Outranking The Rest: Vorys Takes First Place In The 2020 TrueLaw Litigation Index – Josh Blandi Writes in Above the Law

UniCourt’s Legal Data as a Service (LDaaS) is an innovation engine that drives insights and powers the business development, competitive intelligence, knowledge management, and process automation for a broad spectrum of industries. We developed the TrueLaw Litigation Index to showcase how LDaaS can be used for building litigation analytics that tell a story of what’s happening across U.S. District Courts and uncover deeper questions about how and why certain law firms rose to the top. 

We’re excited to share UniCourt’s CEO, Josh Blandi’s latest article in Above the Law, “Outranking The Rest: Vorys Takes First Place In The 2020 TrueLaw Litigation Index.” Much like the article Josh wrote last year on the top performing law firm for 2019, “How Williams & Connolly Topped The Litigation Charts,” his new article takes a deep-dive into the litigation profile of the AmLaw firm Vorys, Sater, Seymour and Pease, LLP. To illustrate the types of litigation intelligence that can be derived from court data, Josh reveals the Vorys’ top practice areas, top jurisdictions, top attorneys, and top clients for the finance, insurance, retail, and food services industry. 

Here below is an excerpt from our article in Above the Law:

In a year filled with uncertainty, legal data helps make sense of 2020 litigation trends where the naked eye could not. The COVID-19 pandemic changed the legal landscape in unimaginable ways, and firms both big and small were not immune to the challenges it imposed.

Now more than ever, making decisions informed by data is vital to law firm success and stability. Utilizing legal data gives firms of any size the ability to better understand their competition, scope out business opportunities, and identify lateral recruits.

For the second year in a row, UniCourt has released its TrueLaw Litigation Index, highlighting the top 200 law firms for civil litigation across all federal U.S. District Courts. To produce the insights in this report, UniCourt downloads the data for every new civil case filed in U.S. District Court from PACER, and uses artificial intelligence and automation technologies to organize, clean, and structure the data to determine the real-world law firms involved in litigation.

In this article, we’ll take a closer look at 2020’s top federal civil litigation law firm: Vorys, Sater, Seymour and Pease, LLP. We’ll also review a breakdown of Vorys’ cases, their top clients, and the story behind how they outranked other law firms in federal District Court litigation last year.

How Vorys Moved Up In the Rankings

Founded in Columbus, Ohio in 1909, Vorys takes pride in the firm’s history of success and growth from a four-person operation to a mid-sized powerhouse with nearly 375 lawyers across four states and the District of Columbia. Since its inception, Vorys has represented a wide variety of clients from children’s hospitals to Fortune 500 companies, and has been recognized as “bringing the same level of confidence and reliability as the big firms” to its clients.

Their confidence paid off in 2020, when the firm topped the charts of the TrueLaw Litigation Index by outperforming all other firms practicing in U.S. District Courts. Much like last year’s frontrunner, Williams & Connolly, the bulk of Vorys’ litigation came from one attorney. William D. Kloss, Jr., handled 4,218 cases for Vorys, most all of which were personal injury disputes representing Davol Inc. and its parent company C. R. Bard, Inc, which was previously acquired by Becton, Dickinson and Company. Unlike Williams & Connolly, however, the lion’s share of Vorys’ litigation took place in a single federal district in Ohio.

Here is a breakdown of Vorys’ top five jurisdictions for all cases handled in 2020:

1. Southern District of Ohio: 4221
2. Northern District of Ohio: 27
3. Western District of Pennsylvania: 11
4. Northern District of Texas: 10
5. Central District of California: 8

But the data doesn’t stop there. With access to litigation data, we can see what Vory’s primary practice areas were in 2020, who their top performing litigators were, and even who their top clients were. Below we’ll discuss some of these data points for Vorys and what they mean in the larger context of leveraging intelligence gathered from data.

You can read the full article here on Above the Law.

To learn more about the TrueLaw Litigation Index or how you can use legal data for business development and competitive intelligence, get in touch with us at TrueLaw@UniCourt.com.

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