Central Mass. Law Firms Show Well In New National Ranking
In rather the same manner as its rankings of colleges and hospitals, U.S. News & World Report, along with Best Lawyers, has ranked the country’s law firms and Central Massachusetts firms did well indeed.
Of the 10 largest firms in Central Massachusetts, five ranked in the U.S. News/Best Lawyers Tier 1 category: Bowditch & Dewey, Fletcher Tilton & Whipple, Mirick O’Connell, Seder & Chandler and Mountain, Dearborn & Whiting.
The rankings were done by practice area and are split into as many as five tiers depending on the size of the geographical area in which firms are based.
The five largest Central Massachusetts firms that were unranked were: Fuller, Rosenberg, Palmer & Beliveau; Burns & Farrey; Hassett & Donnelly; Chapin Intellectual Property Law and Pierce & Mandell.
“What is cool is that compared to the huge mega-firms, we did okay,” said Louis Ciavarra, senior partner at Bowditch & Dewey. “In intellectual property law, seven firms in Mass. rated Tier 1, and we were one of them. The rest are the big boys.”
Bowditch was the local firm with the greatest number of Tier 1 rankings with a total of 10. Seder & Chandler of Worcester made it to the top tier in bankruptcy law, construction law, corporate law and litigation.
Bob Seder, managing partner at Seder & Chandler, said rankings like those in U.S. News/Best Lawyers are nice in some ways, but firms don’t necessarily make a big show of it.
“We might suggest on our website that we’re considered one of the better firms in Central Massachusetts by U.S. News, but in terms of marketing, some older lawyers haven’t gotten used to lawyer advertising. When we all started, you just didn’t do it.”
Mirick O’Connell was ranked in Tier 1 in corporate law and general commercial litigation and in Tier 2 in bankruptcy law.
Fletcher Tilton & Whipple, as well as Mountain Dearborn, made Tier 1 in corporate law.
U.S. News/Best Lawyers claims 1,859 firms participated. More than 9,500 clients, including every Fortune 100 company and 587 of the Fortune 1,000 companies, provided 194,370 firm practice-area evaluations. Nearly 6,200 clients provided 11,181 comments about law firm practice areas and individual lawyers and 8,842 lawyers provided 594,012 evaluations.
Steven Naifeh, president of Best Lawyers, which worked with U.S. News & World Report on the rankings, said the law-firm rankings are quite different from the famous U.S. News rankings of colleges and hospitals.
“There’s a lot of competitive information here,” Naifeh said. “Clients told us rankings are useful only with large amounts of additional information. Firms are looking over their shoulders at other firms all day every day, so this gives them information from other lawyers and clients.”
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