Schmoyer Reinhard is pleased to announce that we have been ranked as a Tier One firm by U.S. News and Best Lawyers® in the 2013 Best Law Firms rankings. The firm was ranked as Tier One in three categories including:
Employment Law – Management
Labor Law – Management
Litigation – Labor & Employment
The U.S. News and Best Lawyers® “Best Law Firms” rankings are based on a rigorous evaluation process that includes the collection of client and lawyer evaluations, peer review from leading attorneys in their field, and review of additional information provided by law firms as part of the formal submission process. To be eligible for a ranking, a law firm must have at least one lawyer who is included in Best Lawyers® as part of the annual peer review assessment.
Clients were asked to provide feedback on firm practice groups, using a scale of 1 (weakest) to 5 (strongest), addressing expertise, responsiveness, understanding of a business and its needs, cost-effectiveness, civility, and whether they would refer another client to the firm. Clients also had the option to write in the names of law firms they have worked with on other matters and within practice areas beyond those they were asked to comment on by the submitting firm. Some clients chose to write a comment about their experience with the law firm. These comments are for reference only and were not used as data points in the formal evaluation process.
Lawyers also voted on expertise, responsiveness, integrity, cost-effectiveness, whether they would refer a matter to a firm, and whether they consider a firm a worthy competitor. Best Lawyers® asked this group to vote on law firms that have a preeminent national presence within specified legal practice area(s) they know well. In addition to information from these surveys, the rankings incorporate the 4.3 million evaluations of 68,761 individual leading lawyers collected by Best Lawyers® in its most recent annual survey.
All of the quantitative and qualitative data were combined into an overall “Best Law Firms” score for each firm. This data was then compared to other firms within the same metropolitan area and at the national level. Because firms were often separated by small or insignificant differences in overall score, Best Lawyers® use a tiering system rather than ranking law firms sequentially. The first tier in each metropolitan area includes those firms that scored within a certain percentage of the highest-scoring firm(s); the second tier, those firms that scored within a certain percentage of the next highest scoring firm(s), and so on. The national rankings were based on metropolitan rankings as well as on the number of offices each firm had with a metropolitan ranking and on the level of legal activity in each metropolitan area. The number of tiers included in each practice area or metropolitan area ranking varies. Of the 11,098 firms that were eligible to submit information for the ranking process, 10,324 firms, including a large number of one-person firms, received rankings, and 6,894 of those firms received first-tier national and/or metropolitan rankings.