Up through 2003, the main corporate representation items in our published surveys—and therefore in our database—were compiled by asking the GCs of the largest 250 U.S.-based publicly-held and largest 250 U.S.-based privately-held companies to list their main outside counsel for general corporate, litigation, IP and labor and employment.
A major change (improvement!) occurred in the 2004 corporate representation surveys. The list of publicly-held companies was expanded from 250 to 500, and the list of categories was expanded extensively and included both European representation and category subgroups, e.g. litigation, litigation (Europe), litigation (plaintiff), litigation (defense), for the first time. The general list of privately-held corporations was abandoned (yes, response rate was a factor), and a new approach was adopted: privately-held corporations would henceforth be surveyed on an industry-by-industry basis. The first ones chosen, for 2004, were biotech and private equity.
Still, the survey was not all we—or you—needed it to be. To remedy that, we have taken advantage of ALM’s journalistic reach. We have engaged a reader to review the national and regional publications, about 30 in all, to extract and categorize corporate representation materials from the editorial material. This will, over the course of a year, add thousands of otherwise absent corporate relationships, and it will keep this information fresh throughout the year. Updates will be added to the database at least twice a month.
Right now there are already about 1,000 new items in the database from 2005 ALM editorial material. When the first ones of our GC surveys goes into the database, we shall employ a publishing convention to let you know, clearly and intuitively, which entries are from the GC surveys and which are from the editorial material—and the ones from the editorial material will be sourced, so that at any time, with a minimum of fuss or effort, you will be able to refer to the original article containing the new material.
As always, we welcome your comments, suggestions and insights: Chuck Lowry, 212.592.4932, [email protected].
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