This week’s Gazette carries two articles whose authors set out to answer the question ‘Have the legal directories had their day?’ Both are by experienced legal sector communications experts – one says ‘yes’; the other says ‘no’.
I spent 10 years, from 1998, contributing to the Legal 500 but I make no judgement about whether the significant time and money spent by law firms on the two main directories, the Legal 500 and Chambers, is worth it. People like our contributors are the experts in that.
But they are curious and unique guides – there is no equivalent for other professions – and working on them as researchers shaped the early careers of many people I’m still in touch with.
How was it from our perspective?
Almost all of us were in our 20s, and these jobs were our route into writing and journalism. As such what most of us wanted was to be writing for the magazines published by the same companies. At the 500, these were Legal Business, European Legal Business, the In-House Lawyer (which I edited), Lawyer International and a law students’ magazine.
A rite of passage for my current colleagues who cut their teeth in local newspapers was the famous ‘death knock’ story. Our equivalent was cold calling a law firm about the loss of its corporate finance or securitisation team to a competitor.
That, and working on the directories in particular, meant we were all dealing face to face with very senior people – all vastly more well informed than us.
When such senior people report that they resent being ranked by someone in their 20s, whose salary was barely into five figures, they may have a point.
But then, the published rankings also reflect the views of their peers in other firms, and the feel you get for the practice from talking to clients. They prompt anyone asked about the rankings to reflect on sources of strength and what constitutes a weakness.
Researchers have a vast amount of information – file upon file of submissions. I’d hope that a researcher knows a lot more about an area by the time they complete their chapters than at the start. At my first interview with a firm for the London pensions chapter, I didn’t know what section 75 of the Pensions Act 1995 was, or why it was important. I did by the end.
And while we might not have known much, phenomenally knowledgeable editors, committed to the guides rather than to just ‘breaking into journalism’, did.
Writing with such little space, and for an audience that cared about detail, we learned care, precision and concision. And especially if you were covering a region or a country, you heard managing partners explain matters of business and strategy. The 500 took me around the City, to Bath, Bristol, Exeter, Cheltenham, Bournemouth, Nottingham, Derby, Manchester, Liverpool, Brussels, Thailand, Taiwan and the Philippines. And while it was a telephone job, I wrote the first Middle East chapters.
‘When you write about Big Law,’ one friend said recently, ‘you manage to make it sound like you care.’ I actually do, I answered. These are important businesses, and whether or not they are run with integrity and commercial wisdom matters.
Others who went through this, and who no doubt seemed too inexperienced to rank and comment on law firms, now form an, I think, impressive group. A couple went to the FT, one is very senior at Bloomberg, another returned to practice and has defeated the government in the Supreme Court several times. Another became an investigative journalist before another career pivot, joining the Met Police as an inspector. One works for the SFO, a follow on from time at a high profile public inquiry. Some are now freelance and write for the Gazette. Still others head communications teams at major law firms.
Skills and knowledge-wise, we aren’t who we were, but we are in part the ‘system’ we went through. I regularly direct journalists writing for the Gazette, or seeking a reviewer for a book, to the directories for ideas of who to contact. When Russia seized Crimea in 2014, I went straight to directory listings in the Legal 500 to add up how many lawyers worked for international law firms in Russia. Nowhere else had that.
I hear firms complain about the directories – and of course I’m very much here for the ones who say researchers are less good than in ‘my day’ (though who knows if they are right? I can’t judge that); and the cost of the listings section and other services, I think the directories need to keep an eye on.
Have the directories been a good thing for people who researched and wrote for them? Not everyone had a ‘good’ experience at the time. But by and large, yes. And the market knowledge seen and held by us is something other professional sectors don’t have. That insight goes well beyond the top-30 firms that City legal coverage focuses on.
Does that make the effort in time and the expense worth it for you as a law firm or barristers chambers?
I couldn’t possibly say. But if you took the time to explain your practice or firm to ignorant, 25-year-old me, then I’d like to say thank you – and to reassure you, I was listening.
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