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.

CMS’s preview post here focuses solely on Lawyers and Team Quality, where the firm scores 80.60.

As shown in the scatter graph above, CMS is in the 10-20%, ie second-lowest, decile of the Global 100 for Lawyers and Team Quality. This absolute score is nonetheless still better than comparators including Ashurst, Dentons and Gowling WLG.

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.

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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.