TrueLaw Litigation Index – 2019 Law Firm Ranking
on Topics: Business Development | Company | Legal Analytics | Legal Data API | Legal Tech
UniCourt is a leader in making court data more accessible and useful. Through our intelligent automation technologies and our artificial intelligence, we aggregate, structure, and normalize court data from state and federal (PACER) courts, so we can provide bulk API access to the data our clients need. As we continue our mission to improve access to court data and information on the attorneys, law firms, parties, and judges involved in litigation, we’re excited to announce the release of our TrueLaw Litigation Index – 2019 Law Firm Ranking.
Download the TrueLaw Litigation Index – 2019 Law Firm Ranking
Beginning in 2018, UniCourt started pulling court data for all civil cases filed in U.S. District Court to ensure that our clients and the public at large could see a complete picture of federal trial court level cases across all jurisdictions in the U.S. Based on the complete set of cases we pulled from PACER in 2019, the TrueLaw Litigation Index highlights the nation’s top 200 litigation law firms across U.S. District Courts for all practice areas and jurisdictions. Because it is focused solely on private firms, the TrueLaw Litigation Index excludes state and federal agencies, U.S. Attorneys’ Offices, state Attorneys General, and nonprofits from our law firm ranking.
While a number of organizations and outlets disseminate top law firm reports each year, from the AmLaw 200 to the NLJ 500, the various Altman Weil surveys, and more, we at UniCourt identified a need for a new type of report: one that is empirical, based purely on litigation data, with no other factors. We have dubbed our report on the TrueLaw Litigation Index due to its data-oriented foundation.
The Top Ten: A Preview of Our Data-Driven List
The top ten firms ranked in the TrueLaw Litigation Index are a microcosmic representation of the ranking at large, which proves diverse in terms of law firm size, geographic reach, and areas of practice. Even in the top ten, we see a range of firm types, from whiteshoe BigLaw firms to small firms handling mass tort cases and class action lawsuits.
Here are the top ten firms:
- Williams & Connolly, LLP
- Nations Law Firm
- Liskow & Lewis
- Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP
- Maron Marvel Bradley And Anderson LLC
- Vorys Sater Seymour & Pease
- Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP
- Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough LLC
- Faegre Baker Daniels LLP
- Fears Nachawati PLLC
As a footnote to the top ten firms and other law firms listed in the TrueLaw Litigation Index, we want to underscore that the report is a snapshot of the litigation in 2019, and does not reflect any law firm mergers or acquisitions that may have occurred so far in 2020.
For instance, Minneapolis-based Faegre Baker Daniels and Philadelphia-based Drinker Biddle & Reath merged into Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP on February 1st, 2020, but are listed separately for the purposes of our 2019 Law Firm Ranking. However, had their 2019 cases counts been combined, they would have totalled over 5200+ cases collectively and taken the pole position from Williams & Connolly.
Entity Normalization Powered by Artificial Intelligence
By its nature, court data is messy, unstructured, and riddled with mistakes. As such, producing the TrueLaw Litigation Index wouldn’t be possible without the entity normalization powered by our AI.
While you only see the top 200 firms listed in our 2019 Law Firm Ranking, the underlying court data contains tens of thousands of variations of law firm names, due to name formatting issues, misspellings, transcription errors, and the frequent name changes law firms undergo due to mergers, dissolutions, and splits among named partners. These variations can lead to a jumble of data that is non-comprehensive at best and inaccurate at worst.
Bad data leads to bad business decisions, and without AI, it would be nearly impossible to wrangle court data to provide accurate, reliable reporting on who the top litigation law firms are, or who their top litigators are, who their top clients are, or which judges they’ve faced in litigation.
Fortunately, with UniCourt’s normalized law firm IDs, our clients can easily pull all of the data associated with a real-world law firm through our application and our Legal Data APIs using the unique alpha-numeric ID we assign to each firm.
Bulk API Access to Litigation Data
Beyond just a list of the law firms included in the TrueLaw Litigation Index, you can download all of the litigation data behind the report to see these law firms’ top attorneys, clients, competitors, practice areas, jurisdictions, and more.
In contrast to legacy platforms acting as strict gatekeepers for accessing court data, UniCourt provides you with options for bulk access to the court data you need via our Legal Data APIs. You can download all of the court data for specific firms listed in the TrueLaw Litigation Index, as well as other law firms of interest to power your business development and competitive intelligence and build your own legal analytics and machine learning models.
Contact us to learn more about getting bulk access to normalized court data via our APIs.
Stay Tuned for Detailed Insights!
In the coming weeks, we’ll offer a behind-the-scenes look at the court data for law firms mentioned in the TrueLaw Litigation Index. In our upcoming posts, we’ll focus on the fascinating story of how Williams & Connolly and the Nations Law Firm vied for the top two positions above all other law firms. We’ll dig deeper into the representation of BigLaw and the small law firm “brawlers” who top the charts, and we’ll also examine the overall makeup of the practice areas and jurisdictions represented in the data.
Download the TrueLaw Litigation Index – 2019 Law Firm Ranking