How To Produce a Chambers Global Submission

Chambers & Partners released its latest global research schedule this week.

Law firms in Africa, Canada, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and for those submitting in the “Global-Wide” sections, will find this helpful, since none of these sections appears in any other Chambers guides.

Click here to search for the relevant countries and practices.

Since Chambers revamped its website last year, the search function has been enhanced and a single search tool now covers all the different parts of the Chambers research.

You can select using combinations of country, practice, and research month.

It’s always important for legal marketers to be aware of submission deadlines for their countries, but also think about how your specific country/regional guides overlaps with Chambers Global.

Launched in 2000, Chambers Global was Chambers & Partners’ second legal directory, after its original UK guidebook, which was first published in the 1980s.

In the old days, Chambers Global featured every country in the world – and much of the content was unique.

Over the years, however, Chambers Global adapted as Chambers & Partners went on to introduce a series of regional guides: Chambers USA (2002), Chambers Europe (2006), Chambers Asia (2008), and Chambers Latin America (2010).

Now that there’s a “suite” of comprehensive regional directories, Chambers Global acts as more of a compendium – a digest of all the other Chambers guides.

There is some original content, which appears in no other Chambers guides, while much of the rest is shortened versions of the material in other regional guides like Chambers USA and Chambers UK.

Despite its evolution, however, Chambers Global is still an important product.

(the current editor is Edward Shum: edwards@chambersandpartners.co.uk)

It features coverage of (almost) every jurisdiction in the world, and focuses on the more “global” practices within each country, leaving the more “local” ones to the regional guides.

In addition, Chambers Global has some valuable “global-wide” sections spotlighting those law firms with breadth across the world in a particular legal discipline.

All this can be logistically quite complicated for law firms – particularly larger ones with multiple offices and practices.

I often receive queries from law firm marketers who are confused about the inter-relationship between, say, Chambers USA and Chambers Global – what do they have to do at particular times of year to engage fully in both?

The precise advice will vary from firm to firm, section to section, but generally you need to familiarize yourself with the relevant research periods for your primary regional guide, and Chambers Global, and plan to submit for both in the most effective way possible.

The general rule with submissions to Chambers Global is that you only need to provide them if it’s new or significantly different from material you have already provided to one of the regional guides.

For marketers, the key is to be efficient and don’t feel that you have to create lots of new material just for Chambers Global – as the Chambers Global team is used to dipping in to the other guides.

Of course, if you are, say, a law firm in Nigeria, a submission to Chambers Global is your primary engagement with Chambers (as there is no dedicated Chambers Africa guide), so treat it as the focus of your efforts.

However, if you have already submitted to, say, Chambers UK or Chambers USA, you may not have to do much as the Chambers editors will use the submissions they already have on file.

They will take the material you have already prepared for the regional guides and use them for Chambers Global.

If there is a significant time period between preparing your original submissions and the global research, you may want to send in a quick update, especially if there has been notable changes like a merger, or partner arrivals or departures.

The essence of Chambers Global is to identify those firms with strong international credentials, so if you do send in an update or a slightly adapted submission, make sure you stress this side of the practice.

Include details of any “foreign experts” – lawyers with knowledge and expertise of a particular foreign jurisdiction, or lawyers based in one jurisdiction who advise on matters in another.

These lawyers are typically dual-qualified, bi-cultural, split their time between two countries, speak languages, and advise on inbound or outbound work involving a certain country.

Chambers Global also presents opportunities to secure coverage for your firm’s global practices – areas where the strength of your practice is evident across multiple jurisdictions.

There are a number of options for these “Global-Wide” sections.

Chambers ideally would like to receive a discrete submission that emphasizes your capability across countries and regions.

How much time you spend on that submission depends largely on the practice.

For example, if you have already submitted a Banking & Finance submission for Chambers UK and Chambers USA, it is not vital to prepare a new Global: Banking & Finance submission, since your key lawyers and deals will likely be run out of New York and London.

To organize a brand new submission would just replicate your efforts and create unnecessary extra work for all involved.

An approach that I have taken before with various firms is to put together a short summary to attach to the front of the existing regional submissions, emphasizing the global credentials of the practice.

It could be something as simple as a one-page executive summary highlighting the key aspects of the global practice:

For example:

• We have 15 partners and 25 associates handling banking and finance in New York, London, Hong Kong, and Tokyo
• Our key global banking clients are x, y, and z
• 70 per cent of our banking and finance mandates worldwide involve cooperation between two or more of our global offices
• The firm worked on x global finance transactions in 2013

Etc…etc.

By doing this, you provide the researcher with a short summary outlining the key features of the global practice.

It gives them a neat snapshot of the global practice, and saves them having to wade through page after page of multiple regional submissions – but they can dig in to those for more detail if they wish.

Another option is to take your existing regional submissions and crunch them together to create a new submission, and then engage in some editing to compact it down.

You should draw out the global themes, while ditching some of the more local work.

For example, when it comes to the matters, highlight those engagements with an international flavor, or deals that sucked in lawyers from different jurisdictions.

If you’re really pushed for time, you could pass on the global submissions and let the directories use what they have.

However, a Chambers Global submission is essential for those areas not covered extensively at the country level – for example, data protection, franchising, public international law, and international private client.