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Legal survey company creating a huge database of info on law firms
RICHARD WEINER
Technology for Lawyers
Published: January 19, 2018
Ah, big data. Its not really invading your privacy. Nothing to see here. Just keep moving along. Kevin Bacon.
A few times a year, I publish culled information about the state of the law biz, particularly as it applies to legal tech, from various published surveys. Many of those surveys are compiled by the firm ALM Media (https://www.alm.com), including the Am Law 100, NLJ 500, etc.
ALM Media actually does about 150 different surveys and covers several other industries.
The company has now launched an app that gathers and collates its various legal surveys to create a user-accessible database encompassing a boatload of that data, laid out in a searchable/ visual/ comparative format.
It’s called Legal Compass. It’s probably expensive (various subscription levels are available). And it not only collates data from various ALM surveys, it is also set up to pull in data from outside sources like LinkedIn. It will mostly cover large and mid-size firms, and is intended for comparative marketing purposes. But who knows?
The data in Legal Compass will encompass (get it?) any information that a user would ever want to see about a law firm, with the ability to compare that data to similar data in other firms across a broad spectrum of parameters about anything you can think of. The data will stretch out at least five years back.
Data points will include inside looks at firms’ financials, head counts, diversity, lateral moves, press coverage, office trends, practice areas, industries, rankings, and changes in practice, among much other data.
Users will be able to compare firms’ performances across a wide variety of markers. Firm diversity markers drill down into racial and ethnic diversity, LGBT staffing, and gender.
Subscribers will also have access to all of ALM’s various surveys and analyses (and, again, I use these a lot. They’re pretty phenomenal).
OK, then. ALM is Big Brother, and maybe you should go read 1984 again. Or not.
And hey thanks again to the great Bob Ambroggi for tipping us all off on this. Although I must say that Bob thinks all this data in one place is a lot cooler than I think it is.