law firm

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The Hong Kong Law Fair will be com­ing to the Uni­ver­sity of Sydney this year, and it’s being coordin­ated by the Chinese Law Stu­dents Soci­ety. Register now to attend, and spread the word!

04 Mar 2009 by Enoch Lau | No comments

Top Australian law firms, the Google way

26 Dec 2008 in Law by Enoch Lau | 14 comments

Other law firm rank­ings go by rev­enue, the num­ber of part­ners, or some other meas­ure of big­ness. But in this Web 2.0 world, shouldn’t we be look­ing at what the unwashed masses have to say? In that vein, I am proud to present the 2009 nointrigue​.com Aus­tralian Law Firm Rank­ings.

The basic idea is that the bet­ter the law firm, the more art­icles there should be on the Inter­net that refer to them. This is sim­ilar to the idea behind PageR­ank, although I can only find out the PageR­ank of a firm’s web­site to the nearest integer, which is insuf­fi­ciently fine-​​grained.

I put each of the law firms’ full names through Google in the fol­low­ing format: "law firm name" AND law site:.au. The name is com­bined with the word law because firms like Gadens have rather com­mon names that could be used in other con­texts.1 The search is restric­ted to Aus­tralian sites, because inter­na­tional firms like Baker & McK­en­zie would be unfairly advant­aged – these rank­ings are meant to be for the Aus­tralian market.

Rank­ing Law Firm Page Count Part­ners2
1 Free­hills (*) 20,000 214
2 Mal­lesons Stephen Jaques (*) 19,600 197
3 Allens Arthur Robinson (*) 19,500 197
4 Minter Ellison (*) 18,600 286
5 Dea­cons3 18,200 133
6 Clayton Utz (*) 17,300 223
7 Hunt & Hunt 15,200 56
8 Blake Dawson4 (*) 14,800 182
9 Corrs Cham­bers Westgarth 9,700 120
10 DLA Phil­lips Fox 8,010 164
11 Gadens 6,210 109
12 Mad­docks 6,160 53
13 Baker & McKenzie 5,950 91
14 Hold­ing Redlich 5,720 49
15 Gil­bert + Tobin 4,830 54
16 Sparke Hel­more 4,760 57
17 Middletons 4,260 64
18 Dibbs Abbott Stillman 3,330 68
19 McCul­lough Robertson 3,300 39
20 Arnold Bloch Leibler 3,260 28
21 Piper Alder­man 3,080 56
22 Henry Davis York 2,510 50
23 TressCox 2,170 48
24 Dav­ies Col­lison Cave 1,800 34
25 Her­bert Geer 1,530 47
26 Lander & Rogers 1,400 42
27 HWL Ebsworth 1,310 99
28 Hall & Wilcox 1,290 27
29 Moray & Agnew 910 53
30 Thom­son Play­ford Cutlers 335 37
31 Kennedy Strang 252 95

Notes:
1 This is very rough and some irrel­ev­ant hits might still be returned. How­ever, it appears to be “good enough” via inspec­tion of some of the hits found.
2 The num­ber of the part­ners is stated at 2 Janu­ary 2009, and sourced from the Aus­tralian Fin­an­cial Review, 12 Decem­ber 2008, page 46.
3 “Dea­con” is a com­mon word and the search with this law firm’s name was par­tic­u­larly prob­lem­atic with many irrel­ev­ant hits; the page count is there­fore prob­ably higher than what it should be.
4 Full dis­clos­ure: I cur­rently work at Blake Dawson as a sum­mer clerk.
* The firms with an aster­isk are the Big Six law firms.

For com­par­ison, I used the same meth­od­o­logy on UK firms, this time switch­ing the domain to .uk. Clif­ford Chance, with 236 part­ners in the UK, returned 19,000 hits. Link­laters, with 227 part­ners, was second, with 12,800 hits. Thirdly, Fresh­fields Bruck­haus Deringer scored 12,500 hits; it has 219 part­ners and coun­sels, roughly coun­ted from their web­site. Inter­est­ingly, this is the same order as repor­ted by The Law­yer Global 100 2008, which ranks law firms by total revenue!

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Gadens clerkship application

20 Aug 2008 in Law, University by Enoch Lau | 1 comment

Gadens Law­yers have caught the atten­tion of many a law stu­dent with their out­rageous approaches to mar­ket­ing them­selves as an attract­ive, pro­gress­ive employer.

This year was no dif­fer­ent, and I couldn’t res­ist snatch­ing their advert from a law school notice­board (after the applic­a­tions have closed) to bring you a choice selec­tion of altern­at­ive applic­a­tion meth­ods. Sat­is­fy­ing any of the fol­low­ing would, appar­ently, “entitle you to an instant interview”:

  1. List the middle names of all the part­ners of Gadens Sydney as at 30 June 2008
  2. Draft your applic­a­tion entirely in prose, in the format of Dr Seuss’ “Green Eggs and Ham”
  3. Accom­pany your applic­a­tion with an Elle Woods style applic­a­tion DVD.

The flier then says, “Attempt­ing to sat­isfy all 3 cri­teria is just plain show­ing off.”

I was actu­ally curi­ous enough to look into these three cri­teria. First, the middle names: their web­site has a list of part­ners in Sydney, but I saw no middle names. I sus­pect you’d either have to be an insider or know an insider (in which case, you’re look­ing good any­way), or email each and every one of them and risk suf­fer­ing their wrath.

For the second one, I may just be a phil­istine, but I’ll admit that I had to look up the Green Eggs and Ham reference.

Enoch I am
I am Enoch
I am Enoch
Enoch I am

That Enoch-​​I-​​am!
That Enoch-​​I-​​am!
I do not like
that Enoch-​​I-​​am!

Do you like
bor­ing old law firms?

I do not like them,
Enoch-​​I-​​am.
I do not like
bor­ing old law firms.

OK, I give up – espe­cially after find­ing out from Wiki­pe­dia that the entire book is writ­ten using only 50 dif­fer­ent words.

Finally, while I have observed that a num­ber of select indi­vidu­als at law school would fit right into the set of Leg­ally Blonde, I sus­pect they have at least some meas­ure of self-​​dignity. But law stu­dents prove me wrong all the time.

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The Exciting Adventures of Peeter

03 May 2007 in Videos by Enoch Lau | No comments

Come and join Peeter as he explores the wild, scary world of the sewer sys­tem. Sharks, law firms and slime are only some of the delights in store! Watch now!

(This was the entry for FilmSoc’s Hairy Guer­rilla film com­pet­i­tion this semester from Daniel and me. We won Best Animation.*)

Watch it on You­Tube, or down­load the Quick­Time file loc­ally.

* out of a total of one.

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