An overview of the key rankings criteria for Chambers and Legal 500

Understanding how The Legal 500 and Chambers & Partners evaluate law firms can turbo charge your submissions, in turn significantly improving your firm’s rankings and reputation.

You want to leave nothing to chance, submitting is a time-consuming process so, if you are going to take part, it is essential to make the absolute most of the process.

In my experience, many demotions and non-rankings are due to simple errors/omissions in the submission such as not providing enough matters, not describing the work in sufficient detail and not relaying sufficient breadth/variety of cases.

Likewise, a large percentage of firms who express disappointment at not being promoted have often made grand claims yet not provided sufficient evidence in their support.

Knowing the criteria used, the submission review process, the role of interviews, and the impact of client referrals can be game-changing for your firm. Let's dive straight into these crucial elements to help you understand what it takes:

Work Highlights

The Legal 500 and Chambers use a detailed set of criteria to evaluate law firms comprehensively. First and foremost, on their list is the quality of work.

This involves analysing the work highlights, of which there are a maximum of 20 for both directories. They look at the quality of client, significance of the matter, the value (if appropriate), innovative solutions, novel/unprecedented points of law, cross-border elements and the outcomes achieved.

It is important to remember that this is a comparative and subjective process, i.e. there is no objective threshold that you need to pass to make it into Band 1, such as every matter needing to be valued over $100m.

More simply, to obtain a promotion you need the researcher to judge that the standard of your work is better than those in your current tier, and on par with the higher ranked firms.

For this reason, it pays dividends to be detailed with your work highlights. Introduce the client, provide context on the matter, specify your involvement and pick out a few points of complexity/significance to focus on. Where appropriate, you may also want to focus on the outcomes achieved and how your firm added value.

Work highlights which are only one or two sentence long are an extremely common reason for a demotion/non-ranking. This creates the idea that your work is simplistic in nature.

Scope of Work

Another key criterion is the scope/breadth of the work. To make a simplistic example, a real estate practice which submits 15 leasing matters, 4 transactions and 1 development project is never going to be in Tier 1. Their predominant focus on leasing is going to make them seem narrow/niche.

This assessment applies not only to the nature of the work, but also sector expertise. To make another example, if your M&A practice has 5 $1bn+ transactions, yet these are all the energy space, you will be adjudged to be narrower than your peers who have an equal number of standout transactions across a greater number of industries.

Firms should have a look at the ‘Practice Area’ definitions for each directory, or at least the editorial commentary on the website, to gauge the range of work considered within each section.

You should prioritise showcasing your best matters but e.g. if you are planning to submit 20 non-contentious matters, it may be worth swapping out two of the weaker matter to include a couple of contentious work highlights.

Even if these are slightly less impressive, at least they will tick a box on the scope assessment. Deciding which work highlights to include is a balancing act though the ability to include up to 20 means that this can easily be navigated with a little tactical analysis.

The Size of the Team

Also of significance is bench strength. This means the size of the team, with specific attention paid towards number of partners.

How is this assessed? It is not simply a case of looking at the number of partners you provided on the first page, rather it involves looking at the work highlights and assessing the variety of names leading on the work.

A firm with 4 or 5 different names taking lead on the standout matters will be deemed to have greater bench strength compared to a team where all 20 exhibited matters are overseen by one or two names.

Even if the latter firm has a larger team of partners on paper, they will be deemed to either be inflating their numbers, or overly reliant on a couple of standout names to source their best instructions. You want your team to come across as well-rounded.

As with the scope of work, the variety of lawyers featuring in your work is something to factor in when narrowing down your list of 20 matters.

While this matters, team size is certainly not the main criterion. I recall an example in the France M&A table where I kept a firm in Tier 2, even though they were far smaller than every other firm in this tier, as the quality of their work was arguably better than the rest. In practice, larger departments are likely to have more standout matters though this isn’t always the case.

In short, if you have the numbers, flaunt them, if you don’t – this shouldn’t deter you from pushing for a promotion. There are other tickets to moving up. As stated above, the quality of work is the main factor.

This is also not just a numbers game. They will also consider the years of experience of your lawyers and their accolades/achievements. This is why detailed lawyer bios, which focus on the career achievement of your partners, are also a must.

Referee Feedback

Another key criterion is referee feedback, this is particularly critical for Chambers and the main point of divergence in criteria between the two directories.

Why does Chambers place more emphasis on referee feedback? Very simply, they phone the referees and conduct full blown interviews, in comparison to Legal 500 who send a written questionnaire. 

As a result, it is not exactly rocket science to imagine that Chambers tends to receive more insightful, useful and detailed feedback than what is provided to Legal 500.

During my time at Legal 500, I never once saw referee feedback as a determining factor in a promotion/demotion, and we had many firms retain their Tier 1 status with no feedback whatsoever. This is far removed from Chambers who, based on conversations with their editors, place an equal amount of emphasis on referee feedback as they do the submission.

Firms submitting to Chambers (where this is a maximum of 20/30 referees) should therefore ideally prioritise names who will take the time to respond. There is no point providing the name of 20 CEOs at Fortune 500 companies if none of them will take the time to arrange a research call.

Likewise, for Legal 500, clients need to be encouraged to provide more detailed and insightful responses when completing the survey. This can help you stand out from your peers.

To hone in on this point, Chambers researchers have the opportunity to probe referees, the Legal 500 research team has no such luxury and often has to deal with generalised, brief and generic commentary such as ‘we recommend them for their commercial insight and strong work ethic’.

You certainly don’t want to put words in your clients’ mouths, but you should give your clients a heads up that more specific, and less generalised feedback, will go a long way. A comment such as ‘We were initially attracted to them for their track record in public M&A. We highly value their international network, which makes cross-border deals a breeze, and that’s coupled with a deep understanding of our sector’ will hold far more weight than the example above.

Lastly, if you have any clients who have used other ranked firms, their feedback will be of tremendous use to the researcher as they can make points of comparison.

Other Factors

Consistency – your submission may be amazing this year though you may miss out on a promotion as last year’s was lacking. The directories sometimes take a two-year view which is why it is essential to submit each year and not let a non-promotion deter your effort levels.

Peer Feedback – less emphasis is placed on this than firms tend to imagine, though this is a factor. If your peers are providing hearsay such as ‘we never see them, they don’t do this kind of work’, the researcher will naturally discount this feedback, assuming the submission proves otherwise.

However, if peers point out that e.g. you’ve lost quite a few lawyers recently, or your service is narrower than others in the market, this will indeed catch their attention though it will again be cross-referenced with the submission which is always given precedence.

Research Interviews – you could have the best interview in the world, you will not be promoted without a strong submission to support it. Likewise, you can certainly get promoted on the basis of a strong submission and no accompanying research interview.

That said, these can help turn the tide slightly in your favour, especially if you focus on making compelling points which are backed up by the submission. Think of it as a chance to put a face to the name and elaborate on an already strong submission, as opposed to something which will be a deciding factor.

Feel free to email me with any questions you may have in relation to this topic.