This blog, written occasionally as it is by the ALM Research staff, has a dual audience. It is aimed, generally, at law firm marketing, business development, competitive intelligence and library professionals and the vendors that serve those professionals, and it is aimed in a more specific way at our ALM Research users, most especially of the on-line database.
Back in the days when I did editorial work for a legal publisher (Matthew Bender: I remember it very fondly), we were constantly told that legal information at the high level to which we aspired must be authoritative (i.e. true, accurate, comprehensive and in the proper perspective) and current. If that is true for legal information, it is also true for legal market information, so I wanted to spend just a few minutes giving some details of our updating procedure for the on-line database.
Those of you who have taken or commissioned surveys know that they are very, very expensive and require both technical and analytic resources to render them as useful as possible. That is why the “major” ALM surveys are only done once a year. These include The Am Law 100 and 200 and Global 100 financial surveys, the NLJ 250 firm size and branch office survey, the diversity, billing and pro bono surveys, and the Corporate Scorecard. The “Who Counsels Who” corporate representation materials are of a somewhat different order, in that they are collected in surveys by various ALM publications, including The American Lawyer, The National Law Journal, Corporate Counsel and IP Law and Business. These surveys will be available in the database at the same time as they are released by the publications. I want to add a quick note here about the internal operation of the database. Once these spreadsheets are added and available for download, the material at the same time is included in the data mining and trend study format and in the Law Firm Reports. It attaches immediately to the right places.
The other materials, some of them published and some of them gathered by ALM Research specifically for inclusion in the database, are updated more frequently. Tech buys are updated quarterly, lateral partner moves and Big Deals, Big Suits monthly, and contact data as often as weekly.
The lateral partner moves have been an area of great interest for the database users, especially in those cases in which partners are moving, sometimes with associates, in groups of three or four, rather than singly. This is the kind of information that we hope client and business development professionals will find valuable.
If you have any questions about our updating policies, methods or timetables, just let me know. I’m always happy to discuss these matters. 212.592.4932, [email protected].
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