How legal directories are viewing the Covid-19 crisis - the Legal 500 perspective

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David Burgess
Legal 500, London
david.burgess@legal500.com

The Covid-19 crisis has had the kind of socioeconomic impact that most of us have never experienced before. It is changing the way we live, work and interact with our colleagues, clients, friends and family. It has brought incredible upheaval to us personally and professionally, and as I write this in mid-April 2020, we are slowly coming to terms with what this means for the next 12 months.

The impact on the Legal 500 depends on which part of the business you look at. With our traditional rankings, we have a new mantra – it is business as (un)usual. The schedule for research is relatively unaffected by the crisis, but we have of course given law firms and barristers' chambers a little more time to provide us with submissions. Our main regret with the ‘stay at home’ edict is that we aren’t able to do our interviews face-to-face and meet with many of the firms and in-house lawyers, but instead have to rely on technology. As soon as the travel bans are lifted, and we feel it is safe for our staff to travel, we look forward to meeting everyone in person once again.

The Legal 500 runs more than 150 events a year, the vast majority for in-house lawyers. Covid-19 has had a devastating effect on these, but it is only temporary, and we hope to be back up and running soon.

No one knows how long our businesses will be disrupted for. It depends on which jurisdiction you are in, what governments are doing concerning social distancing and whether we will see new waves of increased infections, which may lead to further travel lockdowns. In many respects it is too early to say how it will affect us all, but in the course of our research, a few themes are beginning to show.

The demands on in-house lawyers are increasing, with business relying more heavily on their lawyers to provide answers to questions that change on a daily basis. From a legal perspective, the three areas that are keeping them busiest are employment, disputes and restructuring/insolvency. Those firms that took a look at the economic situation about 12 to 18 months ago and started recruiting laterals in these spaces are well set up for the upheaval that is coming. However, it is the need for solutions that will give law firms the most sleepless nights over the next year. In-house lawyers are looking to their external advisers to provide the solutions that very few are able to answer. Their role as trusted adviser has never been more critical, and more at risk.

We have received a number of emails and calls regarding outreach to the in-house community. Firms are concerned that their referees would not have the time to respond to our reference requests, and so we put the entire global referee outreach programme on hold until the end of April 2020. However, as you will see later in this piece, the demand from in-house lawyers for quality advice means that they are more engaged than ever with the Legal 500, so we are delighted that this will restart from the beginning of May.

We have also seen increased communication from individual partners contacting us to ensure that they have visibility on our website, checking on the research schedules and asking more questions about the research process.

In recent conversations with general counsels, I have found that while companies are leaning on their law firms to help them out of this crisis – and the most popular work that they are doing is modelling a range of solutions and scenarios – the results have been mixed at best. Lack of responsiveness and lack of practical business advice means that while those companies will be sticking with their advisers for now, not many have the time or budgets to seek out new firms to instruct, and when things return to the new normal, the relationships those firms have will be severely tested. We are already hearing of a desire to change firms, to get fresh ideas.

Recently the Legal 500 had an internal discussion about our readership and user statistics. Our initial feeling was that our readership figures would probably be slightly down year on year. We were buoyed to see that our readership figures had increased. Conversations with users revealed that most of this increased traffic was cross-border searches and the need to find law firms outside of general counsel’s home jurisdictions.

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