Two attorneys with Outside Chief Legal LLC have earned spots on this year’s Mid-South Super Lawyers rankings, a peer-reviewed honor that recognizes lawyers across Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee and neighboring states for professional achievement and standing among their colleagues. The firm announced that attorney Jordan Gerheim has been selected to the 2026 Mid-South Super Lawyers list for his work in business and corporate matters as well as business litigation. Attorney Benjamin Kearns was named to the companion 2026 Mid-South Rising Stars list for his work in business litigation.
The selections put both firm members on the region’s most closely watched legal rankings in the same year, a combination that is uncommon for a firm of Outside Chief Legal’s size. The announcement was confirmed by the firm on July 31, 2026, when the 2026 Mid-South lists were released.
What the Super Lawyers designation means
Super Lawyers is a rating service that identifies outstanding attorneys through an independent, multiphase evaluation combining peer nominations, third-party research and peer review by practice area. The organization limits the honor to a small share of the region’s licensed attorneys each year: no more than 5 percent of lawyers across the Mid-South are named to the Super Lawyers list, and no more than 2.5 percent are named to the Rising Stars list.
Because the process relies heavily on evaluations from fellow attorneys rather than self-promotion or advertising, it is widely regarded within the legal profession as a meaningful marker of reputation among peers. Lawyers are in the best position to know which of their competitors try cases well, keep promises to clients and write documents that hold up — which is why a peer-driven ranking carries weight that a purchased accolade does not.
The selection funnel is deliberately narrow. Each year, tens of thousands of nominations circulate across the region’s practice areas, and the research phase scores candidates on professional achievement — verdicts, settlements, honors, pro bono work and other credentials — before a peer-review panel scores the finalists by practice area. Only the top slice of each year’s pool appears on the published lists.
The Rising Stars list uses that same selection process but is limited to attorneys who are 40 years old or younger, or who have been in practice for 10 years or less, effectively spotlighting up-and-coming talent within the region’s legal community. For a young attorney, a Rising Stars selection is the earliest peer-driven signal that colleagues across the region have begun to take notice.
About the attorneys
Gerheim’s recognition centers on his work in business and corporate law, along with business litigation, areas that cover everything from company formation and contract disputes to complex commercial lawsuits. The combination of a transactional and litigation practice is a demanding one — the corporate side demands drafting and structuring work that prevents disputes, while the litigation side requires the courtroom skills that resolve the ones that happen anyway.
Kearns, honored on the Rising Stars list, was recognized specifically for his work in business litigation. Commercial litigation is among the most exacting practice areas for a young lawyer: cases turn on contracts, business records and testimony, and they move through discovery and motion practice that punishes lawyers who are not prepared in detail. A Rising Stars selection in that field puts Kearns in the top 2.5 percent of the region’s young business litigators as scored by his peers.
What Outside Chief Legal does
Outside Chief Legal LLC is a law firm serving business clients in the Mid-South region, which spans much of Alabama along with parts of Mississippi and Tennessee. The firm’s name describes its model: it provides outside general counsel services, placing experienced business attorneys at the elbow of companies that need ongoing legal support without the cost of a full in-house department.
Firms in this designation often work with small and mid-sized businesses that need outside legal counsel for day-to-day operations, contract review and dispute resolution without maintaining a full in-house legal department. The model has grown across the region as businesses of that size face the same regulatory, contractual and employment-law demands as large corporations, with far smaller legal budgets. An outside general counsel arrangement lets a company call on a lawyer the way a large company calls on its legal department — for the contract going out the door, the dispute on the horizon and the decision in between.
For the firm’s clients, the Super Lawyers and Rising Stars selections function as independent validation of that model. A small business choosing outside counsel is making a consequential hire, and a peer-reviewed ranking is one of the few third-party data points available in a market where the product is judgment.
Why it matters for South Alabama businesses
For business owners across South Alabama, recognitions like the Super Lawyers and Rising Stars lists can serve as a practical reference point when they are searching for legal counsel in business and corporate matters. Because the rankings are compiled through peer review rather than paid advertising, they are frequently used by companies, in-house counsel and other attorneys as an independent gauge of a lawyer’s standing in a particular practice area.
The practical use case is familiar to anyone who has hired a lawyer. Referrals remain the dominant way businesses find counsel, but a peer-reviewed list gives the referral a second source — confirmation that the lawyer’s standing holds up among the attorneys on the other side of the docket. For companies in Mobile, Baldwin County and across the region weighing whom to retain for a contract dispute or a corporate transaction, that confirmation narrows a search that would otherwise run on word of mouth alone.
The announcement also reflects the broader presence of the legal services industry in the region, where firms supporting local businesses play a role in the area’s overall economic activity, from helping companies navigate contracts and regulatory compliance to resolving commercial disputes that might otherwise disrupt operations. Business litigation and corporate counsel work rarely make headlines, but they underpin the everyday machinery of commerce — the signed contracts, resolved disputes and structured deals that let companies operate with confidence.
Looking at the 2026 lists
The 2026 Mid-South Super Lawyers and Rising Stars lists were released this year, with Outside Chief Legal LLC confirming the selections for Gerheim and Kearns on July 31, 2026. The Mid-South edition evaluates attorneys across Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee and neighboring states, making it one of the most competitive regional rankings a Gulf Coast attorney can appear on.
For the firm, the dual recognition — one attorney on the main list, one on the Rising Stars list, both in business law practice areas — is the kind of result that shapes how the market reads a firm’s bench. Gerheim’s placement on the main list signals established standing among the region’s business lawyers; Kearns’s Rising Stars selection points to where that standing is headed. For the small and mid-sized businesses the firm serves, the selections are a signal worth noting the next time a contract, a dispute or a growth decision calls for counsel.
How the Super Lawyers process works, step by step
The multiphase evaluation behind the lists is worth understanding, because it is what separates a peer-reviewed honor from marketing. The process begins with peer nominations — practicing attorneys across the region naming the lawyers they hold in highest regard within each practice area. Nomination alone selects no one; it simply builds the candidate pool that the next phases measure.
From there, an independent research team evaluates candidates on indicators of professional achievement: verdicts and settlements, transactions, honors and awards, bar and professional activity, pro bono and community work, scholarly contributions and other credentials. The research scoring is applied uniformly across the pool, which keeps the comparison between a Mobile litigator and a Nashville transactional lawyer at least structurally fair.
The final phase returns the evaluation to the lawyers themselves. A blue-ribbon panel of highly rated attorneys in each practice area scores the finalists, and only those who clear the combined thresholds appear on the published lists — capped, across the entire Mid-South, at 5 percent of licensed attorneys for Super Lawyers and 2.5 percent for Rising Stars. The caps are what make the lists meaningful: the honor exists precisely because most lawyers, including many excellent ones, do not make it.
Practice-area designations also matter. A lawyer selected for business litigation was evaluated by business litigators, not by a general pool, so the honor speaks directly to the field in which a client would be hiring. That is the significance for Gerheim and Kearns: both were recognized in the specific areas — business and corporate law, and business litigation — that define their firm’s work.
The market for outside counsel in the Mid-South
The recognition arrives in a legal market that has changed considerably over the past two decades. Companies once faced a binary choice between building an in-house legal department and hiring large firms at large-firm rates. Firms built around the outside general counsel model emerged to serve the middle — businesses with steady legal needs and limited budgets — and the model has proven durable across Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee.
Rankings play a different role in that market than they do in large-firm competition. A small business vetting outside counsel has fewer diligence tools than a corporation’s legal department: no pitch books, no in-house lawyers to check references. Peer-reviewed lists fill part of that gap, offering the closest thing to an independent audit of a lawyer’s professional standing.
For South Alabama, where small and mid-sized businesses make up the bulk of the economy, access to counsel of that quality is a practical matter of day-to-day operations. Every lease, employment agreement, vendor contract and customer dispute moves more smoothly with a lawyer who knows the business — which is the niche Outside Chief Legal occupies, and the niche in which its two 2026 selections were evaluated and recognized by their peers.