Editors' Blog

An altogether better class of deal reporting

Posted 11/10/2007 by Deal Comment

The end of each quarter can be a confusing time for stressed deal lawyers. The plethora of adviser league tables, preliminary M&A rankings and law firms rushing out their selective spin all tends to mean the underlying picture gets lost.

In response, Legal Week has made some changes in the way we report data on corporate activity, as can be seen from the article today (11 October) regarding the Q3 stats. This sees us deepen our relationship with our data partner, Mergermarket.

As such, Legal Week will now run the quarterly deal stats on an exclusive basis, meaning they won’t be sent out until they have appeared in the magazine. We have also taken a joint decision with Mergermarket to stop using preliminary tables. Such tables are the result of data providers responding to media deadlines but we feel they sow confusion and devalue the currency of the research.

As Legal Week will be getting hold of the data before law firms’ marketing teams start cherry-picking bits to suit their own ends, we will be able to devote more editorial resources and space to properly analysing the results and getting more reaction from the lawyers at the coal-face. In a related move, Legal Week will also be drawing on more bespoke data from Mergermarket as we move to analyse the performance of individual firms.

While this is no great analytical revelation, at least readers will have the confidence that any changes in rankings are genuine and not based on distortions caused by journalists referring to a variety of tables from differing providers.

Legal Week chooses to work with Mergermarket because there is no other data provider that can generate the level of deal information on law firms. Since it launched in 1999, the company has rapidly expanded across the globe and now has more than 400 analysts covering 55 countries.

The relationship between the magazine and Mergermarket goes back to 2001, since when they have been our preferred data provider. In our deals section there is a fortnightly page of statistics on the performance of the legal market. This spans areas such as the largest deals of the month, regional round-ups and individual firm performances.

And the two companies are now working closer than ever, meaning we can provide statistics and sensible analysis that is unavailable elsewhere in the industry press. We are currently playing around with ideas to draw on more research but if readers have suggestions, please let us know on the email below.

Combine this with Legal Week and Mergermarket’s annual primary adviser league table and the magazine’s unparalleled Dealweek section (plus its online counterpart) and we think readers are getting a pretty good deal.

paul.hodkinson@legalweek.com