A view comes up often in conversations with managing partners at law firms with long histories: the whole difficulty in legal marketing is getting matter information out of busy partners. Conventional thinking here says that once matter information is in hand what follows is mechanical: feed it to AI, out comes a complete award submission, and a job that used to need a team now takes half an hour.
It’s a view worth taking seriously on its own terms, because two parts of it are genuinely correct. Partner non-cooperation really is the practical bottleneck most law firms feel first. And AI has genuinely compressed the cost of turning notes into prose, and I will not dispute that. However, it doesn’t serve firms to conflate the two halves of the job that comes after the information is in hand. “Capturing the information” is one half. “Knowing what to do with it” is the other half. Both cannot be solved with the same magic wand.
What a ranking submission is actually being judged on
Chambers and Legal 500 researchers aren’t ranking firms on the volume or size of matters listed. They’re ranking on differentiation: whether a firm’s account of its own work shows something a competing firm’s account doesn’t. This would be a complexity handled by the firm distinctively or an outcome a rival team in the same market couldn’t have produced the same way, among other things. The raw matter information a partner hands over (parties, value, a line on what happened) is actually the least differentiating part of a submission. It’s also, usefully, the part a generic AI prompt handles fine on its own.
The part that’s harder to automate is the translation: turning a partner’s messy, partial, understandably self-interested account of a matter into a narrative built to the specific criteria that tier of that directory is known to respond to during that cycle of rankings. This depends on having read what dozens of competing firms submitted in the same practice area, the same year. That comparative view doesn’t sit inside any single firm’s marketing function, however capable, because a team embedded in one firm only ever sees its own matters. It’s the kind of pattern recognition that comes from working across several firms’ award cycles in parallel. This is an aspect in which an external consulting firm and an internal law firm marketing function are simply looking at different amounts of the market, not one being better than the other.
Why partners actually hold back
It’s tempting to read non-cooperation as a discipline problem because partners are disorganised, or don’t prioritise marketing enough, or need to be chased harder. A more useful way to think about it is as a rational response to how the task is currently framed.
A partner asked to fill out a detailed matter form, even in rough notes, is trading an hour of scarce, billable-competing time for an outcome that’s diffuse, delayed, and uncertain. The firm might move up a band next year, and the partner’s own name might or might not be visible in that. Given how long and unclear that chain is, deprioritising the form in favour of the client call in front of them isn’t laziness. It’s an accurate read of where the effort-to-reward ratio currently sits for that person, at that moment.
Which points to where the actual leverage is: not chasing harder, but changing that ratio. Two things do most of the work. Minimise the input — a fifteen-minute in person conversation produces more usable material than any form a partner will actually complete, because talking about work you’re proud of costs almost nothing, while writing about it competes directly with billable time. And make the reward more personal, not just institutional: both directories rank individuals as well as practices, and a partner’s own band or “Star Individual” designation has direct market value to that specific person: leverage in a lateral conversation, grounds for a higher rate at renewal, something a client’s GC actually notices. Pitched as “help the firm’s ranking,” it’s an act of institutional generosity that will always lose to the next billable hour. Pitched as “fifteen minutes that builds your own market profile,” it’s a transaction with an obvious personal return and it happens to be true either way.
And one well-captured conversation doesn’t just produce one submission. It becomes raw material for the directory entry, a practice-page update, a byline pitch to a trade publication, a line in the next similar pitch deck, a reference point for that partner’s next lateral conversation. That’s the actual mechanism behind getting more from less input. It is a specific way the same fifteen minutes gets reused across every channel the firm runs.
A thought worth sitting with together
The gathering process opens up an interesting operational direction to think on. If getting matter information “in hand” really were a half-hour job once it’s captured, that would only be true of a firm whose own systems already hold that information in structured, retrievable form. There exist consistently filed conflict-check records, matter-opening memos, billing narratives retrievable in a usable format. In a firm set up well for this, that should be the easy layer, since this is all internal data the firm already generates just by doing the work.
The fact that the harder part, in practice, is pricing information out of partners one conversation at a time isn’t really an argument against the value of marketing as a function. It’s more a shared diagnostic that the firm’s own information libraries haven’t caught up to what the firm already produces every day. That’s a genuinely solvable problem, and one worth both sides looking at together, rather than a reason to conclude the translation work downstream of it isn’t worth much.
What’s actually left once AI has done its part
None of this is an argument against using AI in the process. AI compresses drafting time meaningfully, the same way it does for a first-year associate drafting a contract. What it doesn’t replace are the two things that were always the genuinely difficult part: getting a busy, rightly self-interested partner to hand over fifteen minutes in a form they’ll actually give it, and knowing not only what this firm did but what actually separates a submission a researcher remembers from one they read past. Neither of those depends on who’s typing the prompt.
A small team that understands both halves of that isn’t doing a diminished version of a job AI has mostly taken over. It’s doing the part of the job that was always the hard part.
Lawfinity Solutions advises international law firms on cross-border legal market positioning. If the India corridor is a live question for your firm, we would be interested in a conversation. Lawfinity works with one firm per jurisdiction. Engagements begin with a single conversation about your firm’s current position and where the corridor question is live for you. Write to Prachi Shrivastava
