Top of the table

People love lists.

Nick Hornby had great success with High Fidelity, a novel which featured a lead character obsessed with lists: top five relationship disasters, top ten pop singles, top three Clint Eastwood films.

If the proliferation of law firm league tables is anything to go by, lawyers may be up there in the Hornby list of obsessives.This week, we report on the release of the latest instalment of The Legal 500, the grand-daddy of all law firm league tables.

Clifford Chance - the largest law firm in the world - can now officially describe itself as a 'magic circle' firm, having, with Allen & Overy, cracked The Legal 500 commercial top clique, joining Freshfields, Linklaters and Slaughter & May.

Of course, legal profession observers, pundits and the solicitor on the street, have for years been referring to Clifford Chance and Allen & Overy as magic circle firms.So with respect to The Legal 500 and its staff - who put in hours of painstaking research to produced an ever-weighter tome each year - what is the point of the legal tables? Who uses them and who benefits? There is the suspense over who has moved up or down, and tables undoubtedly provide guidance for the biggest purchasers of legal services, in-house legal teams.But in reality, all the top firms are providing a finely honed, expert legal service.

Increasingly, they compete at the highest level internationally.

Whether they are up or down in the league tables is interesting, but the ultimate arbiter of their success is their clients' opinion.