Great work, strong lawyers and a stagnant ranking. Sound familiar?
This is a more common situation than most firms care to admit, and it’s almost never about the quality of the work. Across our clients, we see the same patterns repeatedly. Not because the researchers got it wrong, but because the submission strategy didn’t give them enough to work with.
Here are three directory submission mistakes we see most often.
The submission doesn’t make significance clear
Researchers reviewing directory submissions are reading hundreds of documents under significant time pressure. They can’t infer importance from a matter description that reads like a case file summary. If your submission does not explicitly state why a matter is significant, the researcher has no reason to assume it is.
As Léa Sarfati, Senior Directories Consultant at ELE and former Chambers Deputy Research Manager puts it: “Chambers and Legal 500 researchers are reviewing hundreds of submissions, often from firms doing similar work. The reality is they don’t always have the time or the tools to unpick vague language or guess why a matter is significant. If your messaging doesn’t cut through, it’s easy to be overlooked.”
This is where many strong practices lose ground. The work was genuinely impressive, but the submission didn’t say so in terms a researcher could quickly understand.
The submission is being used to build a profile that doesn’t exist yet
This is where many firms go wrong: they treat a directory submission as a way of establishing a practice rather than validating one that already exists. A submission is proof of market recognition, not the thing that creates it. If your target clients and peers can’t speak to your reputation, no amount of well-constructed prose will get you ranked. The groundwork has to come first: building a visible profile, publishing views that people in your market actually read, and developing client relationships that generate the kind of awareness researchers can corroborate.
Getting ranked is the consequence of market recognition. It has never worked the other way round.
The referees aren’t doing enough work
Over-reliance on the same referees year after year is one of the most common weaknesses we find in submission audits. Researchers notice when the same names come up repeatedly. It signals to them that you don’t have enough strong client relationships to produce a fresh name each year.
There’s a related problem with referees who haven’t been briefed properly. Their job is to corroborate the story the submission is telling. If they don’t know what that story is, they default to generalities that don’t help anyone. Rhia Lyon, former Research and Content Manager at Chambers, is direct about this: “Nine times out of ten, a referee would describe a lawyer as ‘pragmatic, responsive and knowledgeable.’ It became a running joke.”
The fix isn’t to tell referees what to say. Researchers can spot a coached answer immediately, and it damages credibility rather than building it. The fix is to brief them properly, match them carefully to the submission, and replace contacts who have run their course.
What it looks like when you fix it
A London commercial practice came to ELE frustrated by consistently low directory rankings in their primary practice area. An audit found several problems: referee contacts that had been overused for years, matter descriptions that buried the significance of the work, and no clear argument for where the team was heading.
We rebuilt the submission from scratch. Overused referees were replaced with fresher, better-matched contacts, all briefed thoroughly before and after submission. Matter descriptions were rewritten to make the significance of each instruction explicit. The introductory sections were overhauled to set out a clear case for why this team is worth watching now.
We also looked at what sat around the submission: updating individual profiles, making sure published content connected to the practice areas being submitted, and tying referee management into the firm’s existing client programme.
The following year, several individuals were ranked for the first time and others moved up. The year after, the practice area gained a band. The work had always been there. What changed was how it was positioned, evidenced, and supported. If your ranking has stalled despite strong submissions, the problem is almost certainly in how the work is being presented, not the work itself. We offer a submission audit that identifies exactly where the gaps are. Get in touch if you’d like one.
