You can use the guide to measure a law firm’s bench strength

An interesting exercise is to compare the number of lawyers each national or full-service firm has ranked in Chambers Global with the number of lawyers in total.

This can be tricky because it’s not always easy to get an accurate head count for each firm. We used the head count that is reported in the firm summary section of Chambers online, and some of those numbers are estimates. We then counted up the number of mentions each lawyer received in the Canadian section of the guide. There are some lawyers in the guide who are ranked in more than one category. We included all those mentions, since each is a worthy achievement.

The result gives you a sense of the bench strength of each firm. It also highlights the depth of some of the smaller national business firms. Torys LLP ranked first in this measure, with 66 mentions or 26.3% of its roster written up in the guide.

Les Viner, Torys’ managing partner, says that its bench strength reflects a simple strategy: Focus on quality, not size. “It’s a relentless focus on quality. That is what we communicate and that is what we do. It’s that simple.”

Rounding out the top 10 would be Davies Ward (25%), Goodmans (20.5%), Blakes (16.6%), Osler (18.3%), Bennett Jones (16.9%), McCarthy (16.8%), Stikeman (14.1%), Lawson Lundell (12.1%) and Cassels Brock (11.6%).

“It is not a coincidence,” says Shawn McReynolds, managing partner of Davies Ward, of his firm’s depth. “It results from our consistent focus over many years on selective recruiting, rigorous training, controlled growth rather than rapid expansion and limiting our practice areas to those things we do extremely well.”