Practice Area Searching: By Topic - Laterals
When you sign on to ALM Research Online, choose “Topic” from the horizontal menu bar at the top of the page. And then, choose ”Laterals” from the vertical menu bar on the left (information is available from 2002 to the present). The data includes the partner’s particular practice area, the year he or she was hired or left the firm; where the partner came from, and where the partner went. You can find this information for one firm or multiple firms and use the ALM Research workspace to compare the results. The results can also be downloaded in Excel format and integrated with your firm’s own data. You can also compare financial, corporate representation, and perhaps financial data, along with lateral partner information for the firms selected. If you want to see results for firms based on revenue or current ALM key financial and demographic ranking, then go directly to the “Firm Revenue” or “Firm Rank” tabs.

For a more complete description of the Laterals information available in the ALM Research database, see the section on Laterals below.

Practice Area Searching: By Topic – Corporate Representation
To get information about clients and corporate representation in specific practice areas, choose two topics from the vertical menu bar on the left
• “Corporate” will get you information about the firm’s mentions in
- the Big Deals and Big Suits columns carried by many of ALM’s publications
- The American Lawyer’s annual “Corporate Scorecard” rankings of firms based, on their corporate transactions work.
• “Clients” will get you names of the clients the firm represents, and in what type of practice area.
• Last, you will be prompted to select the name of at least one firm, and a time frame (e.g. 1980s, 1990s).

You will be prompted, in the most user-friendly way, to producing an easy-to-read report. On-screen, you will see that it has a tabbed page for each of the topics selected (Big Deals and Suits, Corporate Scorecard, Clients). The report may be downloaded in the form of an Excel workbook, and KM-savvy firms may then re-format the data and import it into their own databases if they so choose.

Again, you can find this information for one firm or multiple firms and use the ALM Research tools to compare the results. Here too you can include other categories of data along with the corporate representation information and use the “Firm Revenue” or “Firm Rank” tabs to identify firms.

Practice Area Searching: Individual Law Firm Reports
If your goal is to identify all of the information in the ALM Research database about one particular firm, then a law firm report may be the best place to start. On the ALM Research Online home page, there is a link for downloading reports about individual law firms and viewing samples of them. These in-depth reports provide detailed financial and business information for more than 300 law firms, and are compiled from the most recent information available in the database. Premium subscribers may obtain 1-year, 3-year, and 5-year reports for all firms in the database. Basic subscribers may obtain 1-year reports. Non-subscribers may obtain reports on a per-transaction basis.

The Law Firm Reports provide the same information that can be found by searching By Topic, but is a more direct route. For example, I pulled a five-year report for the Indianapolis-based firm Baker & Daniels and found records for more than a dozen lateral partner moves in and out of the firm in the last four years.

If I was doing some analysis about the firm I would note that the movements in and out of the firm since 2002 (the earliest Lateral Partners data in the database) seem to represent the normal churn – three business and commercial specialist left the firm, but four were hired; one healthcare specialist left the firm, but one was hired.

A look at the firm’s press releases from the last few years (many of these are included in the Individual Law Firm Reports) shows a concentration of hiring in the general fields of commercial banking, finance, and insurance. The firm has also hired at least five new associates to help with their litigation practice, and has been building its China practice over the last few years, with several partner hires and several associate hires. (Data for lateral associate hires is not included in the ALM Research Online database.)

A look at the corporate representation information in the report shows that Baker & Daniels has occasionally placed well in The American Lawyer’s Corporate Scorecard rankings, in the areas of mergers and acquisitions and debt offerings. The following client names show up, many of them repeatedly: Anthem, Cardiac Pacemakers, Cinergy, Conseco, CSX Transportation, Deere & Co., Eli Lilly & Co., General Motors, Guidant Sales Corp., New Medical Technology, WellPoint, and Zimmer. The firm represents these companies in the following types of practice areas: Contracts, Corporate Governance, Corporate Transactions, Intellectual Property, IP Litigation, General Litigation, Mergers & Acquisitions, Patent, Real Estate, and Products Liability.

Practice Area Searching: ALM Research Toolbox: Article Search and Web Spider
This search tools connects you with three types of linkages: articles related to the topic (words) you search; links to law firm web sites that have the same terms displayed on their site; and when searching for a law firm, it also displays any lists or surveys in which the firm has appeared.

To give an example, I searched for the words “Supreme Court litigation,” surrounding those terms in quotation marks. Twenty-five pay-per-view articles ($15 each) were located, including one that identified in its abstract “Supreme Court litigation boutique Goldstein & Howe.” The first five law firm links for “Supreme Court litigation” were to Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg, McDermott Will & Emery, Morrison & Foerster, Mayer Brown Rowe & Maw, and Houtoff Buruma. Note that the first and last mentioned are non-U.S. firms (Davies Ward is Canadian; Houtoff is Dutch). We tend to forget that we are not the only country with a Supreme Court so refining the search with the term “United States” is advisable if you’re only interested in U.S. litigation.

Practice Area Searching: ALM Research Toolbox: Blog Items on Practice Areas & Industries
I occasionally come across good sources of information and good search engines for practice area and industry information when I am culling the blogosphere and reviewing my RSS feeds for items to contribute to the ALM Research Blog. The Blog is free. You will find a link to it in the ALM Research Toolbox section of the homepage of ALM Research Online, or in the Resource Links in this newsletter. Click on the Blog link, and then scroll down, looking for the subject heading in the “Categories” section (right-hand side of the page) called Practice Areas & Industries.

Some of the blog postings have been just for the fun of it (“Celebrities and Their Lawyers”), but most have been just quick links to data and information sources for particular practice areas (e.g. the Energy Information Administration’s Country Analysis Briefs; TRAC’s U.S. Federal Immigration Website; Americans for Tax Reform’s State Tax Trends Over 25 Years).