For many firms, there is currently a short break in the deadlines for the major directories. Some of the next key deadlines will be for Chambers, with some Asia-Pacific and Latin America submissions due in January and some EMEA submissions due in February. Before these deadlines, there is an opportunity to get ready and ensure success in the new year. This article will provide some tips and ideas to help you make the process as smooth as possible.

Reviewing the last submission cycle

Our first recommendation is to hold a review of your previous submissions process. Now is the time to look over at things that did or did not work well over 2025. Given the volume of submissions and numerous deadlines through the year, staying organised across the whole cycle and meeting deadlines is vital to ensure that there are not any knock-on effects to submissions that are next due.

• How easy was it to gather and organise all the necessary information? How strong is your process in adapting the information into the various submission templates?
• Was partner approval a straightforward process? Can this process be meaningfully streamlined Ideally for the partners, their input should be made as efficient as possible so they are not spending more time than necessary.
• Were deadlines met? Did you experience any significant delays in a particular submission, and did this affect any other submissions? Could more time be afforded to any submissions that proved a problem?
• How are your team’s rankings performing vs your targets?

Hold a session to break down the rankings and note where the improvements were. Don’t forget to celebrate your successes as much as identifying things to improve!

Prioritising submissions

Thinking ahead to when the submissions cycle fully kicks into gear in early 2026, a crucial question to ask yourself is what resources you have available, and therefore how many submissions you can dedicate to.

One strategy is to consider which directories you would like to prioritise. Many firms try to submit to as many directories as possible, but it is an equally valid strategy to opt for fewer directories and instead focus your efforts on a few high-quality submissions. Alternatively, for directories that are less of a priority, it may be more efficient to just adapt that submission from another that you have worked on in more detail.

There is also the question of whether your firm has broken into a ranking table that you have submitted to, or even if you have ever submitted to that area before. Submitting to a new area will require working completely from scratch, which will likely take more time than an established submission.

You may also wish to pay extra attention to rankings where you believe the firm is under ranked. If for example you have a new practice area with a young team, it is unlikely you will be ranked in the very first cycle. Your goal this year is instead to to start building your reputation in that area with the directories and lay the groundwork for a ranking in the near future.

Reviewing key market trends and competitive analysis

In order to develop a strategy to get yourself noted in the rankings, we would recommend taking a review for each of your submissions on what were the key market trends in that practice. The directories monitor what is going on in the markets and weight their rankings towards types of work
that have been particularly strong that year.

Therefore, consider what has recently dominated your particular market, and then think about to what extent your practice has been part of that trend. When it comes to the submission, you can then align matters to those trends. This will help to demonstrate that your firm is top of the market and that you’re actually part of the trend, not just chasing it.

Another approach we would recommend at this stage is a comparative analysis with your targets vs where similar firms are ranked. For example, seeing how competitors fare in the rankings, looking at their editorial provided by the directories and how that writeup fits with market trends. The editorial that competitors receive should help to give you an idea about why they have succeeded in achieving a high ranking by detailing their main areas of focus. This is a great approach that our team members with BD experience really recommend.

Preparing to select matters

You can also prepare by starting to gather the necessary information for submissions next year. The best place to start is your previous submission document. We often describe submissions as ‘living’ documents: they are rarely rewritten from scratch every year, but instead are often adapted, updated and honed over time.

Given the number of submissions that are made for a single practice area over a year, it is advisable to start with your previous draft and including new information from there. Remember that matters that have completed 12 months before the submission deadline should now be replaced with newer work. For matters that are ongoing, they can still be included but they should be updated to discuss the most recent developments (they should not just be directly cut from the last submission.)

It may be that you already have a number of new matters that you’re considering for your next submission. When selecting matters, the golden rule is to keep it simple and just select the most impressive, most significant work that your team has acted on. Beyond that rule, the lawyers that you would like to showcase in the submission should all have a strong presence in the work highlights. Partners that you would like to see ranked should be appearing on at least 2-3 matters.

The other main issue to consider is how best to present your team’s strengths as a whole. If the firm is well known for a very particular area of work within that practice area, then the submission should reflect that, as long as you are still keeping space for other types of work to prove the full extent of your practice.

Capturing data

For every matter you are considering for submissions, make sure you have all of the following information on this checklist:

• A description of the matter, including:
  • A brief summary of the matter
  • What the team worked on specifically
  • Why this matter is important
• The client’s name
• The value of the matter
• The team members that acted on the matter
• The date the matter closed or if it is ongoing
• Other law firms that acted on the matter and their role

Capturing this data alongside press releases is often a good approach, because those releases typically contain much of the necessary information. We would also suggest that if a matter could be included in more than one submission, this should be clearly noted now as it will make building your submissions much easier.

In situations where any of the information you need is currently missing, we would recommend making a note of what will need to be added when it comes to writing the submission in full. While it is possible to quickly contact a partner to confirm, we find that it can be very easy to end up in unnecessary back- and-forth correspondence over fine detail, which can be a problem if that partners’ time is limited.

Partner involvement and approval

Speaking of partner involvement, it’s important to consider how to get the most out of the lawyers’ time when working on a particular submission. There are a few ways to make efficiencies in the time needed for partners to review and approve a submission document. Details that usually require help from partners include:

• Adding missing information
• Checking confidentiality of a certain matter
• Selecting particular matters to include

To avoid lengthy correspondence across the team on these matters, we would recommend noting these issues for now so that when it’s time to drafting the submission, they can all be addressed simultaneously. This will allow partners to tackle all these issues at the same time and make their task of knowing what to add much easier.

In submissions for big departments where several lawyers are involved, nominating one partner who is interested in the directories process and giving them full authority to approve that submission could be the best course of action.

In submissions where handling confidential information is a greater concern, now is also the time to seek permission from that client to include them. Getting these matters cleared now will considerably speed up the process of writing submissions later down the line. This is also a good time to ask clients for permission over whether they can be included as referees.

Submission deadlines and building a schedule

Finally, now is the time to build a schedule of deadlines so that you are prepared with the right resources at the right time.

The directories generally launch their guides and set deadlines at around the same time of the year, though we would note that the exact deadlines are usually confirmed 1-2 months in advance and they can be subject to change. We would recommend setting regular reminders so that you can confirm what the exact deadlines are and to commence work for those submissions.

Conclusion

To summarise all our key tips, the key tasks to complete now are:

• Review your process from last year to identify successes and improvements.
• Decide what to submit, and which submissions to prioritise.
• Capture as much data as you can, and identify where you will need more information.
• Seek client’s permission to include their work or act as referees.
• Build a schedule based on rough deadlines.

For each submission, keep thinking about your core strategy: what are your goals, how does this compare to other firms, which lawyers do you want to highlight and how does your work fit into the year’s trends? With all of these ideas in mind, you will be well placed to succeed.

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If you’ve found this article insighful, you might want to read Laurence’s latest article Trends in directories: What is changing and what to look out for by clicking here.