Just over two years ago, I cre­at­ed the inau­gur­al nointrigue.com Aus­tralian Law Firm Rank­ings, which worked on the basic assump­tion that the big­ger and the more notable a law firm is, the more peo­ple would be want­i­ng to talk about it. And what bet­ter way to mea­sure this than to ask Google.

Here are the rank­ings updat­ed, for 2011.

There have been some slight changes in method­ol­o­gy, in an attempt to focus the search results down to the pages that tru­ly mat­ter. Start­ing with what we used for the 2009 rankings:

"law firm name" law site:.au

this has been sup­ple­ment­ed by search terms that remove pages from the law fir­m’s own web site and from some par­tic­u­lar web-based direc­to­ries (the list of which is arbi­trary and could well be improved). For example:

"Allens Arthur Robinson" law site:.au -site:yellowpages.com.au -site:truelocal.com.au -site:findlaw.com.au -site:lawyerlist.com.au -site:hotfrog.com.au -site:aar.com.au

For law firms with an amper­sand or a plus sign in their name, addi­tion­al search terms were insert­ed to allow for vari­a­tions in spelling, like so:

("Gilbert + Tobin" OR "Gilbert and Tobin" OR "Gilbert & Tobin" OR "Gilbert Tobin") law site:.au -site:yellowpages.com.au -site:truelocal.com.au -site:findlaw.com.au -site:lawyerlist.com.au -site:hotfrog.com.au -site:gtlaw.com.au

Now, with­out fur­ther ado:

	Law Firm	Pages	Part­ners1	’09
1	Clay­ton Utz	78,900	201	6
2	DLA Phillips Fox	72,400	149	10
3	Minter Elli­son	66,100	291	4
4	Blake Daw­son	57,400	175	8
5	Free­hills	48,500	202	1
6	Mallesons Stephen Jaques	46,600	186	2
7	Allens Arthur Robinson	37,900	177	3
8	Corrs Cham­bers Westgarth	25,700	108	9
9	Mad­docks	23,500	53	12
10	Bak­er & McKenzie	21,200	90	13
11	Nor­ton Rose2	19,800	146	5
12	Mid­dle­tons	18,900	67	17
13	Sparke Hel­more	18,500	49	16
14	Coop­er Grace Ward	16,000	24	–	–
15	Hold­ing Redlich	15,600	55	14
16	Hen­ry Davis York	10,100	52	22
17	Gilbert + Tobin	9,470	55	15
18	Piper Alder­man	9,170	57	21
19	Hunt & Hunt	7,130	55	7
20	Arnold Bloch Leibler	6,990	29	20	–
21	McCul­lough Robertson	6,490	46	19
22	HWL Ebsworth	5,320	120	27
23	Kennedy Strang3	4,970	72	31
24	Grif­fith Hack	4,890	30	–	–
25	Gadens	4,470	125	11
26	Tress­Cox	4,270	35	23
27	Davies Col­li­son Cave	2,990	36	24
28	Hall & Wilcox	1,780	30	28	–
29	Thom­sons Lawyers4	1,250	47	30
30	Lan­der & Rogers	815	47	26
31	Moray & Agnew	596	59	29
32	Macpherson+Kelley	340	51	–	–
33	Col­in Big­gers & Paisley	324	29	–	–

Notes:
¹ The num­ber of part­ners is the pro­ject­ed fig­ure for 2 Jan­u­ary 2011, as report­ed by the Aus­tralian Finan­cial Review on 10 Decem­ber 2010, page 47.
² Nor­ton Rose merged with Dea­cons, which was #5 in the 2009 rankings.
³ Kennedy Strang is a group of law firms (Kemp Strang, Rus­sell Kennedy, Thynne & Macart­ney, Lynch Mey­er). The report­ed page count is the total count for these law firms.
⁴ Thom­sons Lawyers was called Thom­son Play­ford Cut­lers at the time of the 2009 rankings. 

To get a feel for the “noise” in the page count, that is, the num­ber of pages in the result set that do not actu­al­ly refer to the law firm in ques­tion, I man­u­al­ly exam­ined the top 30 search results for each law firm. For only three firms was 1 out of the 30 pages iden­ti­fied as spu­ri­ous; the oth­er law firms had no spu­ri­ous results. This, of course, does­n’t mean the sig­nal-to-noise ratio remains con­stant as one pro­gress­es towards the tail end of the search results; Google’s algo­rithms, by now, are prob­a­bly quite good at get­ting the more rel­e­vant pages to appear in ear­li­er search results.

Manda­to­ry read­ing (for those of you who have read this far and have tak­en every­thing seri­ous­ly): xkcd on using Google to mea­sure things