Phillips Lytle’s M&A and Litigation Practice Earn High Marks in 2015 Chambers USA Directory

By Will Astor | Rochester Business Journal | 5/27/15

Law firms’ practices ranked on Chambers & Partners lists

Practices at Rochester-based Harter Secrest & Emery LLP, Buffalo’s Hodgson Russ LLP and Phillips Lytle LLP earned band 1 designations on the Chambers & Partners 2015 law-firm lists.

The three firms’ merger and acquisitions and litigation practices earned them the designation.

Harter Secrest maintains a Buffalo office, while the Buffalo firms have Rochester offices.

Chambers & Partners 2015 law-firm lists give several area law firms’ litigation and M&A practices highest rankings.

Found by International In-House Counsel to be the most widely used by clients among a welter of law-firm rating companies, Chambers & Partners annually publishes lists that rely heavily on client reviews as well as exhaustive research to rank firms in up to six so-called bands.

In the Chambers & Partners rankings, band 1 firms earn the highest marks, band 2 are next highest and so on. The firm rankings are broken down by geography into national, state, regional U.S. and international categories.

Area firms whose M&A practices earned band 2 ratings were Nixon Peabody LLP’s Rochester office; Syracuse-based Bond, Schoeneck & King LLP and Buffalo-based Hiscock & Barclay LLP.

Bond, Schoeneck and Hiscock & Barclay both have Rochester offices.

Rated as band three M&A firms were Harris Beach PLLC of Perinton and Buffalo-based Damon Morey LLP.

Earning band 2 slots for litigation were Harris Beach; Bond, Schoeneck & King, Hiscock & Barclay LLP, Nixon Peabody and Goldberg Segalla LLP.

Based in Buffalo, Hiscock & Barclay maintains a Rochester office. Goldberg Segalla is a Buffalo-based firm with several upstate and downstate New York offices.

Chambers & Partners lists no area firms’ litigation groups as band 3 but does name Leclair Korona Giordano Cole LLP of Rochester and Damon Morey as worthy of mention.