Legal Business

The Client’s View: how do HSF’s lawyers compare to its rivals?

Every year, we ask hundreds of thousands of clients to score law firms on metrics such as billing, communication and expertise. This data, which is gathered alongside the Legal 500‘s research, offers huge insight into how clients rate the service they receive, and also, perhaps more importantly, enables us to benchmark firms against each other.

Lawyers and team quality – how does HSF score?

Herbert Smith Freehills (HSF) scores 82.30 for Lawyers and Team Quality, which, as illustrated by the chart below is 0.33% above the average, or ‘benchmark’, for all Global 100 firms. HSF’s score is also better than Ashurst, Clifford Chance (CC) and Linklaters, all of which score below the Global 100 average.

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By plotting all scores for the Global 100 firms, we can see how HSF’s score for lawyers and team quality sits just above the average.


Herbert Smith Freehills


Lawyers and
Team Quality

82.30


Quality of partners 85.21


Quality of associates 78.16


Partner availability and engagement 83.46


All scores are global and /100.

How do clients rate HSF’s associates?

The data that we collect on lawyers and team quality can also be broken down into three sub-criteria: quality of partners; quality of associates; and partner availability and engagement (see above).

Again, this allows us to compare firms to each other and the market average. HSF’s score of 78.16 for quality of associates is 1.14% above the Global 100 benchmark of 77.02. Linklaters and CC both score very near to the benchmark, with CC 0.27% above and Linklaters just 0.09% below, while Ashurst’s score is 1.26% below average.

Partner availability and engagement

HSF’s score of 83.46 for partner availability and engagement is 0.98% below the Global 100 benchmark of 84.44, but the firm is above Ashurst, CC and Linklaters all which score below the average, but to a greater degree.


Benchmark scoring for our other criteria (value: billing and efficiency, and sector and industry knowledge) and all sub-criteria is also available. We can provide data on a worldwide, jurisdictional, country-by-country, office or practice area perspective, with the option to select a small bespoke group of comparator firms.

If you would like to know more, please contact us at researchinfo@legal500.com – we welcome all feedback on our data and what insights you would like to see.