In this week's Law Firm Disrupted, we compare the evolution of baseball statistics to a potential revolution in the practice of law.

I'm Roy Strom, the author of this weekly briefing on the changing legal market, and you can reach me here or sign up to receive this weekly newsletter here.

Is Big Law 'Clutch'? Nobody Knows. Yet!

Today is Opening Day for Major League Baseball. So, in honor of first pitches, I want to spend some time talking about an exploration into an age-old question that has mystified baseball analysts: Are some baseball players “clutch?”

I promise, this detour will be relevant to the business of Big Law firms.

The question of whether baseball players can objectively be considered clutch hitters—regularly getting more hits in big moments than their peers—was explored this month by ESPN columnist Sam Miller. The upshot is that baseball now has more objective ways than ever before to determine who is getting clutch hits.

Consider the main question driving Miller's analysis: Is Daniel Descalso, a never-been-to-an-All-Star-Game journeyman, a better hitter than Giancarlo Stanton, a player who once received the largest-ever contract in baseball history?

By one measure—what MLB data-tracking website Fan Graphs calls its “clutch score”—Descalso is far superior: He recorded the highest clutch score in the majors last year, meaning the probability of his team winning rose more during his high-leverage at-bats than for any other batter. Who added the least amount of likely wins in those scenarios? Stanton.

To be sure, it is a somewhat elusive statistic. You might think clutch hitting was just something like who got the most home runs in the bottom of the ninth inning. But smart baseball fanatics have managed to arrive at a complex, yet more accurate, way to calculate “clutch.”

This type of evolution is no accident. As Miller documents, people have been performing statistical analyses about clutch baseball hitters since at least 1954, when a Time magazine writer created a formula for a clutch statistic. In 2005 someone wrote another statistical analysis about that same 1954 formula.

And this is where I come back to Big Law, because a similar evolution is underway in the U.S. legal market.

I still think it is somewhat crazy how little statistical rigor has been applied to the practice of law, but that is not to say that there has been none. A group of people (lawyers, even) wrote in 1984 about the need to train law school students in statistical analysis so they could better apply data to the practice of law. That doesn't seem to have gone very far.

But more recently there has been some success. Consider Mark Lemley, the Stanford University Law School professor whose interest in empirical studies was part of the reason Lex Machina was founded. More Lex Machina-like companies are popping up, and more people are devoting time to figuring out what litigation analytics can tell us about what is important in successfully practicing law.

Much more needs to be done before we can say things like whether some Big Law lawyers are more “clutch” than others. But an evolution of how we think about the practice and business of law will surely come from systems that better track legal data.

And on that front, my colleague Meghan Tribe suggested one sure-fire way to spark the collection of data that would lead to competitive analysis among lawyers: A Big Law fantasy league.

Boies' Boys versus Quinn's Crew, anyone? Please send ideas my way. And in the meantime, go Cubs!

Roy's Reading Corner

On Santa Monica Competition: My colleague Xiumei Dong writes this week about a flock of Am Law 100 firms opening offices in Silicon Beach—Santa Monica to Hermosa Beach for the uninitiated. The firms include: Goodwin Procter, Fenwick & West, Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, Cooley and Gunderson Dettmer. As the story suggests, there's heavy competition combing for talented corporate lawyers on the beach.

On UK-US Competition: My across-the-pond colleague Krishnan Nair writes this week that a group of UK firms last year supplanted their U.S.-based competitors atop the UK deal tables.

From Krishnan: “The Magic Circle and other U.K. firms took the top six slots in 2018 for U.K. M&A activity, according to data gathered by Mergermarket for The American Lawyer affiliate Legal Week. The familiar top-of-the-table U.S. firms fell down the rankings for the first time since 2014. After taking the top three places in 2017, Kirkland & Ellis, Davis Polk & Wardwell and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom dropped to 12th, seventh and ninth, respectively, last year.

The new-look top six sees Magic Circle titan Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer claiming first place, having advised on 60 deals worth a total of $144.4 billion, with Slaughter and May ($119.6 billion), Herbert Smith Freehills ($116.3 billion), Clifford Chance ($86.5 billion), Allen & Overy ($83.1 billion) and Linklaters ($70.9 billion) in hot pursuit.”

UK leaders have a mix of reasons why this might have happened, ranging from a fluke to an increase in the amount of UK companies that were doing the acquiring compared to U.S. firms in previous years.

That's it for this week! Thanks again for reading, and please feel free to reach out to me at [email protected]. Sign up here to receive The Law Firm Disrupted as a weekly email.