About the Awards: The American Lawyer Industry Awards 2022

About the Awards is a new series of Q&As with our editors across ALM Media’s publications that aims to give readers and potential nominees insight into our judging process for awards related to ALM Recognition Events. We hope this will guide you as you draft your submissions, and we welcome any additional questions you may have.

For the next column in our series, we’ll be discussing our The American Lawyer Industry Awards with executive editor Ben Seal, who will be leading the judging across all categories along with editor in chief Gina Passarella.

For more information about the The American Lawyers Industry Awards 2022 contest, please visit the awards site and the official Call for Nominations. The deadline for submissions is April 25 for The American Lawyer Industry Awards and May 13 for the Law Firm Corporate Practices. You can also view other upcoming ALM contest submission deadlines and sign up for marketing notifications here.

Ben, can you tell us more about yourself and your legal and journalism background?

I’ve been an editor with The American Lawyer for the past four years, but I’ve spent close to nine at ALM, including time as an editor and reporter with The Legal Intelligencer, where I covered state courts. Most of my professional life has been in legal journalism, where I arrived after a relatively brief career covering sports at a variety of local newspapers. It seems fitting that after years of writing about competition on courts and fields, I’m now wrapped up covering competition across the legal industry.

The nominations period is different this year. Why did you move up the contest period?

We’ve moved the nominations up by just a couple of weeks to coincide with our awards ceremony being held a few weeks earlier this year, now in early November.

Do the nominees have to be headquartered in the U.S. or have a U.S. presence?

Nominees don’t need to be headquartered in the United States. While our company does have other honors it bestows in regions around the world, The American Lawyer Industry Awards does accept nominations from the Am Law 100 and 200, the Global 200 and firms and law departments outside of those rankings.

Are you accepting nominations for Litigation Departments of the Year?

Not at the national level. We rotate every year between Litigation Departments of the Year and Best Law Firm Corporate Practices of the Year, allowing for each contest to have a full two-year submission period to be judged on. This year, we are honoring the Best Law Firm Corporate Practices. We do, however, honor litigators of the year, boutique/national specialty litigation departments and regional litigation departments of the year every year, including this year.

Who should be interested in submitting nominations for this contest?

Many of our awards are targeted to law firms ready to demonstrate the outstanding work that they and their lawyers do across a number of areas, including client service, innovation, diversity, technology and more. But these awards are by no means limited to law firms. There are categories relevant to in-house legal departments, law companies and public interest organizations. Our Lifetime Achievement and Attorney of the Year awards, for example, include anyone who is a lawyer and has a great story to tell about their career or the notable accomplishments of their past year.

Who is judging this contest?

The American Lawyer’s editorial staff will be reviewing the awards with assistance from our colleagues across the ALM global newsroom to draw upon specific areas of expertise.

What are the judges looking for?

The American Lawyer Industry Awards are meant to honor the core excellence that’s come to signify what the profession means to the greater world around it, as well as the evolution of the profession through innovation and collaboration. We’re looking for legal work and achievements that stand out in a crowded field. The firms and attorneys we cover all deliver high-quality legal services. What we’re seeking are the organizations and individuals that are breaking new ground, pushing the boundaries of how work gets done and elevating themselves above the competition by virtue of their unique accomplishments.

We are seeking to honor those that have made an identifiable impact on their client, the industries they serve or the legal profession writ large. We want you to showcase unique and novel work, either at the practice or service level. We want to see examples of how applicants overcame challenges or why their particular skill set or talent make up led to them being the best organization to get the results highlighted. Who would you want to honor if it wasn’t your organization? What would stand out to you as being award worthy if it weren’t your firm? Think of that as you select what you are submitting and explain its impact.

What do you want to see in submissions?

Cut to the chase and tell us what’s special about the work you’re telling us about. We want to know why it’s unique, why it demonstrates excellence and why it truly matters. Tell us about the impact the work is having on your firm/organization/client and why it wouldn’t be the same in someone else’s hands. And if you have data that can help paint that picture, all the better.

Some other things to consider in your entry: concrete examples, behind-the-scenes details of how things got done, why the client would be particularly happy, how much money was saved or invested, what was at risk, why this is different than what other firms do. While adjectives and long narratives don’t impress us, some context about how this work fits into the broader framework of the organization’s offerings and why the work is successful as a result of that broader offering can be valuable.

The deadline for submissions for the American Lawyer Industry categories is April 25, 2022. The deadline for submissions for Law Firm Corporate Practice categories is May 13, 2022.

For more information about the American Lawyer Industry Awards and other Recognition Events awards, please contact Recognition Events desk manager Pearl Wu at [email protected].