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 Latham & Watkins scores 85.21. (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, Latham & Watkins’s score of 85.21 sits in the 70-80%, ie third-highest, decile of the Global 100 for Lawyers and Team Quality.

This score is better than competitors including Skadden, Arps, Meagher & Flom (Skadden) and White & Case, but falls behind others including Kirkland & Ellis (those firms’ scores are not published in this article).

Firm performance can also be displayed relative to the market average, or benchmark. Latham & Watkins, Kirkland & Ellis, Skadden and White & Case all scored above the Global 100 benchmark for Lawyers and Team Quality, to varying degrees.

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.

Latham & Watkins’s Quality of associates is 4.12% above the Global 100 benchmark of 77.02, which provides more relative context to its absolute score of 81.14. Kirkland & Ellis and Skadden also score above the benchmark to varying degrees, while White & Case fall below it.

Latham & Watkins’s Partner availability and engagement is 1.57% above the Global 100 benchmark of 84.44, which provides more relative context to its absolute score of 86.01. Again, Kirkland & Ellis and Skadden score above the benchmark to varying degrees, while White & Case fall below it.

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.