawyers are automatically nominated into their listed practice area(s) for the next peer review process and must garner enough positive votes to be included in the next edition. During the voting process, voting lawyers have the opportunity to nominate any outstanding lawyers who have not yet been nominated. New nominees who are not selected for inclusion in Best Lawyers during their first voting cycle will remain on the ballot as a nominee for the next edition as well.

Nominators must choose a practice area from our list to ensure that the nomination is properly submitted. You can access the practice area list for each country by clicking here.

Click here (here for UK and AU) to access/download a Best Lawyers nomination form.

Voting

Voting attorneys for Best Lawyers are those currently listed in the publication, creating an unparalleled level of transparency in our polling process. Customized ballots are generated for each voter and are populated with nominees in the voter’s corresponding geographic area and practice area(s). Because Best Lawyers' voters provide peer review within their own geographic area and practice area, lists are not subject to the distortions of “open” voting. A large and open voting pool introduces a host of potential distortions to the selection process, including encouraging collusion between lawyers to secure votes.

Whether by telephone, e-mail, or fax, we ask voting lawyers the same question, “If you were unable to take a case yourself, how likely would you be to refer it to this nominee?” Lawyers are asked to give nominees 5-1 numerical grades – 5 for a lawyer the voter would certainly refer a case to, 4 for a lawyer the voter would probably refer a case to, 3 for a lawyer the voter might hesitate to refer a case to, 2 for a lawyer they would likely not refer a case to, and 1 for an attorney they would definitely not refer a case to. Voting lawyers are allowed to provide decimal points in order to make their votes more precise. The option to choose “I Don’t Know” is also available, which signifies that the voter is not familiar with a particular attorney’s work.

Best Lawyers does not set artificial quotas or target percentages for the size of its lists.

Inclusion

Once all of the peer review evaluations have been compiled, the votes are averaged. Votes from partners within a nominee’s own firm are weighed appropriately, and eccentric votes – far better or far worse than the others – are tagged for further review.

As soon as the decisions are finalized, the selected lawyers are checked against state bar association sanction lists to make sure that he or she is in good standing with the ethics committee of his or her state bar. Notifications of congratulation are sent to all the listed lawyers to inform them of their inclusion. Firms who have designated contacts with us will also receive comprehensive summaries of the survey results for their firm(s).

It is important to note that the practice area of a lawyer listed in Best Lawyers is based on the nomination and corresponding votes received from their peers. Listed lawyers are not permitted to add practice areas they want to be included in, as they must be nominated for and voted into each practice area. Subspecialties may be added to existing practice area listings to assist clients in locating an attorney that has expertise in very particular legal matters. Lawyers do not automatically remain on the list, but must be voted onto the list during each voting cycle to be included in subsequent editions.

Ultimately, 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 three decades 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.