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Law Firm and Lawyers Awards Report 2023: Malaysia

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 is for Malaysia.

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

Commentary: In 2022, a total of 60 law firms were nominated for firm related awards. 30 of these firms won awards. Skrine were nominated for the greatest number of awards, however Shearn Delamore won the most awards. Christopher Ong & Lee had the best nomination to win ratio of all firms that were nominated for more than one award, essentially winning all of the awards they were nomination for.

Case/Deal Awards

Case/deal awards recognise the firms working on the most significant matters in the past 12 months.

Table 2: Firms by highest number of case/deal award nominations

Commentary: In 2022, 11 firms won at least one case/deal awards out of the 23 firms nominated firms. Case/deal awards mostly relates to significant cross border work and the low nomination to win ratio suggests Malaysian law firms were not active in the most significant matters in the APAC region.

Lawyer Awards

In the 12 publications examined, a total of 41 lawyers in Indonesia were nominated for awards. 26 male lawyers were nominated, compared with 15 female lawyers. The gender ratio of male-female lawyer nominations is 63 to 37 percent.

Six out of the 41 lawyers won awards. Four were male and two were female.

Nomination Statistics 

Table 3: Firms with the highest number of lawyer award nominations

Table 4: Nominated Lawyers

Winner Statistics 

Table 5: Winning firms

Table 6: Winning lawyers

Commentary: 41 lawyers from 29 firms were nominated for awards in 2022. Although Skrine received the most nominations they didn’t not take home any awards. Lee Hishammuddin Allen & Gledhill was the most successful, winning two of the three lawyers awards they were nominated for.

Download report in PDF format.