traceysinclairconsulting

While most of the international submission deadlines for Chambers legal directories have yet to be announced, it’s worth bearing in mind that the Europe Editor Georgia Brooks sent out an email towards the end of last year warning that the first deadline on the Europe Guide is likely to be the end of February.

While it can be difficult galvanising people to pull their submissions together without a concrete, confirmed deadline to work towards, last year the schedule went live only a few weeks before the first submission deadline – leaving lots of firms with a last minute scramble to get their subs in on time. As the sections with the early deadlines are most likely to be the biggest sections (M&A and dispute resolution, for example) and those which are included in the Global and Europe Guides, this obviously isn’t ideal, because these are key sections for many of the firms involved.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing we can do about the late publishing of the schedule, and given how complex and massive the research workload is (and very labour intensive, so the editor has to coordinate work among dozens of researchers), this is unlikely to improve year on year. So the only way to make sure you don’t get caught on the hop is to start preparing now: get your case highlights together, start contacting referees for permission to submit them, and make sure that when the schedule is published, you only need to do the final polish, not compile the whole submission from scratch.

Look at it this way – if you do it now and the submission deadline turns out to be much later, at least you’ve got it out of the way…