Law firms sometimes want feedback about how they can win more work with your corporate legal team.
It’s a natural question. Firms want to be selected as often as possible, and in-house legal teams are not known for providing great feedback to firms about why they select one firm over another.
We’ve previously written about how — on average — corporate legal teams invite between 3 and 4 firms to participate in their RFPs.
Today, we’ll look at the win rate of firms in different segments of the Global 200 rankings. Specifically, we’ll answer these questions:
- What does the data say about average win rates?
- Do top firms win more often during an RFP process? Or do firms without prestigious rankings win just as often?
Firms Win RFPs at About the Same Rate — Regardless of Their Global Ranking
PERSUIT’s data set includes proposals from 96% of the top 200 firms in the world — including all 100 of the Am Law 100 — and close to $10 billion in proposals in total.
Here’s what our data says about win rates for firms of all different sizes.
On average, law firms participating in a competitive RFP on PERSUIT are selected between 27% and 30% of the time, no matter where they’re ranked in the Global 200.
Firms ranked 101-200 actually have the highest win rate (30%), but even this is only a 3% difference compared to top firms, which are selected 27% of the time.
In other words, according to the data, firms do not need to be top-ranked firms to compete for work on PERSUIT.
In fact, firms on PERSUIT are selected at about the same rate, regardless of their Global 200 ranking.
Let your firms know if they’re being selected more or less than average
If one of your firms has an average win rate that’s wildly different — for the good or the bad — we recommend letting them know.
In the positive case, this will let your firm know that they maintain a strong relationship with your team. In the negative case, this will open up the conversation about what they could do differently to be selected more often.
Either way, it’s good for the future of your relationships with your most trusted firms.
If you found the data in this article helpful, check out our data benchmarking report for more: 5 Data Benchmarks to Use When Firms Ask: “How Can We Win More of Your Business?”
