Every legal marketer wants to know how their firm stacks up against the competition.
And legal directories have always been one way in which to do this.
On top of its regular guidebooks, the Legal 500 will soon offer firms data that they can use to benchmark themselves against peer firms.
In January this year the Legal 500 gave away this rather neat wallet-sized concertina-style promotional flyer at the Marketing Partner Forum conference in California.
You can read everything easily on this full-sized PDF version.
On one side, the leaflet lists out all 307 law firms recommended in the most recent edition of the Legal 500 USA guidebook.
Next to the firm name is the number of recommendations in the directory, the number of top tier rankings, and the number of recommended lawyers.
It’s a great snapshot of the market. You can see at a glance how different firms have performed in the directory, and get a feel for how well your own firm is doing.
One of my clients, for example, outperforms its benchmark. It secures more firm rankings and lawyer recommendations than equivalent sized firms, and receives the same number of recommendations as larger firms placed much higher up the AmLaw 200 list.
On the other side of the fold-out are some promotional statistics derived from a recent Legal 500 survey into the readership habits of in-house counsel.
As useful as this tool is, wouldn’t it be great if you could have the underlying data and slice and dice the law firm stats. Everything is about data now, right?
This was my question to David Burgess, the Legal 500’s publishing director, in a recent meeting.
As a former in-house law firm marketer, my first thought was: I would like to have this information in a spreadsheet so I could do more accurate benchmarking and make like-for-like comparisons.
For example, I would want to order the firms by number of rankings (on the paper version, the firms are listed alphabetically) or add in another column and do a ratio of rankings-to-firm size.
David explained:
“Our new online service will allow firms to log in and track their rankings, and rankings of other firms (going back five years). It will be fully interactive and firms will be able to see how many recommendations they have, how many top tier listings, and how they compare against peer firms across regions, countries, or practice areas.”
Data for the Europe, Middle East & Africa regions is set to be launched on March 27 2013, with US information to follow at the end of May after the 2013 edition of the US directory is released.
Although there will be a fee for this service, the pricing is likely to be integrated into different firm profile packages.
Firms should contact David Burgess for more details.
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