What do clients really think about the service they receive from law firms?

At Legal 500, we hear thoughts from hundreds of thousands of clients every year, rating firms on various key metrics such as individual quality, availability, billing, communication and expertise.

This provides an objective and unbiased set of responses, allowing us to evaluate firms using a set of client service data scores. Our specific criteria include Lawyers and Team Quality, Value: Billing and Efficiency, and Sector and Industry Knowledge – all of which combine to produce an Overall Client Service Score.

Bird & Bird’s preview post here focuses solely on Lawyers and Team Quality, where the firm scores 79.96.

As shown in the scatter graph above, Bird & Bird is in the 10-20%, ie second-lowest, decile of the Global 100 for Lawyers and Team Quality. This absolute score is nonetheless better than comparators including Ashurst and Pinsent Masons, but falls behind comparators including Simmons & Simmons.

Firm performance can also be displayed relative to the market average, or benchmark. Although Bird & Bird outscored Ashurst and Pinsent Masons in absolute terms, all three – and Simmons & Simmons – 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.

Bird & Bird’s Quality of partners is 2.65% below the Global 100 benchmark of 85.10, which provides more relative context to its absolute score of 82.45. Ashurst, Pinsent Masons and Simmons & Simmons all fall below the benchmark too.

Bird & Bird’s Partner availability and engagement is 1.31% below the Global 100 benchmark of 83.59, which provides more relative context to its absolute score of 82.28. On this occasion, Simmons & Simmons scores above the benchmark, while Ashurst and Pinsent Masons fall below it again.

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

If you would like to know more, please contact our sales team, who can provide more information about what is available for your firm, at researchreports@legal500.com. We also welcome any feedback on The Client’s View series and our client service scoring.