Picture the person reading your submission. Not the partner signing it off. The researcher.
They have a stack to get through, often more than a hundred documents in a single practice area. They are clever and thorough. An excellent writer and editor. But they are probably not lawyers, and they almost certainly don’t specialise in your field. They have a fixed window to decide who moves up, who stays where they are, and who has quietly overstated their year.
That is your audience. And most firms write for the wrong one.
The reader is not a lawyer
We know the view from that seat because many of us used to sit in it, as researchers and editors at Chambers and Legal 500. We saw hundreds of submissions written as though the reader already knew the practice, knew the clients, and understood why the work was hard. A researcher covering banking one week and shipping the next does not know this though. They will not reconstruct the importance of a deal from a list of process steps, and they will not guess. If you do not tell them why a matter mattered, they will move on.
This is where good work gets lost. The firm did something genuinely difficult, then described it in a way that helps the reader to pick that point out quickly and clearly. A researcher cannot score what they cannot see or understand. And, importantly, if they can’t see the wood for the trees, they are likely to assume it means the expertise isn’t there to see.
The same matter, read two ways
Here is an example of what we mean. One work highlight, written twice.
How we often see things written:
Acted for the borrower on the refinancing of its senior facilities, including negotiation of the intercreditor arrangements and security package, together with associated hedging and conditions precedent.
Written for the researcher:
Advised a mid-market manufacturing group on its £180m refinancing, the first of its kind in the sector since the 2023 rate rises. It was complicated work: four jurisdictions (France, Italy, Germany and UK), a distressed timeline, and a lender group that had not worked together before. Sarah Owen (Associate, currently un-ranked) led and ran the intercreditor negotiation herself, opposite two ranked partners (Joe Bloggs, Band 1 and Sally Smith, Band 4). Two ranked competitors (Big Firm and Massive Firm) have since used the same structure.
This deal is significant because it demonstrates the firm’s work on ground-breaking matters, developing innovative structures followed and applied by higher-ranked firms. We believe this is a clear indication of the firm’s qualification for ranking alongside these professional peers. In addition, this deal shows Sarah Owen’s work far above her seniority level, establishing her as worthy of inclusion in the rankings in her own right.
(Illustrative example, not a real matter.)
The first is accurate. It also tells the researcher nothing they can rank. No value, no context, no reason the work was hard, no clear role, no sign the market noticed. The second answers the questions a researcher is actually scoring. Is the work complex, high value and relevant? What did this lawyer do, as opposed to the team around them? Did it matter to anyone outside the firm?
Chambers scores work on its sophistication and relevance, on the seniority and prominence of the lawyer’s role, and on whether client feedback backs the story up. None of that can be assessed if the writing hides it. The second version is not longer because it is padded. It is clearer because it helps the reader understand.
Comparison is the thief of rankings
It is important to remember that researchers read comparatively. Your submission is not marked on its own but, rather, sits next to your competitors’, and next to what the researcher already knows from referee calls and last year’s round. The reader will test your claims against everything else on the desk. Specific, checkable detail earns trust for the next claim you might make.
Researchers reward clarity like this because so little of what crosses the desk has it. A submission that leads with its headline facts, explains why each matter belongs, and is laid out so the eye can find things, is a relief to read. And, if yours is the only submission setting things out this way, with clear, supported sets of claims, this will help your submission to stand out.
Ultimately the judgement a researcher forms about your firm comes partly from the work, and partly from how you presented it.
Want a few more things to consider that will make you stand out?
- Consider the formatting. It sounds trivial, but bullets and bold let a researcher scan the document and pull out the points that matter. A wall of unbroken text buries your best work; a submission built to be skimmed gets read properly.
- Make the whole story line up. Researchers cross-check the submission against referee calls, the lawyers’ bios, your website and what they already know of the market. If the submission says someone leads the practice but their bio and the work highlights suggest otherwise, the gap registers, and it costs you more than the claim would ever have won.
- Put a value on the work. An anonymous matter with no figure gives the researcher nothing to weigh. A recognisable client, or a line on who a lesser-known one is and why they count, lets them judge significance in seconds.
- Show range rather than the same deal twenty times. Varied issues, sectors and deal types tell a researcher the practice has real depth. A run of near-identical matters, however good each one is, reads as a narrow bench.
- Say who did what. Naming the lawyers on each matter and their actual role demonstrates the true bench strength, beyond just the headline partners, and plants the evidence for next year’s individual nominations. A submission carried start to finish by one name looks thin, however strong that name is.
- Name the other firms and lawyers on the matter too. Who you acted alongside and against tells the researcher where you sit and who your real peers are. A deal opposite a Band 1 firm is direct evidence you operate at that level, and it is the argument a researcher makes internally to justify a move.
- Back every nominee with enough evidence. Anyone put forward for a ranking wants at least five supporting matters, and the same discipline applies to referees. A name with one deal behind it is easy for a researcher to pass over, however senior.
- Add links to further reading. Where there is press coverage or published analysis on the client, the matter or the issue, include it. It lets the researcher corroborate the significance for themselves rather than taking your word for it.
- Show the year’s movement. New client wins, growth, a first instruction in a sector, a lateral hire settling in. Researchers want the direction of travel, not a static description lifted from last year. Recycled wording is easy to spot, and it quietly signals that nothing has changed.
- Join up the overview, the bios and the matters. These sections should read as one argument, not three. The overview states the background to the case for ranking, the bios show the people who deliver it, and the matters prove it happened. When a researcher can follow that thread from claim to evidence without doing the work themselves, the submission does its job.
Write for the chair
Write for the person sitting in it. Lead with the facts that carry weight. Explain why the work mattered instead of assuming it will be obvious. Remove the process detail that only a colleague would care about. Make it easy to find the reason you deserve the ranking.
If you want a second reader who has done the researcher’s job, that is what we do. Book a call and we will look at how your submissions read from the other side of the desk. And we might just be able to make sure that the right points get across that desk, for the first time.
