Three ways to rank IP lawyers: submissions, surveys, registers

2026-09-20T00:00:00Z

Every ranking of IP counsel rests on one of three kinds of evidence. They fail in different ways, and the differences are not a matter of degree.

A submission-based ranking measures which firms wrote a good submission, and which firms had the staff time to write one at all.
A survey-based ranking measures reputation among the people who answered, which is not the same population as the people who filed.
A register-based rating measures filing work that actually happened, and inherits the registers' own gaps instead.
None of the three is complete. The useful question is which gap you can live with for the decision you are making.

Anyone choosing intellectual-property counsel in a country they do not know eventually reaches a ranking. There are many of them, and they look alike: tiers, bands, a list of names. Underneath, they rest on one of three kinds of evidence, and the choice of evidence decides what the ranking can and cannot tell you.

Submissions

The dominant model in legal directories asks firms to submit. A firm nominates its own matters, supplies referee contacts, and writes a narrative. Researchers read the submissions, call the referees, and assign a band.

What this measures well is the quality of a firm's own account of itself, checked against referees the firm chose. That is not nothing: a firm that can name ten substantial matters and produce ten clients willing to speak has something. But the measurement is conditional on participation, and participation is expensive. A partner writing submissions is not billing. Firms with a marketing function submit; firms without one often do not, and their absence is recorded as absence of merit rather than absence of a submission.

The second problem is that the sample is self-selected at the matter level as well. A firm submits the matters it won.

Surveys

The second model asks the market. Peers and clients are polled, and the aggregate of opinion becomes a ranking. This measures reputation, which is a real and useful thing, particularly for work where reputation is the product.

The difficulty is the population. A survey measures reputation among those who answered. In a small jurisdiction, the set of people who answer a peer survey and the set of people who file the country's trademarks overlap less than one would expect. Reputation also travels slowly: it reflects the firm of five years ago more accurately than the firm of today, and it rewards visibility, which is not evenly distributed.

Registers

The third model reads the official record. Every trademark, design and patent application in Europe is filed with a named representative, and every one of them has an outcome: granted, refused, opposed, withdrawn, renewed, lapsed. That record is public, complete for what it covers, and not written by the firm being measured.

This is the evidence IPRATE uses. Its advantage is that it cannot be gamed by a good writer and does not depend on who answered a questionnaire. Its limits are equally specific, and worth stating plainly:

The registers record filing and prosecution. They do not record litigation strategy, transactional work, portfolio counselling or the advice that led a client not to file.
A firm that acts through a local associate is recorded under the associate's name. Work crossing borders is attributed where it was filed, not where it was directed.
Register data is uneven. Some national offices publish outcome and renewal states in full, others publish little beyond the application. IPRATE states, for each register, what it holds and what it does not.
Nothing in a register distinguishes a routine renewal from a hard-fought opposition beyond the procedural trace each leaves.

A register-based rating therefore answers a narrow question accurately: among the firms that filed this kind of right, in this country, in this period, whose filings performed how. It does not answer "who is the best IP lawyer in the country", and a rating that claimed to would be worth less, not more.

Which gap you can live with

The three approaches fail differently. Submissions miss the firms that did not submit. Surveys miss the firms nobody has heard of. Registers miss the work that leaves no register trace.

For choosing counsel to file and prosecute a right in a country you do not know, the register gap is the one that matters least, because filing and prosecution is precisely what registers record. For choosing counsel for a bet-the-company dispute, it matters a great deal, and a reputational source is the better instrument.

The honest position is that these are different instruments, and that a ranking should say which one it is. IPRATE is measured on 21,262,773 filing and outcome records across 32 European countries, publishes the thresholds a firm must clear, and puts a confidence grade on every rating. What it cannot see, it says it cannot see.

Questions this piece answers

Does IPRATE accept submissions from firms?

No. There is no submission form, no questionnaire and no editorial shortlist. A firm enters the corpus by filing, and is rated when its filing record clears the published evidence thresholds.

Can a firm pay to be rated or to move up a tier?

No. Paid products change presentation, delivery or visibility share. They never change a score, a tier, a rank, a confidence grade or eligibility for a rating.

Why would a well-known firm carry no IPRATE rating?

Most often because the work it is known for is not filing work, or is filed through associates in other countries, or falls below the case-count threshold for the country and practice area in question.

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