Legal 500 Law Firm Rankings Scraper

Scrape ranked law firm data from Legal 500. Returns firm names, tier numbers, practice areas, editorial commentary, key clients, and recommended lawyers across Legal 500's global rankings — the rankings themselves, in JSON, instead of a table you were about to copy by hand.

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Legal 500 Scraper Features

• Extracts the full ranking table for any practice area — firm name, tier, and both profile and ranking-detail URLs.
• Pulls the editorial layer most rankings scrapers skip. That means Legal 500's own commentary on the firm, its listed key clients, and the individually recommended lawyers, each as a semicolon-separated list you can split on.
• Offers 58 jurisdictions in the country picker, from the United States and London through Germany and Japan. Point it at one and it walks that jurisdiction's practice areas for you.
• Targets specific practice areas directly by URL when you already know what you want.
• Caps the run with maxItems, or set it to 0 and take the whole thing.
• Resumable — a crawl that stops on a cap or a spend limit picks up where it left off without re-charging you for records you already have.

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What Can You Do With Legal 500 Rankings Data?

• Legal marketing and BD — Track where your firm sits against its competitive set, practice area by practice area, and watch the tiers move between editions.
• Lateral recruiting — Build a target list from the recommended-lawyer field. Legal 500 has already done the shortlisting.
• Client-side panel reviews — Rank the firms bidding for your panel against an independent tier, then check who they already act for.
• Competitive intelligence — Pull the key-clients field across a practice area to map which firms hold which relationships.
• Legal press and research — Assemble ranking histories for a jurisdiction without opening 40 tabs.

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How Legal 500 Scraper Works

1. Choose a jurisdiction with country, or hand it specific practice-area URLs in practiceAreaUrls and skip discovery entirely.
2. The scraper reads each practice area's ranking table and pulls every firm listed, with its tier.
3. With includeDetails on (the default), it then visits each firm's ranking detail page for editorial commentary, key clients, and recommended lawyers. Leave it off if you only need the tier table — the run is faster and cheaper.
4. Records stream into the dataset as they're found. maxItems stops the run whenever you've had enough.

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Input

{
    "country": "united-states",
    "includeDetails": true,
    "maxItems": 100
}

Field	Type	Default	Description
country	string	united-states	Jurisdiction to scrape, from a picker of 58. Each covers multiple practice areas of ranked firms.
practiceAreaUrls	array	[]	Specific practice-area page URLs. Provide these and country discovery is bypassed.
includeDetails	boolean	true	Fetch editorial commentary, key clients, and recommended lawyers from each firm's ranking detail page.
maxItems	integer	15	Maximum firm rankings to return. 0 for unlimited.
resumeCursor	string	—	Cursor from a previous run's Output, to continue that crawl.

Targeting practice areas directly

{
    "practiceAreaUrls": [
        { "url": "https://www.legal500.com/c/united-states/antitrust/cartel" },
        { "url": "https://www.legal500.com/c/united-states/antitrust/civil-litigation-class-actions" }
    ],
    "includeDetails": true,
    "maxItems": 0
}

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Legal 500 Scraper Output Fields

{
    "firm_name": "Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton",
    "tier": 1,
    "practice_area": "Cartel",
    "jurisdiction": "united-states",
    "country": "United States",
    "recommended_lawyers": "Leah Brannon; Heather Nyong'o; Jeremy Calsyn; Bruce Hoffman; David Gelfand; Joseph Kay; Kenneth Reinker; Daniel Culley; Ryan Shores; Larry Malm",
    "editorial_commentary": "'The practice is unique because of its combination of deep partner expertise and a genuine, client-focused approach.'",
    "key_clients": "Cushman & Wakefield; KKR; Scott Sheffield",
    "firm_profile_url": "https://www.legal500.com/firms/51353-cleary-gottlieb-steen-hamilton/c-united-states",
    "ranking_detail_url": "https://www.legal500.com/rankings/ranking/c-united-states/antitrust/cartel/51353-cleary-gottlieb-steen-hamilton"
}

Field	Type	Description
firm_name	string | null	Name of the ranked law firm.
tier	number | null	Ranking tier. 1 is top tier; higher numbers rank lower.
practice_area	string | null	Practice area or sub-practice the firm is ranked in.
jurisdiction	string | null	Jurisdiction slug, e.g. united-states, london.
country	string | null	Human-readable country or jurisdiction name.
recommended_lawyers	string | null	Individually recommended lawyers, semicolon-separated.
editorial_commentary	string | null	Legal 500's editorial text about the firm in this practice area. Empty where Legal 500 publishes none.
key_clients	string | null	Notable clients named in the entry, semicolon-separated.
firm_profile_url	string | null	URL of the firm's Legal 500 profile.
ranking_detail_url	string | null	URL of the firm's ranking detail page for this practice area.

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Resuming a large crawl

Every run emits a resumeCursor in its Output. If a large crawl stops before it finishes — because it hit maxItems, your spend cap (maxTotalChargeUsd), or was aborted — start a new run with the same input plus that resumeCursor to continue from where it left off. The crawl resumes from the queued work the previous run didn't reach.

• You are not re-charged for records the earlier run already delivered.
• Resume within your account's run-retention window — on the free tier, roughly your 10 most recent runs. Once the source run is pruned, its resumeCursor is no longer valid.
• resumeCursor is opaque — supply it unmodified.

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FAQ

How do I scrape Legal 500 rankings?

Legal 500 Scraper takes a jurisdiction, or a list of practice-area URLs, and returns the ranked firms as JSON. There is no account to create and no API key to find, because Legal 500 does not offer one.

How much does Legal 500 Scraper cost to run?

Legal 500 Scraper charges $0.10 per run start plus $0.001 per record. A full practice area is typically 20 to 40 firms, so most runs land in small change.

What data can I get from Legal 500?

Legal 500 Scraper returns the tier table plus the editorial layer — commentary, key clients, and recommended lawyers. Editorial commentary is present where Legal 500 publishes it and empty where it doesn't; the tier and firm fields are populated either way.

Can I scrape jurisdictions other than the US?

Legal 500 Scraper's country picker lists 58 jurisdictions. Legal 500 itself ranks roughly 196, and the ones outside the picker are still reachable — put their practice-area URLs in practiceAreaUrls, which bypasses the picker entirely.

Can I skip the editorial detail to save money?

Legal 500 Scraper does exactly that with includeDetails: false. You get firm name, tier, practice area, and both URLs, and the run is meaningfully faster.

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Need More Features?

Need custom fields, filters, or a different target site? File an issue or get in touch.

Why Use Legal 500 Scraper?

• Cheap — $0.001 per record.
• The editorial layer, not just the table — key clients and recommended lawyers come back parsed and semicolon-separated, which is the part that actually takes a human all afternoon.
• Resumable — stop a multi-jurisdiction crawl and pick it back up without paying twice.

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Further reading: Which Web Scraper Do I Need?