How It's DoneThe 2013 Fort Worth, Texas list of Top Attorneys is drawn from nominations by other attorneys in the region who must provide their Texas law license number to be able to make nominations through the magazine's website.
Attorneys are not permitted to nominate themselves. Attorneys in large firms may nominate other members of their firms so long as they nominate an equal number of attorneys outside their firm in the same areas of practice.
This year, we received 979 completed nominations with 6,963 names. Many of those were duplicate nominations, of course. Once the nominations were calculated, we determined where the cutoff point was in each category. The remaining names were checked against the Texas Bar Association database to determine whether the nominee was licensed to practice law in Texas, when the attorney passed the state bar exam, where the attorney's primary area of practice was located and whether there were public disciplinary actions involving the attorney.
We developed two lists: Attorneys in practice more than five years and attorneys in practice fewer than five years. Those lists were submitted to a panel of attorneys who are themselves Top Attorneys for examination. They were asked to look for obvious omissions, questionable inclusions and areas of specialty. We went back through the lists and either accepted or rejected their suggestions.
Attorneys who passed the bar in November five years ago were left on the less-than- five-year list because that was their status when they were nominated. Attorneys who passed the bar earlier in the year were moved to the more-than-five-year list.
Attorneys whose names are in color received 10 or more nominations from their peers.
