Ranking lawyers and their schools

How do you choose a lawyer? By comparing loud, late-night TV commercials? Throwing a dart at the Yellow Pages? Asking around? Finding out who went to which school?

Ever consider going to law school? How in the world do you pick one? Enthusiasm of alumni? Country club membership? Political connections?

Every year, it seems, more magazines publish annual rankings of lawyers, law firms and law schools based on a variety of measures. Bragging rights and contracts — at the least — are on the line. You can count on a spirited debate.

As the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog points out, the best-known ranking of laws schools, U.S. News & World Report’s, has faced more competition for attention and prestige in recent years. Just last week, Super Lawyers magazine went beyond rating attorneys for the first time to print what it calls an “alternative” to U.S. News’ schools list. Unlike others’ rankings, “The only thing we focus on is the end product — the practicing attorney,” wrote its publisher. The more “Super Lawyers” (as rated by the magazine) that a law school can claim among its graduates, the higher it ranks the school.

Wait a minute, critics say. Doesn’t that mean schools with larger graduating classes have an advantage in this ranking? Shouldn’t Yale, which has much smaller classes than, say, top-ranked Harvard, really be higher than 10th?

And so statistical methodology and marketing collide yet again.

I don’t know which lists to trust, if any, but I learned during a few years of editing magazines that rankings and just about any other excuse to put a number on the cover will increase sales of an issue.

So, if you’re looking for a “Super Lawyer,” or a Super law school, or if you’re curious about how Maryland’s schools fared, here’s that list.