Paul Clement and Lisa Blatt both had standout OT2025 Supreme Court terms, but in different ways. Clement was one of the term’s most frequent advocates, appearing across a wide range of high-stakes cases and producing both major wins and difficult losses. Blatt appeared less often but produced a more consistently high set of case-adjusted scores. That contrast captures the central problem in evaluating Supreme Court advocacy: raw wins and losses do not necessarily convey advocate quality. A lawyer who wins an easy case (or predictable from the perspective of the justices’ priors) has not necessarily performed better than one who loses a hard case while narrowing the rule, drawing a dissent, or preserving the client’s core position.
This article uses a case-adjusted advocacy score to rank Supreme Court advocacy quality in OT2025 – the recently completed term. The goal is not to identify who caused the Court to rule a particular way as the analysis is not causal. It is to measure, from the public record, which advocates made the strongest showing given the assignments they had. Essentially, attorneys that faced the m The tracker covers 58 argued signed-opinion case slots and 110 party-attorney entries, using the Court’s decisions, judgments, vote splits, separate opinions, briefs, oral arguments, party posture, and case-difficulty indicators.
The result is a leaderboard, but not a simple one. Some of the highest scores belong to lawyers who secured major wins. Others belong to lawyers who lost but still achieved something meaningful: a fractured Court, a substantial dissent, a narrowed rule, or a remand posture that preserved future arguments. The rankings are therefore best understood as a measure of advocacy quality as reflected in the Supreme Court’s public record, not as a conventional win-loss table.
How the Case-Adjusted Advocacy Score Works
The score measures not merely whether a lawyer won, but how strong the lawyer’s performance appears from the Court’s public record after adjusting for the difficulty of the assignment. Each party attorney receives a 0-to-100 score. The score starts with the expected difficulty of the case at the merits stage, then evaluates what counsel actually achieved.