:::::::::: Tim, firstly I appreciate you taking the time to discuss this issue offline, and for your willingness to debate it at length here despite the majority view here being in your favour. Yes I certainly agree with your friend that it is very important to describe the jurisidictions that a firm is present in, there is clearly a massive diffence between, say having offices in the French or Japanese jurisdictions, or between the Chinese and U.S. jurisdictions, since the legal and regulatory systems are very different, as well as the commercial characteristics of the markets.

 Beyond that however it remains my firm view that there is a big difference between a law firm having an office in, say, Paris or Toulouse, even though they are both in the same jurisdiction. I appreciate that the situation in the U.S. is slightly more complex since you have both federal and state jurisdictions. Even within each state there will be big differences between the legal markets in different cities though. To give an example, the San Jose market will be not just a lot smaller overall than the Los Angeles market, but it will also have a quite different profile - on the whole a lot more specialist, niche and focused on high tech. 

 To give another example, in the UK a law firm could never be regarded as being truly top tier if it didn't have an office in London, even if it had offices in every other big city. In fact all of the very top tier UK firms (DLA Piper is not yet regarded as one of them, despite its size) have just one UK office, in London, although they have other offices overseas. 

 Saying that DLA has " has 69 offices across the United States, Egypt, South Africa, Kenya, Thailand, China, ..." would in my view still mean a loss of valuable information to the reader. We could fall back on using descriptions like "in major financial centres" or "in major commercial centres" or "in a combination of major financial centres and major commercial centres" but then we are introducing what is in my view an unnecesssary element of vagueness, imprecision and even original research.

 I do accept that DLA, with 69 offices, is right on the borderline of having too many offices to make it practical to list all of them in the article. However I do also feel that there is an important general point of principal that information about the office locations of a law firm is very valuable information to aid the reader of an article in understanding the subject of it, and should be included as much as possible.