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If a company wants to buy another company or has been approached by a company that wants to buy them, either company’s law department might like some guidance as to which law firm to retain. Since large deals announce the law firms representing both sides in mergers and acquisitions, companies compile the data. The New York Times published some of that data regarding M&A legal advisors through the second quarter of 2014 (July 1, 2014 at B8).

The firms are Allen & Overy; Blake, Cassels; Cleary Gottlieb; Davis Polk; Freshfields; Jones Day; Latham & Watkins; Simpson Thacher; Skadden, Arps; Slaughter and May; Sullivan & Cromwell; Willkie Farr; Wachtell, Lipton; Weil, Gotshal; and White & Case. Together, these fifteen firms accounted for a significant chunk of the nearly $1.77 trillion worth of deals announced in the first six months of 2014.

Let’s present the M&A data on leading law firms using graphs. The first graph shows the 15 law firms and the number of deals on which they have been retained.

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If some method were available to assess the quality of blog posts, lawyers as a group would learn more quickly and benefit more from blogs. Currently, each blog post is equal in value – however “value” might be determined – to every other blog post. My research into the blog posts of large U.S. law firms must stop at the point of quantifying many aspects of those posts; no technique exists to describe them or assess them qualitatively.

Analogies to what such a qualitative method might entail come from law, academia, intellectual property, and programming. When a court’s opinion is cited frequently in subsequent opinions, we can count those later citations and infer that a more frequently-cited case has more importance than a less frequently cited case. When a professor publishes a paper, citations to that paper provide a rough measure of its quality. If other academics rely on the paper’s findings, presumably those findings have value and the higher the citation number, the more value. Likewise, when patents cite prior art and related patents, the patent applicant has made some assessment of the importance of the cited patents. Finally, if a question asked on StackOverflow has been viewed hundreds of times, you can guess that the topic is deemed important by many people. In all four of these areas, there are sources that compile the data that people want.

Blog posts have no similar measures of the level of interest they raise or their evaluated worth; more’s the pity.

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    The Economist, June 28, 2014 at 11, writes about higher education’s future and observes that with colleges, it “suffers from Baumol’s disease – the tendency of costs to soar in labour-intensive sectors with stagnant productivity.”

That effect could diagnosis the malady of corporate legal services: what big-firm lawyers do is labor-intensive, in the sense that a person not a machine has to do most of it and output per hour hasn’t budged much. It takes about as long to review a contract now as it did ten years ago. Maybe more given the new legal risks that have reared up. It takes about the same amount of time to talk to a client about the facts and ask questions that bear on the legal issues. It takes time to read a decision and understand its rationale and reach. Baumol’s disease would predict that hourly rates will tend to soar for top-flight legal work. Despite much talk about alternative structures for law firms, or pressure by general counsel to deliver greater value (increase productivity, in other words), or software plus the internet, the productivity of lawyers doing complicated work has barely changed. Fees rise inexorably.

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We have looked at the blogs of the firms in this series according to their substantive legal practice area. Most of the blogs have a substantive focus, such as tax or anti-trust. But what about the sub-topics that are secondary to the substantive focus?

To collect the data in the graph below, I visited each blog and either took the blog’s self-description or devised what I thought would be important sub-topics of the blog. When all those sub-topics were compiled I regularized them and then plotted the ten most frequent sub-topics.

For example, iPhone.JD, by Jeff Richardson, a partner at Adams and Reese, has a substantive practice focus of telecommunications, but I assigned it sub-topics of privacy, cyber-law, and perhaps others. http://www.iphonejd.com/

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Continuing this series on law firms and their blogs, I hypothesized that firms with wider-spread branch offices would support more blogs. My reasoning was that if your footprint of clientele and prospective clients is broad, you need marketing efforts that reach broadly. Prospective clients everywhere can read blogs so they inherently reach broadly. On the other hand, firms whose offices are clustered more around their largest office may rely relatively more on local marketing.

The plot below shows the total number of blogs hosted by groups of firms where the firms are categorized by different average distances of their branch offices from their main office.

blogs by avg distance from largest office
Single office firms are on the left side of the horizontal X-axis and the short column tells us that they host only 2or 3 blogs. What I termed “local” firms have an average distance of their branch offices from their main office of less than 100 miles: “local < 100”. As a group they hosted 17 blogs. “State” firms have an average distance of their branch offices at less than 200 miles, so I thought of them, roughly speaking, as covering one state. If the average of the firm’s branch offices was between 200 miles and 400 miles, the firm was categorized as “contiguous” since their offices were likely clustered in their home state and bordering states. The category “multi-state < 1000” suggests firms that have established branch offices beyond bordering states, but perhaps not spanning the country, which is what the category “national” firms represents.

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This post looks at the topics of the blogs described previously. Recall that forty-nine large US law firms host one or more blogs. When you categorize those blogs by substantive legal practice area, you find the distribution shown in the plot below.

Topic numbers June 25
With 30 of the blogs focused on it, by far the dominant practice area is employment law. Why? Because every corporate client (or hoped for client) has at least one employee, because a bewildering array of Federal, state, and local laws and regulations complicate employment arrangements, and because it mixes counseling and litigation.

Next comes litigation, with a score of blogs addressing that practice area. Some treat the topic generally; others pick portions of the broad litigation spectrum, such as appellate practice or class actions.

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I have previously described a set of 65 U.S. law firms with 200 to 300 lawyers.   Click here to read the full list of firms and understand the background: http://wp.me/p4JQV6-2aB

Of that group, fourteen firms support no blog, as well as I can determine. Those fourteen firms, as they are identified in the plot that follows with shortened names, are Archer Greiner, Boies Schiller, Cahill Gordon, Chapman Cutler, Honigman Miller, Loeb Loeb, Miller Canfield, Quintairos Prieto, Robins Kaplan, Shutts Bowen, Stroock Stroock, Vedder Price, Wachtell Lipton, and Williams Connolly.

My hypothesis was that smaller firms would predominate, simply because they have fewer lawyers who might choose to start and sustain a blog. To test this hypothesis, I combined data my blog data set with numbers of lawyers at each firm in 2013, from ALM’s NLJ350 data set. The plot sorts the firms from the smallest at the lower left to the largest at the upper right.

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Many U.S. law firms host blogs. They do so in part so that in-house counsel find them if they search for a topic on the internet or so that they develop followers of the blog who are interested in the issues dealt with by the blog. Law firm blogs, in short, are marketing.

But how many law firm blogs are there? I researched the blogs of 65 U.S. law firms that have 200-300 lawyers. Those firms are Adams and Reese; Archer & Greiner; Armstrong Teasdale; Baker & Daniels; Balch & Bingham; Bingham Greenebaum Doll; Boies, Schiller & Flexner; Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck; Burr & Forman; Butler, Snow, O’Mara, Stevens and Cannada; Cahill Gordon & Reindel; Carlton Fields; Chapman and Cutler; Clark Hill; Cole, Scott & Kissane; Dickinson Wright; Epstein Becker & Green; Faegre Baker Daniels; Fenwick & West; Fisher & Phillips; Foley Hoag; Fredrikson & Byron; Gardere Wynne Sewell; Gibbons; GrayRobinson; Honigman Miller Schwartz and Cohn; Ice Miller; Kelley Drye & Warren; Knobbe Martens Olson & Bear; Lathrop & Gage; Leonard Street; Loeb & Loeb; Lowenstein Sandler; Maynard, Cooper & Gale, McElroy, Deutsch, Mulvaney & Carpenter; Miles & Stockbridge; Miller Canfield; Moore & Van Allen; Morgan & Morgan; Parker Poe Adams & Bernstein; Phelps Dunbar; Porter Wright Morris & Arthur; Quintairos, Prieto, Wood & Boyer; Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi; Robinson & Cole; Roetzel & Andress; Saul Ewing; Shumaker, Loop & Kendrick; Shutts & Bowen; Steptoe & Johnson PLLC; Stinson Morrison Hecker; Stites & Harbison; Stradley Ronon Stevens & Young; Strasburger & Price; Stroock & Stroock & Lavan; Taft, Stettinius & Hollister; Thompson & Knight; Vedder Price; Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; Warner Norcross & Judd; White and Williams; Wiley Rein; Williams & Connolly; Williams Mullen; and Winstead.

The plot below shows how many blogs I identified for each firm. In coming days I am going to write about various ways to analyze the blog data from this set of firms.

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Sometimes you want to compare companies on metrics that vary widely. As an example, patent applications granted during a year for a group of companies may vary from five to fifty. The external legal spend of those same companies may vary from $750,000 to $6 million. You can rank each company from high to low on patents and then on spend and find that company A is number 5 on patents and number 8 on spending. Thus, company A is somewhat “better” on patents than spending because it was higher on the ranking.

But ranking eliminates most of the data that could more finely discriminate the companies from each other. That company A ranked number 1 on patents merely says it is two positions ahead of company C ranked number 3. You’ve lost the actual difference between them. In fact, perhaps company A had three times as many patent applications granted than company C. Being fixed intervals, ranks lose information.

A method to preserve the granularity of data is to calculate how each company’s figure varies from the average figure for the group. Company A then might be 500% of the average while company C might be 150% (or approximately like that). At least that listing gives some idea of the size of the gaps between companies.

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When you create a plot, you may be content with the default text labels on the axes. You should, however, at least be aware of some choices you could make. To make this point real, let’s plot the 14 law firms that this year’s NLJ 350 reported as having more than 1,500 lawyers.

june19fifteen100axes
Pay attention to the horizontal axis (the X-axis) above. The default for the software I use has 500-lawyer intervals and adds as “text” the numbers of lawyers without commas.

Most people find it easier to process larger numbers if there are commas. Some parts of the world use a dot (period) instead of a comma and software can accommodate that style. The next plot adds commas.