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 Philippines
Table 1: Top 20 firms by highest number of firm award nominations
Commentary: In 2022, a total of 55 law firms were nominated for firm related awards. 34 of these firms won awards. While ACCRALAW were nominated for the greatest number of awards, SyCip Salazar Hernandez & Gatmaitan narrowly won the most. Of the top 10 firms, SyCip Salazar Hernandez & Gatmaitan had the best nomination to win ratio, winning 84% of the 19 firm awards which they were nominated 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, four firms won at least one case/deal awards out of the 13 firms nominated firms. Case/deal awards mostly relates to significant cross border work and the low nomination to win ratio suggests Philippines law firms were not active in the most significant matters in the APAC region.
Lawyer Awards
In the 12 publications examined, a total of 44 lawyers from 22 firms were nominated for awards. 35 male lawyers were nominated, compared with nine female lawyers. The gender ratio of male-female lawyer nominations is 80 to 20 percent. Only Alejandro Alfonso Navarro from Villaraza & Angangco won an award.
Nomination Statistics
Table 3: Firms with the highest number of lawyer award nominations
Table 4: Top lawyers by nomination count
Winner Statistics
Table 5: Winning firm
Table 6: Winning lawyer
