The 2002 Legal
Elite Big problems in
other sectors make lawyers more needed than ever
Long
the butt of usually unfair jokes about supposed avarice,
lawyers these days may seem more like Atticus Finch in
“To Kill a Mockingbird.” Compared to accountants
or business executives, whose reputations have taken a
beating lately, lawyers seem downright dignified and principled.
Seriously,
let’s be glad they’re around. Virginia needs
legally adept men and women to bring a semblance of
justice and sanity to what has been a very rough world
in the past year. When corporate boards run amok with
power trips, they need corporate counsel to pull them
back. Lawyers need to make sure accounting firms aren’t
cooking the books. When terrorist attacks make it much
tougher for worthy and needed foreign workers to get
visas to work in Virginia, we need lawyers skilled in
immigration law. And when snipers go on cold-blooded
and random shooting sprees killing 13 people in Virginia,
Maryland, Alabama and perhaps elsewhere, we need prosecutors
to help put a stop to them and defense lawyers to ensure
that the accuseds’ constitutional rights are protected.
The
bad times, however, have spread to the legal community.
Billable hours are down as the economy struggles with
recovery and state budget cuts faces hard choices. Fast-paced
technological advances in research and preparing documents
have challenged lawyers to keep up while still having
enough time to think through cases. As always, newer
fields such as intellectual property and medical law
break new ground, forcing lawyers to spend long hours
studying recent developments. The urge to merge with
larger, out-of-state law firms may bring economics of
scale to some lawyers, but it also threatens the identity
of Virginia-based law firms. And, the slim pickings
around because of the economy may make it harder for
lawyers to jump into pro bono work.
As
it has for three years now, Virginia Business tried
to identify about 400 of the very best lawyers in the
commonwealth. With help from The Virginia Bar Association
and our own research resources, we polled more than
6,000 lawyers, asking them to nominate lawyers in their
own firms and outside in 10 categories of law that we
picked. We do change some of the categories from year
to year to get more diversity. For example, in the past
we have included an intellectual property category and
will do so again, but this year we merged lawyers in
that field with business law. We weighed the responses
more heavily in favor of those lawyers picked outside
of one’s firm.
We
have gotten more responses each year, so the process
seems to be well received. Our list follows, along with
10 profiles of some of the top-scoring lawyers. As always,
we strive, not always with success, to represent all
parts of the state and as many areas of the law as we
can. We appreciate the feedback we get from many lawyers
and rest assured, in the future, we’ll cover more
legal specialties.
