How Kent’s firms are ranked

For decades two publications have sat in judgement on the legal profession: Chambers & Partners and The Legal 500. Both directories employ teams of researchers to analyse law firms performance based on practice.

They are aided by lengthy submissions from the firms’ marketing departments, but researchers also conduct extensive interviews with clients.

And each year a new edition of each bible-like book is published. The book launches are red-letter days for solicitors and barristers, keen to find out how they have fared against their rivals. Solicitors and barristers take these rankings very, very seriously. Nowadays, most people access the directories online, rather than leaf through hard copies. And over the years no internet ranking services have come close to rivalling these two publications as legal industry barometers.

The Kent Legal Sector Review uses both directories to work out a composite rating by translating rankings into scores. We award five points for a top band rating (Band 1), four points for Band 2 and so on.

The directories don’t always analyse sectors in exactly the same way.

For categories where they do, the maximum a firm can score in a practice is 10. For categories where they don’t, the maximum is five.

We have broken the numerous practice areas down into four headline categories: corporate and commercial; dispute resolution; private client and charities; and real estate and public sector.

Large law firms that work in

more practice areas will, inevitably, be rated in more categories. This will increase their overall score. To balance this, we have compiled a list of niche firms ranked in four or fewer categories including boutique firms who are highly-rated at what they do, and smaller firms that have a number of well-rated departments.

Only offices in the county of Kent are counted, and offices in the London borough of Bromley are not included. Chambers & Partners and The Legal 500 no longer have specific Kent rankings, so our scores are extrapolated from larger geographical areas.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR James Lumley is a freelance writer, journalist and trainer. He’s been covering the UK, EU and US legal sector for more than 20 years, and is based on the Kent/london border.

Some data in a version of the Legal Review published last month was incorrect. We apologise for the error.