Providing too much information.
Perhaps the most common error a Chambers researcher will encounter when reading submissions is where a firm has provided excessive reams of information. These issues can include too many work highlights, or individual highlights running for multiple pages. Often a lot of this information is impenetrable and goes far too close into the fine technical detail. When determining rankings, researchers typically take ten to fifteen minutes reading and analysing each submission. Therefore, anything that makes it difficult to quickly comprehend the information is often a pet peeve for researchers. The ideal length of a work highlight is one side of A4, which means that the matter description should be around two to three paragraphs. It’s very rare for a matter to genuinely require more space than this.
Providing too little information.
Ironically, this issue is typically the next most common problem with submissions! The submission document is ultimately a balancing act; the document is designed to be a specific length so that a researcher can make a reasoned decision on the quality of that firm in a reasonable amount of time. Whilst matter summaries should be succinct, providing just one or two sentences is likely not enough to fully understand what the matter is about. Furthermore, if a firm is unable to provide 20 work highlights, researchers will likely conclude that it is not acting on enough significant work to warrant a ranking.
Adding extra matters outside of work highlights.
A technique often used by firms to circumvent the limits of the submission document is to group together multiple matters into a single work highlight. For example, grouping any work done for the same client or the same type of work being collated together. Grouping a few related matters together like this is acceptable, but this technique should not be used to abuse the document and filling it up with an excessive number of additional matters. The work highlights should ideally remain just one page of A4. Furthermore, listing additional work in other areas such as lawyer bios or team summary should also be avoided beyond quick headlines.
Getting the wrong focus on certain lawyers.
One of the most challenging aspects of writing a strong submission that achieves a firm’s aims is in providing enough coverage around individual lawyers. As space is limited, it’s common for some lawyers to present more evidence to the disadvantage of others. One effective workaround is to list all lawyers who were involved in each work highlight to give them due credit for the same matter. Lawyers who are already ranked should continue to demonstrate a good stream of work (at least 2-3 work highlights), but when it comes to unranked lawyers, firms should consider who they want to focus on supporting and provide them with the most support both in terms of the submission and the number of referees.
Using hyperbolic language.
Sometimes firms are prone to using superlatives in order to promote some of the work they present (for example, describing a deal as ‘one of the best in the market’ without elaborating on why.) Researchers are trained to look beyond ‘marketing speak’ and just drill down into the facts of the evidence. The evidence that a firm presents should be allowed to speak for itself.
Ignoring or mishandling the feedback section.
Section C2 on the Chambers submission offers firms the opportunity to comment on the existing rankings and how accurate they believe current coverage is. Firms often instead use the space to express frustration about rankings without any constructive feedback. This can instead be used as a chance for a firm to describe why they are underranked and where they believe the current coverage is going wrong, or by drawing comparisons to firms in higher bands. These insights will both get the firm’s point across and provide insight that researchers will find helpful.
Misunderstanding the confidential/publishable format of the submission template.
The standard template on a Chambers submission contains space for both publishable and confidential information in order to allow firms to confidently share any sensitive data without any risk of publication. This template includes 10 publishable matters and 10 confidential, and firms often interpret this as needing to specifically include this number of each. In reality, as much or as little confidential information can be included, and the template can be adapted to include more or fewer sensitive matters.
Mislabelling confidential information.
It’s surprisingly common for the same information in a submission to be variously labelled as publishable or confidential in different parts of the submissions. Matter values, client names and other specific details are often affected by this. Whilst this doesn’t affect ranking decisions, it is significant in writing editorial, as researchers will not include information that is at any point labelled as confidential.
Bios.
It’s common for lawyers to cut and paste their bios directly into this space, when a link to their website will provide the same information. The bio space is best used to provide a very brief summary of what that lawyer’s particular strengths are and a few headline achievements.
Quoting rankings in other directories as evidence.
Chambers does acknowledge data from third parties such as press releases or data from Mergermarket. However, notes about rankings in other directories are usually disregarded by researchers. The methodology of directories varies slightly, so it should be anticipated that they produce slightly different results.
