5W Research
Master baseline Six practice-area cuts AI legal discoveryInaugural Report — AmLaw 200 Baseline
The inaugural baseline of how AI engines cite, recommend, and discover U.S. law firms across the AmLaw 200. Methodology, dataset, the Legal Retrieval Stack, and the Wikipedia-vs-revenue gap that defines machine-readable legal prestige.
M&A and Corporate
Five firms answer roughly two-thirds of the M&A questions. The Wikipedia-rich anchor — not revenue rank — explains which five. A practice-area cut from the 5W AI Legal Discovery Index.
White-Collar Defense
Six lawyers — not six firms — capture half the white-collar defense citation share. How named anchors, SDNY prestige, and decades of televised commentary became the retrieval infrastructure of elite criminal defense.
Personal Injury
How four decades of billboard, TV, and SEO spending built the citation infrastructure that BigLaw cannot replicate. The widest gap between AmLaw revenue rank and AI citation share in any legal practice area.
HNW Family and Divorce
In elite divorce, the matter creates the retrieval infrastructure. How Page Six, Vanity Fair, TMZ, and public court filings became the citation engine of high-net-worth family law — and what that means for counsel selection.
Securities and Regulatory Enforcement
Most elite securities enforcement work is intentionally invisible — pre-Wells negotiations, quiet settlements, voluntary disclosures, SEC staff interactions. How AI retrieval sees the visible five percent and misses what determines outcomes.
Bankruptcy and Restructuring
How Lehman, Purdue, FTX, Hertz, WeWork, Bed Bath, and Puerto Rico became the canonical narrative anchors of restructuring retrieval — and how one firm's concentration in those cases reshaped the practice area's citation infrastructure.
