What do clients really think about the service they receive from law firms? At Legal 500, we hear from hundreds of thousands of clients every year, rating firms on key metrics such as lawyer quality and availability, billing, and levels of communication and expertise.

The answers we receive allow us to evaluate firms using a set of client service data scores, covering Lawyers and Team Quality, Value: Billing and Efficiency, and Sector and Industry Knowledge – all of which combine to produce an overall Client Service Score.

This article focuses on Lawyers and Team Quality, for which CMS scores 80.60. (The rest of this article is available to logged-in users only. If you are unable to log in above right, please click ‘Forgot your password?’ below to gain access to the full article).

By ordering the scores for all Global 100 firms, we can see how they compare to each other. As shown in the graph below, CMS’s score of 80.60 sits in the 10-20%, ie second-lowest, decile of the Global 100 for Lawyers and Team Quality.

This score is, however, better than competitors including Ashurst, Dentons and Gowling WLG (those firms’ scores are not published in this article).

Firm performance can also be displayed relative to the market average, or benchmark. Although CMS outscored Ashurst, Dentons and Gowling WLG, all four firms were comfortably below the Global 100 benchmark for Lawyers and Team Quality.

Lawyers and Team Quality is the average of sub-criteria scores attained for Quality of partners, Quality of associates and Partner availability and engagement, and we scrutinise these in exactly the same way.

CMS’s Quality of associates is 0.35% above the Global 100 benchmark of 77.02, which makes its absolute score of 77.37 even more impressive. In contrast, Ashurst, Dentons and Gowling WLG all fall below the benchmark.

CMS’s Quality of partners is 2.03% below the Global 100 benchmark of 85.10, which provides more relative context to its absolute score of 83.07. Ashurst, Dentons and Gowling WLG all fall below the benchmark again, although Gowling WLG and Ashurst fare marginally better.

Benchmark scoring for our other criteria (Value: Billing and Efficiency, and Sector and Industry Knowledge), all sub-criteria and details of firms’ Overall Client Service scores are also available. In addition, Legal 500 offers comprehensive client satisfaction reporting not only for the Global 100, but also from a worldwide, jurisdictional, country-by-country, office or practice area perspective.

If you would like to know more, please contact researchinfo@legal500.com to find out about what is available for your firm. We welcome all feedback on The Client’s View series and what you would be interested in seeing from our data.