Summary

• Legal Directory Rankings are a critical part of demonstrating a law firm’s expertise.
• The annual submission process is time and resource intensive for BD professionals and lawyers.
• The team at CMS automated and streamlined the process, reducing emails by 75%.

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About the team 

CMS is a top 10 international law firm with over 1,250 partners, 5,800 lawyers and 9,000 staff. Anna Baer leads Business Development for the firm’s cross-sector and cross-practice approach to Environmental, Social & Governance (ESG).

The Challenge

The ESG practice at CMS is growing fast – and Anna found her inbox overwhelmed with potential matters to include in the submission:

“Before Lupl, I really did struggle. Email was the go-to for collecting responses. I would receive multiple hundreds of emails. It was a real struggle.”

Automating the Process

Anna has always been an early adopter of tech – and she identified an opportunity to automate the process using Lupl’s No-Code Forms feature, which enabled sourcing of more than 100 matters for inclusion in the submission with just a few clicks:

“Setting up Forms was the easiest of processes and particularly useful to get all the information back from the lawyers in each jurisdiction.”

The Outcome

Anna used Lupl on the firm’s Chambers & Partners submission for ESG – for which they received a global ranking (one of eight rankings secured to date). But Anna also measured the success of the project through the efficiency gains she achieved:

“By using Forms in Lupl, we cut emails by at least 75% and probably even more than that. This allowed me to focus on the content and quality of the submission, not buried in my inbox, managing the process.”

A Future of Tech-Enabled Business Development

Anna sees a future of technology-enabled business development. For example, her team has begun to use Lupl’s task and project management features beyond submissions to manage their day-to-day work. An additional benefit has been to enable seamless collaboration with the lawyers Anna works with across the global ESG practice, many of whom already use Lupl for their own work:

“It makes life so much easier to have a solution to help in our day-to-day tasks. It’s for any activity that BDs are involved in, including events, pitching, client development, client targeting, the management of different focus groups, practice groups and sector groups we support. It’s having that central place.”

With thanks to Anna Baer, International BD Manager at CMS Legal.