S&R is the gold standard, not your typical tier 1.

It is for its key practice areas of capital markets and M&A. See tier rankings at publications like Legal500, IFLR.

Bump

It's a fictional criteria based purely on our perception. In general tier 1 would be a full service firm with good rankings in multiple areas.

It is all area specific for me, eg. IC can be called a tier one for funds and not AZB. AZB is tier one for m&a etc but not IC.