Every year I read submissions that are well written but are ultimately followed up by disappointment at best and, at worst, rage. Everything in the document is great but the ranking doesn’t move.
As we have discussed in many of our other blogs, this is rarely down to the work itself… or even the document, so much as the gap between that document and everything else a researcher hears about the firm.
A submission is one source, not the assessment
Chambers is clear about this on its own submissions page. A submission is a collection of factual information, used alongside other sources, to help decide whether a firm or individual should be ranked. Chambers also says firms can be, and have been, ranked without submitting anything at all, on the strength of publicly available information and the research team’s own market work.
I often describe it as a set of claims and assertions, backed up with your chosen evidence, that the researcher can then seek to prove or disprove through various means. You are not making the case on your own. Your submission is one voice among referees, peers, published commentary, your website, and a researcher who has covered your market for years. Decisions are the result of those sources agreeing.
So the question isn’t so much whether your submission is persuasive. It’s whether it says the same thing as everybody else who gets asked.
This isn’t general advice about consistent messaging
In many ways this point is specific to directories rather than general advice about being consistent in your messaging (although I believe that is important too).
Chambers’ research team can see a firm’s submissions across jurisdictions and across related practice areas. A researcher covering M&A in one market can look at what you filed in another. Someone reviewing white-collar crime can read your related filings alongside it.
Nowhere else does one reader see that much of your firm’s output at once. A client reads one page of your website. A prospect reads one pitch. A researcher reads six documents that all claim to describe the same firm, and reads them in the same fortnight.
If your London team calls the practice a market leader in complex cross-border disputes, and your New York team calls it a nimble alternative to the big battalions, that isn’t two pieces of positioning. To the person reading both, it’s one firm that can’t agree on its strengths.
Referees can only corroborate a story they recognise
And this indecision can have a wider knock-on to your rankings.
A referee isn’t being asked to praise you. They’re being asked to confirm something. If your firm has never settled on what the practice does and why it matters it is likely anyone asked will supply their own story. Which is how you end up with the same three adjectives every year. My colleague Rhia Lyon, who spent nearly six years at Chambers, put it well: nine times out of ten a referee would describe a lawyer as pragmatic, responsive and knowledgeable. It became a running joke.
Briefing referees properly is not telling them what to say. Researchers spot a coached answer immediately and it damages your credibility rather than building it. I’m talking here about making sure the language exists in the first place, so that when a referee describes your work in their own words, those words echo yours.
You can’t do that if nobody has decided what the words are.
The same failure costs you twice
Firms react to the rankings argument because it has a date attached. The second cost, however, is (I think) bigger and almost nobody notices it, because there is no deadline.
Your submission file is the only place in the firm where, once a year, partners hand over their best matters, those matters get fact-checked and approved for external use, and your positioning gets tested directly against your competitors. That’s why we tell clients it’s the natural source material for the year ahead: pitch credentials, case studies, capability documents, award entries, biography updates, website copy.
Importantly, if you’re going to get the best ROI from this source material it has to be coherent, relevant and consistent, to be usable.
Try building a capability document for a practice that four submissions describe four different ways. You can’t.
Or try filling out a proposal for M&A work – to use the original example – when you don’t know how you’re meant to be positioning the practice and each lawyer bio talks about different strengths and weaknesses.
Someone has to decide which version is right, which means going back to the partners, which means the conversation you should have had in January now happens in September with less time and less patience on all sides.
And then it gets worse
If you build the year’s content out of an inconsistent submission file, you push that inconsistency across the website, the pitches, the case studies and the award entries. All of it becomes public.
And it’s this inconsistency that is ultimately used by researchers to assess next year’s submission against, when determining rankings.
The corroboration problem gets worse, and not because anyone was careless. You took the original disagreement, scaled it up, and published it.
While it may not be immediately obvious that messaging is a core part of directories, I would argue that clear messaging is the very bedrock of both directories and getting year-round value from them. Without consistent messaging and a clear, strategic link, not only will your rankings likely disappoint, but you’ll throw away much of the knock-on benefit that can come from using the directories process as a data-collection tool for your BD and marketing content.
What to do before the next round
Put this year’s submissions in one folder and read them side by side. Every practice, every jurisdiction. Mark every place the same practice is described differently.
Now test this against your firm-wide tone of voice, brand strategy and overall strategic plan. [Incidentally, this is actually a really valuable exercise to use AI for, but that’s another article.]
Some of what you find will be fine. Different tables need different emphasis, and a fintech submission shouldn’t read like a banking one. What you’re looking for, however, is the places where the firm makes incompatible claims about itself, and the places where nobody said anything at all and the text filled the gap with adjectives. Where arguments are presented that directly contradict what’s on the website or in press clippings. Where the strategic plan is driving in one direction and the submission examples clearly map a path in another.
Once you have this insight you can decide which version is right, and write it down properly, with worked examples for the people who will be using it.
My advice is to do this before anyone uploads another submission and certainly before they seek to turn it into content.
For more information on this subject or our content from directory submissions and tone of voice services, please get in touch.
