A strong IP STARS submission gives researchers a clear, supported account of an IP practice. It explains the team’s strengths, its contribution to significant matters and why that work mattered to clients.

The challenge is to turn detailed legal information into a coherent submission. Here are five practical tips for presenting your practice accurately and persuasively.

1. Support the Practice Overview with Relevant Matters

The practice overview should explain the team’s strengths and give researchers a clear introduction to the case studies that follow.

Start by reviewing your matters for recurring patterns. They may demonstrate particular experience in international brand protection, patent disputes involving commercially important technology, or IP rights within complex transactions.

Look at the matters together. Several instructions can support a sector focus or an established capability more convincingly than a single prominent mandate.

Use those patterns to shape the overview. If you emphasise technology licensing or life sciences expertise, the case studies should provide relevant evidence. Distinguish established experience from areas the practice intends to develop.

Practical step: Identify the main strengths demonstrated by your selected matters, then check that the practice overview reflects them.

2. Explain the Work and Why It Mattered

A recognisable client name or a large project value provides context. The description still needs to explain what your team contributed.

Separate the work undertaken from its significance. The work summary explains the instruction and the team’s role. The significance section explains why that contribution mattered to the client or the development of IP law and practice.

In transactional work, this might involve securing rights to use and modify technology, allocating ownership of future developments or addressing dependence on a supplier. In disputes, it might involve challenging a commercially important right or protecting a client’s ability to operate.

Capture:

• The client’s objective and what was at stake.
• The legal, technical or commercial issues.
• The team’s role and the work undertaken.
• The outcome or current stage.
• The significance of the advice.

For cross-border matters, explain the work undertaken alongside the jurisdictions involved. Relevant details might include working with local counsel, addressing provisional refusals, negotiating coexistence agreements or advising on registration and enforcement strategies across markets. Connect those activities to the client’s objective.

For ongoing matters, explain what was achieved during the reporting period and what remains unresolved. A registration, completed negotiation or procedural milestone can demonstrate progress even when the wider matter continues.

Keep anticipated benefits separate from achieved results. Where you include the value of a wider project, make clear what that figure represents and describe the IP mandate precisely.

Practical step: Read the description from the perspective of someone unfamiliar with the matter. Can they understand what the team did and why it mattered?

3. Include Valuable Confidential Matters

Select matters for their significance, complexity and the team’s contribution, whether they are public or confidential.

Where the research process permits confidential information, include work that helps demonstrate the practice’s capabilities even if it cannot be publicised. Describe the instruction, the team’s role and its significance with the same care as a publishable matter.

Clearly mark the relevant client names and details as confidential, using red text where required by the submission guidelines. This identifies the information supplied for confidential research rather than publication.

Practical step: Review confidential matters alongside public ones when selecting examples, and check that their confidentiality status is clearly indicated in the required format.

4. Make Sector Experience Specific

A list of industries gives researchers limited insight into a practice’s sector expertise. Explain the IP issues the team handles within those sectors and support the description with relevant case studies.

For example, experience in life sciences might involve brand protection and enforcement, while technology work might concern software licensing or rights to future developments. Describe the connection between the sector, the client’s needs and the advice provided.

Use the sector summary to bring those examples together without repeating each case study in full. This helps researchers understand how individual instructions demonstrate broader experience.

Practical step: For each sector highlighted, identify the relevant matters and explain what they collectively show about the team’s expertise.

5. Keep the Different Sections Consistent

A matter may appear in a case study, the practice overview and a sector summary. Each section serves a different purpose, but the underlying facts should remain consistent.

The case study provides detail. The overview explains how that work supports the practice’s strengths. A sector summary brings relevant examples together to demonstrate experience in an industry.

Adapt the emphasis without expanding the claim. If a case study describes pending proceedings, a summary should not present them as a completed success. If the team advised on one part of a project, the overview should preserve that scope.

Before finalising, check dates, matter status, outcomes, values and the firm’s role across all references. Update descriptions of ongoing matters and ensure that broader statements are supported by the examples provided. Resolve placeholders and confirm factual amendments with the responsible lawyers.

Practical step: Review the submission as one document, tracing its main claims back to the case studies that support them. A well-prepared IP STARS submission also helps a firm articulate what it wants to be known for. By identifying its strengths and supporting them with clear examples, the firm develops a more consistent account of its expertise—one that can inform pitches, practice descriptions and wider communications, using material approved for those purposes