Emerging Litigation Podcast

An Innovative New Law Firm Self-Ranking Tool with Molly Huie and Sara Lord

• Tom Hagy • Season 1 • Episode 113

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Law firm headcount and revenues are a poor proxy for measuring leadership and excellence. 

In this episode I had the pleasure of chatting with Molly Huie, team leader of proprietary, industry thought-leadership surveys and data-based award programs at Bloomberg Industry Group. Joining me to interrogate Molly is data strategist Sara Lord of Reed Smith, the best kind of tech, law, and legal-tech nerd. 

We interviewed Molly about Bloomberg's relatively new law firm ranking service that we think is pretty innovative. It helps firms make detailed, four-pronged examining of performance and effectiveness that goes beyond traditionally examined characteristics and metrics.  

The new Leading Law Firms program blends financial strength, talent, growth, innovation, and excellence-related metrics into an interactive experience where you can sort, compare, and drill into firm-level dashboards to reveal actionable metrics.

What makes it different? The data is submission-only and transparently shared, with sensitive answers aggregated for scoring rather than exposed as competitive intel. The tool is also unique in its ability to reveal -- via an interactive interface -- how small and midsize firms may innovate as well as, or faster than, the giants.

Who benefits? We talk through the types of professionals expected to get the most value out of this tool, e.g., business development and marketing leaders seeking sharper positioning, managing partners who desire meaningful and comparative performance metrics, among others.  

Enrollment is now open. Check it out! 

Disclosure: I am not being compensated for sharing this. God knows I've asked. 

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Thanks for listening!

If you like what you hear please give us a rating. You'd be amazed at how much that helps.

If you have questions for Tom or would like to participate, you can reach him at Editor@LitigationConferences.com.

Ask him about creating this kind of content for your firm -- podcasts, webinars, blogs, articles, papers, and more.

Tom Hagy:

Welcome to the Emerging Litigation Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Hagy. Today we're going to talk about uh we're talking about how m law firms can look at themselves and measure themselves in some key areas uh that aren't traditional areas. So traditionally you might look at a law firm by its size, its revenue, how many partners, how many lawyers, case wins, and things like that. But uh Bloomberg Law is doing something interesting that involves looking at a firm across four pillars, but it includes looking at innovation. And I would say, how is a law firm adapting in today's in in the modern era, you know, with AI and new business models and new challenges facing law firms? So they're looking at things uh from four pillars. You've got to have pillars. Where would we be without pillars? They are looking at financial strength, what kind of talent they have on their teams, um, are they growing? And then lastly, innovation. So those are those are the are the key ways that they're allowing firms to look at themselves based on data they're inputting, or data they're uploading, or data that they are sharing in a questionnaire online. And this service is called Leading Law Firms. So it's the Bloomberg Bloomberg or the Bloomberg Leading Law Firms 2026 uh survey. So you visit them at uh Bloomberg Law, you get your participation link and fill it out, see what's uh see what's happening there. So with us to, or with me anyway, uh on this uh on this episode is Molly Huey. She's an industry leader in this area. She's at Bloomberg Law. She's got quite a bit of experience in data analytics and working with firms, examining firms and things like this. So uh it's great to have Molly Huey on. And joining uh as my side person is somebody who knows quite a bit more about data analytics uh than I do. The bar is low. However, she's uh she does know her stuff. And her name is Sarah Lorde, and she's with Reed Smith. What is her title? Let's take a look. I've got head of strategic insights at Reed Smith. Uh she's a she's a she was a practicing lawyer and antitrust. She uh is an entrepreneurial uh bent to her, and um so I call on Sarah whenever I get into the deep end of the data analytics pool. With that, here is my uh my conversation with Molly Huie of Bloomberg Law and Sara Lord with Reed Smith. I hope you enjoy it. Molly Huie, welcome to the Emerging Litigation Podcast.

Speaker:

Thanks, Tom.

Tom Hagy:

And uh I'm here also with uh with Sara Lord. I'll ask her to introduce herself a bit, but she is my wing person because she knows a lot about technology and data and that stuff and just stuff in general. So, Molly, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself? What do you do at Bloomberg Law?

Speaker:

All right. Well, I am Molly Huie. I am a team lead on um our central news desk. Our team is focused on rankings, surveys, and awards. So we do all of the thought leadership surveys. My team also runs the quantitative um ranking programs, including leading law firms.

Tom Hagy:

Okay, that was concise. Well done. Sarah, do you want to say a couple words about yourself? Or you can say no.

Speaker 1:

Just a couple. I don't know. Can we can we distill Sarah Lord down to a couple words?

Tom Hagy:

Um it's gonna take that's gonna take work.

Speaker 1:

It'll take a little bit of work, but I am head of strategic insights at Reed Smith, and I am uh your right hand today for this podcast, Tom. So uh I I deal with data and Molly deals with data, so I'm here to uh help support that discussion, uh looking from that angle. And you know, former Bloomberg uh person here as well. So full disclosure, used to work with Molly. Tom, you can add it out all or none of that. All that no, that will complete it.

Tom Hagy:

Actually, you won't be in this at all. Uh no, I I I haven't worked at Bloomberg. I have read uh stuff from Bloomberg, and I've certainly heard of you. Okay. Well, tell us what is leading law firms. Tell us what it is and what it isn't, because when we talked before, I sort of wasn't getting it. It's been hammered into me now. So I uh want to know, in your words, not mine, what is leading law firms and what isn't it?

Speaker:

Leading law firms is our newest program designed to be a holistic and comprehensive listing of law firms that goes beyond just revenue and headcount. Most of the stuff out there now is how much money you make or how many lawyers you have. We have built into this questionnaire metrics on growth, metrics on technology usage and innovation. Um, and it's not just one ranking or listing. We've we've built it out to be an interactive, almost data exploration tool where you can look at firms by things like revenue and head count, but also who's doing the most innovation, who's growing. It's it's interactive, it's multidimensional. I think it's really different than anything else that's out there right now.

Tom Hagy:

Yeah, yeah. It sounds like it. So we can get into it uh more, but you know, measuring things like innovation, I think that's important. We've had podcasts on some firms are bringing in, you know, even smaller firms are bringing in people who are experts at technology and are developing apps and developing systems and things like that. So that's that's very cool. Sarah, you have a question? That's very formal.

Speaker 1:

So many questions. So many.

Tom Hagy:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

But let's just start with one. So it sounds like it's a ranking tool of sorts. Can you tell us how it works in terms of interactivity and engaging with it?

Speaker:

Yes, it is really pretty cool, in my opinion. We built a front-end interactive data visualization into the main story. So we did reporting, there's um a whole story about what we think matters for law firms now and into the future. And then you get to this wonderful graphic where you see each of our main pillars or buckets or categories that we've done for this survey. So you can look at financial strength, you can look at headcount or talent, you can look at growth, and you can look at business strategy and innovation, each separately. So you can sort by each of those. And when you sort, you know, the listing of law firms in the interactive sorts, right? So the the firms that are the strongest in that category will rise to the top. We also have an overall what we call our leading law firm score, which is a composite of all of those subcategories. And then also anytime you click on the name of a law firm or the little carrot next to it, it opens up a panel that is a dashboard for that particular firm that shows key metrics, including things like profits per partner, uh, revenue per attorney, starting associate salary, um, and visualizations that show kind of where they fall on a scatterplot of similar firms in terms of the revenue per attorney and even their business staff to their attorney staff accounts.

Tom Hagy:

You know, I I do I want to get more into like a use case. You know, what is it, what is it folks are doing with it? But I guess first of all, how is the how are you is the data being collected? Who's c who's collecting it from whom?

Speaker:

This is a um submission-based program only. So this is one way that we're different from a lot of other things out there. We don't come up with a guess and ask firms to confirm. We send out a questionnaire, online questionnaire, and say, please give us whatever data you're happy to give us. And firms would submit and we would take that data, and then we only publish the data that they gave us. So it is you can go in and out, update your data in the window that it's available. We work really closely with firms. So people would call me with questions or like, how do I do this or how do I do that? It's a really collaborative process, but everything that we have is data that was proactively given to us by the firms that participated.

Speaker 1:

Who do you expect to be the primary user of the results? Who's your target audience?

Speaker:

So many people that want these kind of ranking and award programs are people that work with law firms in capacities like business development, PR, marketing, communications, right? Firms always want to be on top of a list. They want to tout an accomplishment in some kind of way. They want something to include in their pitch decks. And so I feel like that's also why our focus on innovation and growth is so key, because it's different than anything else that's available right now.

Tom Hagy:

Just to add to that, then just describe for me who's using it and what are they seeing? And you use the word publish. So does this mean that if you the three of us are at three different law firms, are we all seeing each other's data or are we seeing ourselves in comparison? Tell me about that, the visibility.

Speaker:

Visibility. So the main interactive graphic that we've been talking about is published in a main story. It is behind the paywall at Bloomberg Law. So if you have a subscription, you can go and see that. If not, we can talk about ways to give you a guided tour. Most of the data in the survey is attributed to individual law firms. Like you can click on a firm and see this is their profits per partner, this is their starting associate salary. There were several questions in the survey instrument, including some of the ones in growth and innovation, that we said we are going to report these in aggregate. It will feed into the scoring mechanism, but we won't say exactly which firm said what or how you answered this particular question. Because some of that could be seen as competitive intelligence that firms don't really want out there. So we we aggregate it, we use it in scoring, but it's not directly attributed.

Speaker 1:

I have to say, I don't know that we need uh, you know, a million tools and rankings and surveys. We do have a million. Whether we need them, I guess, is is anyone's guess considering we keep getting more. So talk to me about how this one in terms of impact is intended to set itself apart from all the other uh identical. What you're doing is definitely different in terms of how you're approaching it, but similar tools in terms of overlap. So I can go to another uh tool and I can see the kind of work that a firm is doing in innovation. I can look at it from all of those buckets individually. So what makes what you're doing more impactful than the variety of tools that are already out there?

Speaker:

I think the big two for that will be that it is holistic. You don't have to go to four or five different places to try to get the same picture. You can see a comprehensive and holistic picture of any one firm and compare it then to other firms that have participated. So that's that's really a big deal. The other thing is that it's the data exploration aspect is much different. So it is allowing people to actually dig into things on their own is not something that we've seen from any any other published ranking or list. So we're really hoping that people will use it to benchmark themselves, to look at their competitors, and to to go in and try to dig out trends on their own as well.

Speaker 1:

So you're describing a lot of law firm focus engagement. Are you anticipating a broader user base?

Speaker:

The other thing that we've seen is, you know, we wrote the main story with the interactive graphic. There are several other stories we published that had pieces of this data. And one of them was on starting associate salary. And that was actually one of the most welcome pieces of this contact package. And we could see where that is potentially really useful for law schools and law students in being able to dig in and say, okay, well, if I go to a firm like this, I can make this much money, or maybe I want to be at a smaller firm that still pays really well. Here's my list of firms that fit that bill and can use it for some career exploration.

Tom Hagy:

Yeah, I I could see it being terribly useful. I'm not surprised that salary, uh, salary surveys are always at the top of the list. Everybody wants to see everybody's paying and not everybody wants to share that, but it does get out. And you know, Sarah mentioned all the, I think you said a million awards and ranking services.

Speaker 1:

I believe that's yeah, I've been counting it on my on my time off. That's how I I use my personal time.

Tom Hagy:

Yeah, on the graphic behind you, there are reindeer or caribou. We can't tell which, but each one of those represents 100,000 surveys. That's how Exactly Sarah has her statistics or graphics, whatever, sewn into a blanket. The um the thing I was gonna add though, you mentioned there were that many of them, and I I can tell you the cynical journalist in me will say that there are so many because it's such a profitable industry to be in, is the I call it the legal rankings industrial complex. You will get, you know, because I work with law firms and they get, I get on their behalf, oh hey, you've been in this and you've been in that, and I get things personally. Oh, Tom, you're in a who's who. I'm like, well, then you're you're really messing up over there. But for that, you know, we'll give you uh we'll sell you a badge that you can put on your LinkedIn, your webpage for a thousand, two thousand dollars, or you we're gonna have an awards ceremony and you can buy seats. Uh, you know, it's only like uh $500 per seat, and you go buy a table for $10,000. I'm sorry, Molly. And if Bloomberg does that, I apologize to everybody at the uh at the organization.

Speaker:

We do not. In fact, that is one of the hallmarks. It is free to submit data, it is free to be included on the list, it is free to get your press kit, including seal of approval and you know, templates for press releases and all of these things. You don't even have to be a Bloomberg Law subscriber.

Tom Hagy:

Get out.

Speaker:

Correct. Free, free, free.

Tom Hagy:

Good God. So all right. Sarah, I'm gonna toss it back to you for another question.

Speaker 1:

Another question?

Tom Hagy:

If only we had one.

Speaker 1:

Right? No. There's always another question. Now, you mentioned that it's behind the paywall, but I feel like I've seen at least pieces of it outside of the paywall because I I've played, I've clicked on things and moved things around. So so what ability do we have to explore outside of the paywall?

Speaker:

The only thing right now that is behind the paywall is that main interactive graphic. So this the story I said about the um associate salaries, that is outside the paywall. There's a story on the top growth items that firms are doing. There's a there's a story on the top innovations. All of those are outside the paywall so that people can get parts and pieces. Hopefully that drives interest. And then you will want to become a subscriber so you can play with the full interactive.

Speaker 1:

And I know when Tom was playing with it, he got super excited about the differentiation between firm sizes. So can you talk a little bit about how you organize the information? Yes.

Speaker:

Um we absolutely want a way to showcase smaller firms because we think there's a lot of innovation happening there. And so this year was the first year of the program. Um, and what we did was we did a revenue split, and the interactive graphics are split between firms with 500 million or more in revenue and those under that threshold, which which split our sample about 50-50 this year. The program opens again January 7th for this year's actually 2026's data collection. So depending on how much more and different data we get, we may split that a different way, but the goal is always going to be being able to highlight firms of different sizes.

Tom Hagy:

Yeah. It does seem like it's a it's a really good tool for smaller and boutique firms, from what I was seeing. Yeah. So it sounds it sounds very cool.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so give us skinny. Give us the uh the skinny. Get give us the skinny, give us the dirt.

Tom Hagy:

Spill the tea?

Speaker 1:

What other spill the tea? Which tea? Which flavor? You know, dealer's choice.

Tom Hagy:

How's that throwing it on? I can tell you. Can I just tell you, can I interject this that there are only four kinds of tea? And I know this because in a misguided trip to Singapore for a corporate meeting, I don't know why we had it there, but it was fun. We went to, you could go to different tours in Singapore, and we, group of us, decided we're gonna go to a tea master. Okay. And this gentleman was, I believe, Japanese. Uh he was a retired Japanese businessman. And the tea ceremony in Japan, as you probably know, you know, it's a very formal thing and has to be done in a certain way. And he was showing us exactly how hot the tea should be, and he was scoffing at Americans for dropping tea bags with staples into a you know, piping hot. Anyway, he was really trashing that. But the teapots were much smaller than we think of. And then we kept asking him questions, and I think after a while we just decided to irritate him. But we said, and he's like, There were only four kinds of tea. There's black, green, what's the other one? Black, green, white, and oolong. I don't know why suddenly that one didn't get a color. Maybe oolong is some color. I don't know.

Speaker 1:

It might be.

Tom Hagy:

And then we kept yeah, and then we kept saying, Well, what about chamomile? Not tea? What about this? That's herbal. Herbal is not tea. There are only four kinds of teas from the tea plant.

Speaker 1:

So if we go back to the transcript and read back the prior question, we we were trying to learn more about tea. So what were the big surprises that jumped out at you when you were reviewing the data? What might we not have expected?

Speaker:

Because it was the first year of the survey, we don't really have too many trends surprises quite yet, but I will say the associate pay salary data.

Tom Hagy:

Okay, God, I'm really sorry.

Speaker 1:

Should we go for the third take?

Tom Hagy:

Just keep going, Molly. Just go. I'll slice it in. We'll keep it in. We'll just keep it in. Come on. It's a podcast. They're supposed to be fun.

Speaker:

So I think the most interesting thing then was seeing the associate salary data. And what we did with it in the piece we published was to break the salary data down by revenue bucket of the organization. So you could see that there were some firms that made a lot of money that didn't pay their associates quite as much, or some firms that overall made a little less money but were still paying their associates a lot. Like that was kind of a cool thing to look at.

Speaker 1:

Very nice. Okay. We're getting Darth Vadery kind of noises out of you, Tom, I think.

Tom Hagy:

Me?

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Everybody think, are you feeling dark?

Tom Hagy:

I'm so sorry. I'm sorry.

Speaker 1:

Like, I'm surprised that Mike is picking that up. Like it's usually so fiddly.

Tom Hagy:

So sorry. Uh yeah. I um let's just let's just say I have sleep apnea. That doesn't mean anything.

Speaker 1:

So we're putting you to sleep? Is that what you're doing?

Tom Hagy:

God. Okay. Um, we're completely off track, which I'm not surprised. I want to hear more about the innovation metrics. What kind of things will you be looking at there?

Speaker:

Sure. Um, in the first year for innovation, we were kind of testing the waters with things. And we had essentially a checklist of does your firm do this thing or this thing or this thing? Are you using analytics? Are you data warehousing? Are you Using your own data or clients' data or how are you doing this stuff? Spoiler alert, this coming year is going to be more extensive and deeper with innovation. We're going to dig into a little bit of kind of tech stack and how your tech ecosystem works and also a little bit more actual metrics or KPIs around some of the innovation.

Tom Hagy:

Yeah, I imagine, I imagine artificial intelligence is going to come into play in the adoption of it.

Speaker:

Kind of are you using, how are you using, are you training people? We're still hoping that it is a fairly easy questionnaire to answer. Like that was one of the things we were really proud of is that it was short yet comprehensive. Like we're really trying to only capture the metrics that matter. We are not making people spend three months filling out a whole bunch of gobbledygook we're not going to use.

Tom Hagy:

Sarah, did you have any other questions? Because I only wanted to close with one that was actually yours.

Speaker 1:

One that was actually mine. All right. So we were talking about innovation and we were talking about the development of the survey. One of the things that I think sets Bloomberg surveys apart is that they do tend to modify over time. They're not static. I'm sure you can make an argument that that's a good thing, just like somebody else can make an argument that that's a bad thing. But I would love for you to talk a little bit about that approach and how you handle the evolving state of legal, the changing definitions of innovative, those kinds of challenges that feed into this sort of a ranking program.

Speaker:

We are definitely in the camp of evolving with the industry is a good thing. So there are some metrics that we know are super important and will continue to be important, and they are the same all the time. How much money did you make? How many lawyers do you have? Those kinds of things we will keep consistent. But especially in the innovation realm and the technology realm, we are really trying to look ahead of and see what things are important now. We want to measure what you're currently doing, but we also want to ask what you're thinking of or how you're doing it, because we're hoping that with leading law firms, we're really figuring out a way to say, this firm is a leader now and is setting themselves up to be a leader five, 10, 15 years in the future. And so we will continue to tweak those metrics, especially innovation and technology and potentially even growth year over year as it makes sense.

Speaker 1:

So let me throw a little curveball in. We're talking about leading law firms, but there's a lot of discussion about the current law firm model and the challenges that are that are being encountered with the emergence of AI. And I use that broadly. So how do you differentiate when it comes to different law firm models? Do you care if it's an AI-first firm? Do you care if it's legal? Like, how are you defining law firm in this context? Since there's so many now more alternative legal services providers.

Speaker:

That is fascinating because we haven't yet had to encounter an entity that is more of an alternative legal service provider wanting to participate in this. Right, right.

Tom Hagy:

Completely off script. Is this going to be better for men or women? No, go ahead. Answer the question.

Speaker:

It'll be an interesting hurdle when we get there. You know, if if one of these entities that's like, well, we're not really a law firm, but we provide legal services.

Tom Hagy:

Sarah, what's an example of one of those? What are you thinking of?

Speaker 1:

Oh no, I ask questions. You seem to have gotten confused on the role in this particular podcast.

Tom Hagy:

Yeah, that's like that uh Robin Williams joke where it's uh Nazi knock-knock jokes. Have you heard that? You know, someone says knock knock and the person says who's there, and before the person can get that out of their mouths, the Nazi slaps them and says, I'll be asking the questions.

Speaker 1:

So um I'm sorry, Molly, for you're gonna have to edit so many things in this podcast.

Tom Hagy:

Including the sound behind you. Somebody putting in your panic room. Is that what's going on? Okay, Molly, do you want to take a shot at that?

Speaker 1:

Molly already answered it.

Tom Hagy:

Okay, fine. Molly already answered it.

Speaker 1:

We'll get there when we get there, is the answer.

Tom Hagy:

Okay. The uh I had a I had a final question. Just just to uh it's not a curveball, it's more of a it's a slow pitch. These are these are sports metaphors, and I'm not good at those. My question is could you just bring this down to earth? Say you're a business development person, you're a managing partner. Walk me through what this person is doing, what they're seeing, and then then what do they act on when they see these things? Can you give me the case study? No.

Speaker:

Clarifying question. Are you talking about actually filling out the survey, or are you talking about looking at the data in an interactive publication?

Tom Hagy:

I'm sorry, yes, looking at the data.

Speaker:

So I would say if you're the business development person and for instance, you were at one of the smaller firms. You go into our publication, you read the article, you say, great, this is what kind of the biggest firms are doing. This is what they're doing to get ahead. And then you scroll down and you get to the interactive that has the smaller firms in it. Play around and you go, Oh, we're number three in innovation. Well, what are we going to do about that? That's really cool. And then you can say, okay, well, how did we answer this thing? Oh, we should probably tout that we do this and this and this. And that got us to this number, you know, the Bloomberg Law listing. And hey, this is so great. Yeah, they can figure out ways to uh to tout their accomplishments. They can look at who's around them.

Tom Hagy:

Right. Yeah. I mean, from a business development perspective, yeah, that looks like, yeah, this is what we should be focusing on. This is what we should be bragging about. In fact, maybe we should pour more into that if that means we're going to retain clients or get more out of clients or get more clients. Would a managing partner look at this or do they delegate this kind of work?

Speaker:

I think it kind of depends. I for them, I would, I would say they are more looking at like, okay, well, what's our competition doing a little bit? Like they want to know where they are in the list, but also like I have a sense that they know who their biggest competitors are, right? Like here's the five closest to me. Where they end up and is our innovation better, is our growth better? Like, I know they have more money or more people, but where do we stack up?

Speaker 1:

Kind of activity bother in the very best of ways until people throw off their boards. I love it. You you know, just be that little bird on the shoulder saying, It's still open, it's still open. All right, answer to a tweety bird there.

Tom Hagy:

Um no, yeah, that's what I do. That's what makes this podcast really, really sing. Um, we've got bird references, natural references, we've got baseball references. We had some some other things that were pretty questionable too. So, Molly Huey, thank you so much for spending time with us talking about this.

Speaker:

Always.

Tom Hagy:

And Sarah, thank you for being my wing person.

Speaker:

This wing person is another bird reference.

Tom Hagy:

Gosh, Molly's on top of it. Molly's had her coffee this morning.

Speaker 1:

Right?

Tom Hagy:

Yeah, okay.

Speaker 1:

You know, I normally call you traveling Tom, but maybe I need to start calling you like Tweety Tom. What do you think?

Tom Hagy:

Wouldn't love that. And I think that's I don't know, but I think this podcast keeps wanting to go to this place. Um especially when Sarah's on. We have a topic and then it keeps wanting to go into these other, you know, maybe the tangents are really over. Oh no, we in fact this is the last episode.