Poll: Cleary NY v. Weil NY Forum

[spondee]

I was only looking at the NY offices. Cleary's NY office isn't even ranked by Chambers for antitrust.

I'm not trying to say Weil is better than Cleary. I'm just confused about what makes Weil a lesser firm than Cleary. TLS is pretty unanimous on this, but I don't understand what it's based upon.

[ToTransferOrNot]

I'd be leary about Weil for bankruptcy, too. Sure, it's an amazing BK firm (see: Lehman). But I wonder whether they're swollen due to Lehman. Will they be able to find the work to replace Lehman to keep their swollen ranks fed?

[edcrane]

I don't think Chambers' state ratings should be read as accurately reflecting the total strength of a given office. "NY" doesn't even list capital markets, for example, which is a very big part of Cleary's transactional practice in NY. Also, many firms allow you to split between offices. If you think you're really going to be into antitrust, you might be able to arrange to spend some time at Cleary DC. Nationwide ratings seem to be the better metric, imo.

Also, I think you need to weigh the practice area strengths by the amount of business it corresponds to. EB, for example, is almost meaningless, unless you're gunning hard for EB for some bizarre reason--the practice is going to be tiny at either firm.