I've written a lot in this space over the past few months about change, so it's only fair that I look within, too—at how The American Lawyer should be changing.

I'll admit that we do more talking about change than actually implementing it. (You may know the feeling.) There are a lot of reasons for that, or perhaps excuses: the power of precedent, our readers' expectations, deadline pressures and so forth. But we do think a lot about the metrics we track and the data we present and how we can update and improve them to reflect a changing legal industry.

To that end, this year's A-List rankings feature not only a streamlined scoring system (a 100-point scale is just way easier for us wordsmiths to handle than a 1,200-point labyrinth), but a new metric. We have added a score for a firm's percentage of women equity partners, combining that with our historical metrics of diversity, pro bono, revenue per lawyer and associate satisfaction to identify the creme de la creme of The Am Law 200. For more details, see “The New and Improved A-List” on page 21.