The Houston Business Journal has been cycling through specialty lists of Houston law firms, focusing lately on the largest labor and employment firms in the Houston area. It has been going through firms that specialize in bankruptcy, IP, labor and employment, and real estate. Some that made those lists are also on the labor and employment law firm list.
No. 1 – Ogletree Deakins, based in South Carolina, 19 Houston area lawyers who spend at least 75 percent of their time in labor and employment.
No. 2 – Jackson Lewis LLP, based in New York, 18 lawyers.
No. 3 – Vinson & Elkins LLP, Houston based, 14 of its 295 lawyers.
No. 4 – Alaniz & Schraeder, Houston based, 12 lawyers.
No. 5 – Norton Rose Fulbright, 9 of its 243 lawyers.
No. 6 – Locke Lord LLP , based in Dallas, 9 of 135 lawyers
No. 7 – Baker Hostetler, Cleveland-based, 9 of 87 lawyers.
The lawyer count is based on spending 75 percent of their time in the industry as of Dec. 31, 2013. Certainly, many of these large firms score high on multiple lists. Norton, for instance, was not only no. 5 on this list, but no. 2 for the overall law firms list, and Vinson, number 1 overall, ranked no. 3 on this list. Numbers 5-7 on the list, while all having the same number of lawyers in house, were differentiated by the number of total lawyers the firm held.