My 2013 blog post that consistently gets the most hits: "Ranking the most liberal and conservative law firms"

It’s not even close. On a given week where I don’t blog, it’s usually the top hit on my site. Even when I do blog, it’s still usually the top. It’s at or near the top of my year-end report, year in and year out.

It’s a post from 2013, “Ranking the most liberal and conservative law firms.”

I used to be way more into rankings on this blog (they’re clickbait-y, and it was a weakness in my early blogging days, I confess). This was an effort (with some help!) to look at campaign finance data, who contributed to the Obama and Romney campaigns in 2012, and figure out which firms, based on employee contributions to the candidates, were the most “conservative” or “liberal.” Plenty of open questions about how to use it, of course!

I didn’t update after 2016 because, well, maybe things were different in 2016. And maybe they’ll be different again in 2020. Maybe I should update. After all, seven years is a long time! But people keep coming back to it.

It’s also noteworthy that the bulk of the hits to this page come in as searches for some version of “conservative law firm,” and almost never as “liberal law firm.” It appears there’s some Google appetite among prospective law firm associates to identify the conservative ones.

This piece by Bonica, Chilton, and Sen in 2016 offers a more robust look at the political leanings of American lawyers—also a useful resource.

I don’t know if I’ll do something like this again, or if I did how I might change the reporting or methodology used. But it’s wild to me that after seven years it remains one of this site’s most popular posts. Then again, rankings do tend to hold as clickbait….