Ranking litigation has proved notoriously difficult for the legal media industry.
Unlike transactions, many of which are public and are easy to quantify, litigation is complex, multi-layered, unpredictable, and success is often determined by what stays out of court.
But UK legal media group The Lawyer has jumped into the fray with a new rankings product that tracks the number of times law firms appear in court.
Set to launch in early 2017, The Lawyer Litigation Tracker will run as a quarterly ranking and covers all judgments in English and Singaporean civil courts from 2015 and 2016 – some 6,000 cases.
According to The Lawyer, the data featured in the new litigation tracker includes:
- The most active law firms, barristers and solicitors in court action
- The most active companies in litigation by sector
- Relationships between companies and law firms
- Specialist activity such as construction, medical negligence, and private client
- Success rates of barristers/chambers before individual judges
Muscling in to the area long occupied by the M&A and transactional league tables (Thomson Reuters, Bloomberg, and the like), Catrin Griffiths, editor of The Lawyer, said:
“While corporate lawyers have long been able to benchmark their activity through the M&A league tables, such research has not been available for the litigation market – until now. The Lawyer Litigation Tracker will reshape the way the market perceives contentious work.”
The Lawyer has made a play for the rankings and surveys segment of the legal publishing market in recent years.
Barely a week goes by without receiving an email from an arm of The Lawyer promoting its latest market intelligence report or survey.
Reporting on news and writing feature articles alone is not enough for media companies to survive these days, and some would say their strategy is a wise one.
Last year, The Lawyer launched a new survey of the firms with the most links to FTSE 250 companies.
And among The Lawyer’s “research suite” is a range of rankings products such as The Global Litigation 50 and The Lawyer Global 200.
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