If you’re a regular reader of the Best S.A. Lawyers features in Scene, you’ll notice something different about San Antonio Lawyers: Best of 2014. The difference goes further than its placement in the debut issue of the magazine’s new, premium oversized format.
While the magazine has distributed the survey as usual, we asked nominating lawyers to provide a little extra information on each of their surveys when submitted to the magazine. The purpose of this was to enact a paradigm-shifting change during the processing phase of survey tabulation. For the first time, Scene has assigned a specific weight to each and every vote cast for each lawyer.
What does this mean? In certain instances, a vote still carries its full weight. However, a lawyer’s vote may count for a reduced value to a vote of full weight based upon three criteria: the nominator’s business relationship with the nominee (i.e., whether the two lawyers work in the same firm), the longevity of the nominator in the Texas law scene (measured by the nominator’s Texas bar card date) and the types of practice of both the nominator and nominee. A full vote is awarded to a lawyer nominated by a peer who practice in the same field as the nominee, who doesn’t worth in the same practice as the nominee and who was nominated by a lawyer with at least 15 years of experience in Texas law. If one or more of those criteria were not true, the vote was assigned a fractional point value. A nominee was only allowed to be voted upon by a colleague in his or her own practice a maximum of four times.
We took these weighted votes and added them up for each nominee to present you with a more dynamic list of lawyers in San Antonio Lawyers: Best of 2014. You’ll see lawyers in each category listed in order of total point value of all votes received. Furthermore, we segmented the list in each category into up to three parts: senior lawyers who have become an integral part of the San Antonio law landscape (more than 15 years practicing law), lawyers who are well-established in San Antonio but not with the experience of the first group (five to 15 years practicing law) and fresh faces to the San Antonio law community (less than five years practicing law).
We hope the new and improved methodology used in San Antonio Lawyers: Best of 2014 will serve as an interesting and more complete look at the San Antonio law community. We thank the readers for your interest in San Antonio law, the nominating attorneys for lending their input to this feature, and the nominated attorneys for their great work in our community.
Read more in the June 2014 issue of S.A. Scene.