The world’s largest legal market survey is now live. Following months of data collection, research, interviewing and analysis, the Client Intelligence team is proud to present the most detailed ever review of the global market for legal services.
4,710 clients from 120 countries shared their views on in-house challenges and developments, law firm service delivery and perceived future market changes. With over 80% of FTSE 100 and Fortune 100 companies represented along with the largest corporates from Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America, the Client Intelligence Report (CIR) is the new blueprint of the global legal market.
The core component of CIR is a fully searchable and interactive online database containing millions of data points covering everything from the size of a company’s legal team and its annual external legal spend to individual commentaries on specific firms. Users can interrogate the entire dataset and plot their own correlations, filtering data by industry group, geographical region, specific jurisdiction, size of company, stock listing and much more. In addition, clients have scored law firms across 18 KPIs to highlight areas of importance during a routine instruction and rank firms against each other. In short, CIR offers a wealth of insight into almost every area of the legal market.
Firms can use CIR to plan for the coming year, grow their profits, and develop new projects and initiatives. In particular, CIR’s unparalleled overview of the legal services market will allow users to:
• Form stronger relationships with existing clients: CIR helps firms to understand the struggles clients face within their own company, country and sector. It gives detailed firm-specific feedback that highlights gaps in service delivery. With over 14,000 verbatim comments from the world’s top purchasers of legal services, CIR gives firms the tools to satisfy and retain clients more effectively.
• Understand the market in more detail: With CIR’s ready-made suite of regional and sector-specific reports, users are able to see the market at a glance. A few minutes exploring the database will give a detailed insight into problems partners have identified or questions clients have raised.
• Open a window on competitor firms: Users can also see what nearly 5,000 clients think of their competitors. This information is one of the strongest incentives to bring about change in a firm’s culture and organisation.
The Client Intelligence research data has produced a wealth of information and a plethora of insights about the legal profession. Below are some of the themes that are already being discussed in the market:
• Legal teams throughout the world are under enormous pressure from business to become more efficient and many feel their firms should be doing more to help.
• One of the most frequent complaints GCs have of their external counsel is that partners are too keen to impress their CEO and forget to draw attention to the in-house team’s contribution to a matter.
• Legal budgets are not set to shrink over the coming year, but legal teams will be asked to produce higher workloads.
However the Client Intelligence Report has shown these statements to be too simplistic. It’s essential to be able to interrogate the data that sits behind these opinions. Being able to assess the statements by geography, sector, size of business and individual’s job role grants an intricacy to the data, providing a true picture of perceptions.
The Client Intelligence team has only had a chance to scratch the surface of the huge volume of client feedback we received, so over the coming weeks we will keep a series of blogposts highlighting some of these different discoveries within the data. We welcome questions from firms or clients who want to hear more about our work and are always happy to discuss our research in more detail.
dominic.williams@legalease.co.uk
Find out more about the Client Intelligence Report
