No, there is no official weighting. The ranking decisions are made by looking at these different factors together, but there is no catch all approach we take for every category.
We place such a high emphasis on client feedback because it is so reliable – we are speaking to people who have recent experience working with the firm and can give an honest assessment as to the quality of the client service, which is what we are trying to reflect in our rankings. Ultimately, if a client says one thing and a market peer says another thing, we are going to go with the client.
The work is key because you could have clients saying incredibly nice things about a firm, but if the work they are handling doesn’t compare favourably to that of the others in the rankings, it doesn’t make sense to rank them in the higher bands.
Market feedback, i.e. feedback from non-clients is probably the most challenging to assess, because we are always trying to determine how reliable someone’s feedback is. Some lawyers may have a hidden agenda to try to further their own cause, which we have to guard against. Instead we look for themes in the market feedback we receive and ignore anything that we consider to be an isolated comment or unreliable. There are occasions when market feedback can be incredibly useful and will have a significant impact on the rankings, however we will always be assessing the context within which it is being provided.
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