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Legal data has never been more important than it is now. 2021 was a record-breaking year for many law firms who dramatically accelerated their growth rates compared to 2020. From profit and growth to efficiencies and strategic decisions, legal data can help uncover key trends from this record-breaking year that may not be readily apparent, making it a critical part of trend analysis for 2021 and beyond.
The TrueLaw Litigation Index – 2021 Law Firm Ranking is UniCourt’s third annual edition of our report highlighting the top 200 federal civil litigation law firms by case count for all United States District Courts. To develop this report, UniCourt downloads all publicly available civil PACER cases and we then leverage artificial intelligence and automation technologies to organize, structure, and normalize court data to identify the attorneys, law firms, parties and judges involved in litigation for trend analysis and litigation intelligence.
For the second year in a row, Vorys, Sater, Seymour and Pease, LLP is the top federal litigation law firm across all U.S. District Courts. In this article, we’ll review the data behind Vorys’s cases, who some of their top clients are, and how they beat out other law firms again in 2021.
How Vorys Clinched First Place
For an impressive second year in a row, Vorys has clinched first place in the TrueLaw Litigation Index. While Vorys has topped our charts for the past two years, the firm has been providing quality legal services for over 100 years. Since its founding in Columbus, Ohio in 1909, Vorys has gone from a small, four-person office to a legal powerhouse, employing close to 400 lawyers across eight offices in Ohio, Washington, D.C., Texas, Pennsylvania, and California.
Vorys prides itself on the firm’s record of success, representing clients from children’s hospitals and Fortune 500 companies to individuals from all walks of life. But Vorys doesn’t just provide exemplary client services, it has also been identified as a “Best Place to Work for LGBTQ Equality” by the Human Rights Campaign, and consistently makes lists of best lawyers in the United States.
Vorys’ rise to becoming a two-time leader in U.S. District Court litigation is mainly due to one legendary rainmaker and mass litigator – William D. Kloss Jr., who represents Davol Inc. and C. R. Bard, Inc. While Vorys had a decline in overall case volume compared to 2020, Mr. Kloss, a 30-year litigation veteran, handled thousands of cases in 2021, leading his firm to the title.
As in 2020, the majority of Vorys’s 2021 cases are concentrated in Ohio. The top five jurisdictions where Vorys litigated are:
- Southern District of Ohio – 3439
- Northern District of Ohio – 19
- Central District of California – 15
- Northern District of Texas – 5
- Northern District of California – 5
However, with access to federal litigation data, we can dig deeper into Vorys’s 2021 roadmap to first place, and go beyond simple jurisdictional lists. With legal data, we can uncover Vorys’s primary practice areas, top clients, and most active litigators. In the next section, we’ll discuss what these data points mean for Vorys and how law firms can use legal data to enhance their decision-making.
Dig Deeper with Legal Data
Legal data provides law firms with the ability to make targeted, knowledgeable decisions regarding litigation strategies, legal marketing, legal recruiting, and practice area development. It can also enhance their knowledge management and data analytics initiatives. Legal data isn’t just case specific. Utilizing litigation intelligence derived from legal data can uncover macro trends in areas impacting caseloads, clientele, and internal efficiency.
By breaking down litigation by case types, law firms can easily get a sense of where their business is coming from. Does the firm handle mainly one type of case within a specific practice area? Is there an area in which the firm is expanding, or wants to expand due to increased profitability?
Deep diving into caseload data allows law firms to divert focus, energy, and resources to the practice areas driving the firm’s success. Alternatively, caseload data gives firms the chance to highlight their next move: did you litigate significantly more of a certain type of case this year than last? It may be time to invest in expanding your practice to capture new available business opportunities.
Here are Vorys’s top ten case types for 2021:
- Personal Injury – Medical/Pharmaceutical Product Liability – 2252
- Personal Injury – Other Product Liability – 1089
- Intellectual Property – Trademark – 26
- Property – Real Property Product Liability – 23
- Contract – Other Contract – 21
- Civil Right – Employment Discrimination – 20
- Labor – Labor Standard – 14
- Civil Right – Other Civil Right – 7
- Property – Other Personal Property – 7
- Contract – Insurance – 6
Litigation volume, however, isn’t the only important metric to look at when seeking to understand a law firm’s litigation profile. A firm’s client roster can be just as, if not more, helpful to understanding a law firm’s business.
A client roster is like a private social media handle: it illustrates exactly who the firm wants to interact with, as well as who chooses to interact with the firm. Further, it highlights key clients and the strength or weaknesses the firm has with those clients.
Do you want to understand a firm’s health outside of what you can see on its website? Litigation data shows which clients stick with the firm long term, and which took their business elsewhere. What’s more, looking at competitors’ client rosters can be critical for understanding upcoming business development opportunities.
2021 saw Vorys represent a variety of well-known clients across multiple different disciplines. Below, we’ve listed some of Vorys’s most prominent clients:
Finance
- The Home Loan Savings Bank
- US Bank National Association
- Premier Bank
- Fifth Third Bank
- Global Lending Services LLC
Insurance
- Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield
- Anthem Insurance Companies, Inc.
- Community Insurance, Inc.
- The Western and Southern Life Insurance
- Acceptance Insurance Agency of Tennessee, Inc.
Retail
- Mary Kay Inc.
- Big Lots Stores, Inc.
- GNC Holdings, Inc.
- General Nutrition Corporation
- Abercrombie & Fitch Management Co.
- Victoria’s Secret Stores, LLC
- The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company
- General Electric Company
- Jos. A. Bank Clothiers, Inc.
- Zale Corporation
Notable Mentions
- Google Inc.
- CBS Broadcasting Inc.
- Cushman & Wakefield Western, Inc.
- Abbott Laboratories
- Viacom Inc.
- FEDEX Ground Package System, Inc.
- The Boeing Company
- Monsanto Company
- Halliburton Energy Services, Inc.
- 3M Company
The strength of a firm’s litigation practice can be directly tied to its top litigators, so it’s imperative to look at who a firm’s litigators are, and how their case volume is spread out across a firm’s practice areas. Identifying top rainmakers can assist competitors in poaching the best lateral candidates with large books of business, give future clients an understanding of who they’ll potentially be working with, and help law firm HR departments highlight top performers for retention and promotions, such as partnership offers.
Here are Vorys’s top ten attorneys from 2021 and their respective caseloads:
- William Darrell Kloss, Jr – 3380
- Emily Anne Papania – 12
- Kent Allen Britt – 11
- Nathaniel Lampley, Jr – 10
- Wesley Abrams – 9
- Janay Marie Stevens – 9
- Thomas N. McCormick – 7
- Cory D. Catignani – 7
- Daniel J. Clark – 7
- Timothy B. McGranor – 6
Each of the data points we’ve looked at individually in this article tell an interesting story and give a small window into the larger picture of Vorys’s litigation and its performance over the last year. Combined together, these data points can be used to create a bigger, fuller portrait of who a law firm is, how they got there, and where they’re headed.
Success isn’t just about the money coming in – it takes a holistic, data-centric view of a law firm’s inner workings to uncover the best ways to expand, take on new clients, and ultimately, increase firm profitability.
Whether you need a dossier of client or competitor litigation portfolios for business intelligence, information to enhance your business development initiatives with data analytics, or a way to see litigation trends impacting your firm’s profitability in real-time, litigation data unlocks the intelligence you need to move forward with confidence.
Interested in learning more about the TrueLaw Litigation Index and UniCourt’s Legal Data as a Service? Check out our blog post, where we talk about how the 2021 report was created, give a rundown of 2021’s top ten civil litigation firms, and look at the biggest gains and losses in the law firm rankings from 2020 to 2021.
Josh Blandi is the CEO and Co-Founder of UniCourt, a SaaS offering using machine learning to disrupt the way court data is organized, accessed, and used. UniCourt provides Legal Data as a Service (LDaaS) via our APIs to AmLaw 50 firms and Fortune 500 businesses for accessing normalized court data for business development and intelligence, analytics, machine learning models, process automation, background checks, investigations, and underwriting.
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