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 India.
Table 1: Top 30 firms by highest number of firm award nominations
Commentary: In 2022, a total of 143 law firms were nominated for firm related awards. 111 firms won awards. Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas were nominated the greatest number of times and Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas won the greatest number of awards. Of the top 10 firms, AZB & Partners had the best nomination to win ratio, winning almost four in five of their nominations. Induslaw had the lowest nomination to win ratio of the top 10 firms.
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: Sixteen firms won at least one case/deal awards out of the thirty-one nominated firms. Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas were nominated for and won the most number of awards, which suggests the firm led the most significant matters in India in 2022.
Lawyer Awards
In the 12 publications examined, a total of 65 lawyers in India were nominated for awards. 41 male lawyers were nominated, compared with 24 female lawyers. The gender ratio of male-female lawyer nominations is 63 to 37 percent.
Six out of the 65 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: 65 lawyers from 37 firms were nominated for awards in 2022. The six lawyers that won awards were from five firms, Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas won the greatest number of lawyers awards, with Cyril Shroff winning all of the three awards he was nominated for.
