What do clients really think about the service they receive from law firms? At Legal 500, we hear from hundreds of thousands of clients every year, rating firms on key metrics such as lawyer quality and availability, billing, and levels of communication and expertise.

The answers we receive allow us to evaluate firms using a set of client service data scores, covering Lawyers and Team Quality, Value: Billing and Efficiency, and Sector and Industry Knowledge – all of which combine to produce an overall Client Service Score.

This article focuses on Lawyers and Team Quality, for which Herbert Smith Freehills scores 82.30. (The rest of this article is available to logged-in users only. If you are unable to log in above right, please click ‘Forgot your password?’ below to gain access to the full article).

By ordering the scores for all Global 100 firms, we can see how they compare to each other. As shown in the graph below, Herbert Smith Freehills’s score of 82.30 sits in the 30-40%, ie fourth-lowest, decile of the Global 100 for Lawyers and Team Quality.

This score is better than competitors including Ashurst, Clifford Chance and Linklaters (those firms’ scores are not published in this article).

Firm performance can also be displayed relative to the market average, or benchmark. Not only does Herbert Smith Freehills outscore Ashurst, Clifford Chance and Linklaters in absolute terms, but it is also the only firm of the four to sit above the Global 100 benchmark for Lawyers and Team Quality.

Lawyers and Team Quality is the average of sub-criteria scores attained for Quality of partners, Quality of associates and Partner availability and engagement, and we scrutinise these in exactly the same way.

Herbert Smith Freehills’s Quality of associates is 1.14% above the Global 100 benchmark of 77.02, which provides more relative context to its absolute score of 78.16. Linklaters also score above the benchmark to a lesser degree, while Ashurst and Clifford Chance fall below it.

Herbert Smith Freehills’s Partner availability and engagement is 0.98% below the Global 100 benchmark of 84.44, which provides more relative context to its absolute score of 83.46. Ashurst, Clifford Chance and Linklaters all score below the benchmark again this time, but to varying degrees.

Benchmark scoring for our other criteria (Value: Billing and Efficiency, and Sector and Industry Knowledge), all sub-criteria and details of firms’ Overall Client Service scores are also available. In addition, Legal 500 offers comprehensive client satisfaction reporting not only for the Global 100, but also from a worldwide, jurisdictional, country-by-country, office or practice area perspective.

If you would like to know more, please contact our sales team, who can provide more information about what is available for your firm, at researchreports@legal500.com. We also welcome any feedback on The Client’s View series and our client service scoring.