Change re: contract lawyers & monthly reports

The rankings for the monthly reports published from January 2023 through April 2023 do not include the firms and attorneys that are/were paid by the government to provide legal services to a client pursuant to a contract.

Such firms and lawyers tend to have a much higher than average number of public cases than usual. On the other hand, some firms and lawyers take few if any public cases (e.g., Steve Rice Law).

In 2022, we manually counted every case to filter out the public cases of such firms and lawyers to ensure a more accurate picture. We have not done so in 2023 thus far because it is takes a long time. We also did not include such firms and lawyers in the 2023 monthly rankings.

But that means the reports do not include some firms and lawyers that should be in the rankings (e.g., Eric Weisbrod, who was #1 in 2022 in Franklin County according to the firm and lawyer reports in addition to having a firm and being a lawyer with a government contract).

We believe that the discrepancy is significant enough that we have decided to suspend the monthly reports and to go back to our original practice of manual counts for the annual reports (for those firms and lawyers with contracts who have high enough numbers that they would make the top 10 lists otherwise).

This will save time and promote more accurate and complete reporting, albeit at the expense of frequency.