It's funny that the dynamic seems to be entirely reversed in criminal or collaterally-related-to-criminal matters since I could have told you by the time I graduated (and had been practicing on a limited license for a year) which attorney is more competent at what specific aspect of defense related work, and when I jumped to federal CJA work and then removals which is administrative entirely, it also took very little time to suss out the quality of not only other attorneys working on the defense side but the prosecutors and their proclivities, strengths, and weaknesses. In fact I think I'd be a pretty bad attorney in my field if I didn't pick up these things pretty quickly, and the question of recommendations only happen when there may be a conflict anyway, usually because it's pretty normal for a case to have more than one defendant. The biggest case I worked on had 68 and everybody ended up pleading but even with that, I feel like just seeing how different attorneys tackled the same basic case but from a slightly different angle gave a decent amount of insight, including how quickly they are able to get a plea worked out and how they approached collateral issues that always comes out of massive fishing expeditions. I mean, it's a service industry gig with a fancy title in the end and since law school didn't teach anything about lawyering - even legal writing didn't actually cover any client management and actual courtroom procedure, although the 2 weeks we spent on what was essentially a doxxing exercise was really helpful combined with some programming skills - it feels inevitable that through exposure on a daily basis one would get a feel pretty quick of others in your field.

And there's always reputations and word of mouth but I find that to actually be more or less on point when it comes to particular niches, like if you need someone who spoke a particular language or dialect, or someone who understood how to cross examine about technology and not have the jury fall asleep on you, or someone who can handle a child witness and someone who can't. It's not that different in the civil context, is it? There was even a prosecutor who was widely known to be susceptible to running himself into Batson challenges and sure enough the first trial I had against him he managed to dismiss every minority in the pool leaving me and the client the only two in the room which was glaring since the jurors began noticing that something was before we even got there. It was moot since we got a mistrial but if the opposing side is known to be generous with free issues to preserve for appeal you'd be on the lookout, wouldn't you? Or am I still overestimating how often civil attorneys end up in front of a jury broadly?

One big difference in England (I'm an English barrister, so that's my jurisdiction) is that most short civil proceedings end up being effectively closed to the public, or at least unlikely to be viewed by other barristers. Longer proceedings will typically be held in larger court centres where you are, again, less likely to see what fellow advocates are up to.

You do meet opponents, but in some fields, not often enough to really know.

In crime, your client would be in the cells much of the time and you could sit at the back of the court and watch lots of counsel do a good or bad job.

Of course even the civil bar do get to know each other in the way that commercial transactional lawyers - which is what I do now - don't have as much opportunity to do. I am typically dealing with commercial organizations all over the world. Too many lawyers to get to know.

I missed saying that in England (1) civil juries are essentially hen's teeth nowadays and (2) you don't tend to cross-over. Either you are in court most of the time, or advising on court proceedings, or you are a litigator (running those proceedings but not going to court) or you are a transactional lawyer who has nothing at all to do with them.