April 30th, 2009 by Conrad Saam, Marketing

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Law.com just published the AM Law 100 listing of largest law firms. I thought it might be interesting to compare law firms’ gross revenue rankings with their online traffic rankings to see if there is any relationship between the two. By comparing the AM Law list with the Avvo BigLaw List, which stacks law firms by their Alexa rankings, I found a statistically strong positive correlation between the two. For statistic geeks – the result was a correlation coefficient of 0.57. [Note one shortcoming on the analysis is that the revenue data referenced 2008, while the Alexa rankings referenced that past 3 months of 2009.]

For those of you who snored through statistics – correlation does not prove causation. (i.e. Does lots of website traffic generate lots of law firm revenue? or is it the other way round? or is their no causal relationship at all.) To test the theory that web traffic can be a revenue generator for BigLaw, we ran the correlation between revenue per lawyer and the Alexa ranking. The math showed that this was statistically uncorrelated (correlation coefficient of -0.09).

Conclusions? The greater the website traffic, the bigger the BigLaw; however, traffic does not drive revenue per attorney. But I have to wonder about Skadden Arps, the one firm that fell in the top 10 for all three metrics: revenue per lawyer, gross revenue and Alexa ranking. Is it possible in this miserable legal economy, that their online marketing success is in some way responsible for financial performance?

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 30th, 2009 at 7:11 am by Conrad Saam, Marketing and is filed under Conrad Saam Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.