If you’ve just filed your Chambers USA submissions, you’re in the peculiar lull: the work is in, the research is in motion, and the rankings will arrive on Chambers’ schedule, not ours. Chambers’ methodology is built on independent research and real interviews with selected references, handled with discretion, and with anonymized quotes when anything is published.
Here’s my holiday gift to my BD colleagues and the attorneys we support: stop treating Chambers as a writing project. Start treating it as an operating model.
Chambers tells firms exactly where the deadlines live (on the research schedule) and how the referee process works (initial outreach is typically by email, with phone or survey options depending on the researcher and timing). If you build a system around that reality, you get better submissions, happier attorneys, and fewer late-night archaeology digs through old matter notes.
Gift 1: The deadline is not the start date
Litigators are deadline-native. They’re also deadline-honest: if you give them time, they will use it, because the work is never truly “done” and the next filing is already blinking. That instinct is rational in court. It’s optional in a directory submission.
Chambers publishes deadlines on its research schedule. Nothing about the process requires BD to wait until the last month to begin drafting. In litigation, I’ve found that producing a near-final submission four to eight weeks early is one of the simplest ways to get a materially stronger result. Early submission is not moral superiority; it’s basic quality control: time to verify, tighten, and polish, rather than rushing to assemble something that reads like it was written in a stairwell between hearings.
Gift 2: Chambers is the first mile of a bigger pipeline
Most firms treat Chambers as a directory chore. I treat it as the front end of a firmwide matter-capture pipeline.
Chambers’ own guidance on work highlights is refreshingly practical: describe what the team did and why it was significant, including the nature of the work, team members involved, and other organizations advising. You can submit up to 20 work highlights per practice area, and they can be a mix of confidential and non-confidential. You also must designate whether a highlight is publishable or confidential.
That structure is a gift. If I capture matters in a Chambers-ready format, I’ve built an asset library that should feed the rest of the firm’s growth engine: practice pages, attorney bios, pitches, RFPs, client alerts, internal talking points, and the stories that belong in more than one place. Chambers becomes the forcing function that gets the matter record clean once, so the firm can reuse it across platforms without rebuilding it from scratch every time.
Gift 3: Referees are not an org chart; they’re a responsiveness strategy
Chambers is explicit that rankings are based on real interviews with your selected references, and that reference contacts can be clients or others who have experience and knowledge of you and your firm over the last 12 months. They also explain exactly how outreach works: initial contact is by email, with follow-up by phone or survey depending on the researcher and timing. The majority of referees are contacted by the researcher assigned to that practice area on the research schedule.
This is where firms quietly lose ground: they optimize for prestige instead of probability of response.
I’ve seen attorneys nominate the CEO or the CLO because the title looks impressive on paper. Often, that person is far from the day-to-day details and less likely to respond during a research window. A more junior in-house lawyer who lived the matter, remembers specifics, and will reliably reply is frequently the better referee.
My rule is simple: responsiveness beats prestige, because unread emails do not become usable feedback.
One more practical point BD teams should lean into: one strong referee can cover multiple attorneys and multiple matters. Chambers’ online submissions guidance allows linking a single referee to multiple nominees and multiple work highlights when that referee has the relevant relationships, and it encourages those links because they give researchers clearer context for more specific questions. That’s ideal. It reduces list bloat, improves clarity, and increases the odds you get substantive feedback instead of scattered silence.
BD Playbook
The holiday-to-spring plan that makes next year easier.
- Run a “Chambers rewind” in January. Ten to fifteen minutes per key partner: what were the strongest matters, where did we struggle to describe impact, which highlights required too much reconstruction.
- Build a rolling matter-capture cadence (monthly or quarterly). Do short, structured attorney interviews shortly after key milestones. Capture the matter while memory is still crisp.
- Convert interviews into “matter cards,” then curate highlights. Treat each card as a reusable record: what happened, what we did, why it mattered, staffing, and publishable versus confidential designation.
- Run referee management like a performance dependency. Confirm contact data early. Map each referee to the matters and attorneys they can discuss confidently. Remember that initial outreach is by email, so deliverability and responsiveness matter more than anyone wants to admit.
- Set an internal finish line well ahead of the published deadline. Use Chambers’ research schedule as the external calendar, then protect quality with an earlier internal “ready for review” date.
GenAI can help a lot, with grown-up guardrails
GenAI can be a major help here because the workflow is structured: interview notes become matter cards, matter cards become first-draft work highlights, validated highlights become channel variants. It can compress drafting time and improve consistency across partners and offices.
The guardrail is non-negotiable: humans own the facts, confidentiality calls, and final voice. Chambers’ process is built on independent research and reference interviews, so accuracy and internal consistency are not stylistic preferences; they are survival traits.
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Melissa (Mac) Borkgren is a business development and marketing executive in AmLaw firms, combining BD strategy with marketing operations, AI, and analytics to drive revenue. Connect with Melissa on LinkedIn.
