Professors Jordan Neyland (George Mason, Antonin Scalia Law School), Tom Bates (Arizona State University), and Roc Lv (ANU/Jiangxi University), have recently posted their article, Who Are the Best Law Firms? Rankings from IPO Performance to SSRN. Here's the Description:

If you have ever wondered who the best law firms are (which lawyer hasn’t?), have a look at our new ranking. My co-authors—Tom Bates at ASU and Roc Lv at ANU/Jiangxi University—and I developed a ranking method based on law firms’ clients’ outcomes in securities markets. 

There is no shortage of recent scandals in rankings in law. In particular, U.S. News’ law school rankings receive criticism for focusing too much on inputs, such as student quality or acceptance rates, instead of student outcomes like job quality and success in public interest careers. Many schools even refuse to submit data or participate in the annual ranking. Similar critiques apply to law firm rankings. We propose that our methodology improves upon existing methods, which frequently use revenue, profit, or other size-related measures to proxy for quality and reputation. Instead, we focus on the most important outcomes for clients: litigation rates, disclosure, pricing, and legal costs.

By focusing on the most relevant outcomes, this ranking system makes it harder for those being ranked to “game the system” without actually producing better results. Moreover, we use multivariate fixed-effect models to control for confounding effects, which provides some assurance that the ranking is based on a law firm’s skill rather than good timing or choosing “better” clients with a lower risk of getting sued.

We suggest that our innovation can provide some guidance and help improve upon extant methods. Rankings can be valuable tools to help evaluate a firm, school, or other institution. Despite the limitations and criticisms of rankings in law, perhaps the solution is to improve the current system instead of withdrawing from it altogether.