Back in 2002, Jones Day was the first winner of The American Lawyer‘s biennial Litigation Department of the Year contest; beating out Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher; Kirkland & Ellis; Simpson Thatcher & Bartlett; and Williams and Connolly. This Year Gibson became the first firm to win the contest twice, outpacing Boies, Schiller & Flexner; Mayer Brown; O’Melveny & Myers; Sidley Austin; and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to reprise its 2010 first place finish [Litigation Department of the Year, The American Lawyer, January 2012].
But how do the firms compare when you take the long view? Pulling together a list of law firms and their wins [see chart, right], we devised an unscientific measure of lifetime achievement that we’re calling the Litigation Power Rankings. We assigned five points to the winners in the general litigation competition and three points to the finalists, and we gave three points to the winners in individual practice areas and two to the runners-up. Firms that win an honorable mention get one point. In this way, we aimed to identify the firms that have managed to achieve a sustained record of superior litigation results.
