Law Firm and Lawyers Awards Report 2023: Hong Kong

Introduction

Legal awards acknowledge the market recognition of a law firm and lawyer’s success, ability, effort and, above all, excellence.

While rankings consider the accumulation of a firm or lawyer’s efforts year-on-year, awards represent the achievements of firms or lawyers during the past 12 months. Awards can be viewed as being more significant than rankings because being shortlisted or winning an award means a firm or lawyer is one of a very select number of parties considered to be “the best”.

Legal Media 360’s Awards Reports consolidate the nominations and winners of the most reputable international and regional awards, showcasing the top performers by jurisdiction.

Methodology

Atomic awards data is categorized, and naming conventions standardized. This highlights which firms, lawyers, cases and deals are receiving the greatest recognition via a nomination/win ratio.

Awards data from the following sources are used in our research:

Asian Legal Business, ALM, asialaw, Benchmark Litigation, China Business Law Journal, Chambers and Partners, China Law and Practice, India Business Law Journal, International Financial Law Review, In-house Community, Legal 500, Managing IP.

The awards period used for our research is January to December 2022.

Legal Media 360’s awards analysis splits firm awards into two distinct categories: Firm awards and Case/deal awards.

Award Categories

Firm Awards

Firm awards include categories such as practice area specific awards, practice management, diversity and inclusion and firm-wide awards (such as firm of the year).

The following data focuses on Hong Kong (domestic) firms only.

Table 1: Top 15 firms by highest number of firm award nominations

Commentary: In 2022, a total of 29 firms were nominated for firm related awards. 12 of these firms won awards. Deacons had the greatest number of nominations and overalls wins. ELLALAN had the best nomination to won conversion, winning 1 of every 2 awards they were nominated for.

Lawyer Awards

In the 12 publications examined, a total of 17 lawyers were nominated for awards. Nine male lawyers were nominated, compared with eight female lawyers. The gender ratio of male-female lawyer nominations is 53 to 47 percent.

Only one lawyer won an award.

Nomination Statistics

Table 2: Firms with the highest number of lawyer award nominations