Multinational Law Firm Ratings and Performance

The literature on market categories has addressed the issue of multi-category membership with the lens of specialism vs. generalism, specialists being less ambiguous than generalists. We contend that multi-critic consensus complements prior studies and helps establish the relationship between multi-category membership and performance. Multi-critic consensus consists of both low categorization and rating ambiguities, i.e. whether critics categorize identically organizations across multiple categories and whether per category they converge in their ratings. We develop propositions and test them in the context of international corporate law firms. We find that categorization and rating ambiguities reduce performance, and more so for high-status firms.