Our Friday session with Dmytro Fedoruk, founder of Ranking Copilot and former head of M&A at Clifford Chance Kyiv (now Redcliffe Partners), and Milos Trifunovic, COO at Ranking Copilot, to unpack why rankings still matter – and how technology can finally take the pain out of directory submissions.

Setting the scene: a universal law firm headache

Fedoruk has spent over 20 years in private practice, including leading an international firm’s office and later co-founding his own Ukrainian firm. Rankings were a constant, crucial for winning premium cross-border work, but administratively brutal.

Across more than 200 jurisdictions, firms compete for visibility in major international directories such as Chambers, The Legal 500, and IFLR, alongside at least 25 other reputable global and local guides. Each has its own templates, rules, and research periods – and firms must navigate them all every year.

For each submission, firms collate:

• Key matters over the past 12–18 months
• Lead partners and teams
• Client referees
• Practice and firm overviews

Done manually, a single submission can take around seven days. Smaller firms might file 10–15 submissions a year, mid-sized firms 150–200, and large internationals can be dealing with thousands, often 50 pages apiece.

Why rankings still matter

Despite occasional grumbling, Fedoruk reminded us that directories are not going away.

Because lawyers are restricted in how they can market themselves, independent rankings have become one of the few credible ways to demonstrate quality. Over time, the most established directories have developed robust methodologies, including confidential market interviews and referee feedback, to protect their own reputations and provide buyers of legal services with a degree of objectivity.

Fedoruk noted that in some markets, local rankings are even more influential than international ones – for example, Juve in Germany, Latin Lawyer in Latin America, and specialist national publications in France – and firms ignore these at their peril.

Where firms go wrong

Participants distinguished between the strategic and the mechanical parts of directory work:

• Strategic work: deciding which matters to highlight, which lawyers to position, and how to tell the story of the practice.
• Mechanical work: understanding each directory’s rules, identifying eligible matters within the research period, formatting descriptions, tracking deadlines, and managing referee lists.

Fedoruk argued that when two firms have broadly similar clients and matters, rankings often turn on presentation and referee management rather than pure substance. He cited research suggesting up to 70% of the outcome may be driven by referee feedback – yet many firms still submit referees they have not worked with in the last 12 months, meaning their views are heavily discounted or ignored.

Inside Ranking Copilot

Ranking Copilot was built to reduce the mechanical pain while preserving human judgment.

Trifunovic explained that their platform:

• Maintains up-to-date templates and rules for each directory and jurisdiction, so users no longer need to track annual changes.
• Imports historic submissions and automatically builds a structured database of matters, lawyers and clients using AI.
• Enforces research-period rules so that only eligible matters and referees are used for each submission.
• Provides a dashboard of all upcoming deadlines across directories, sorted by due date, with completeness indicators for matters and referees.

User roles are clearly defined:

• Admins oversee the full process and visibility.
• Editors enrich and refine matter and submission content.
• Collaborators (usually lawyers) only see matters explicitly shared with them for review or update – an important safeguard for confidentiality and information barriers.

The result is that approximately 90% of the time-consuming groundwork is automated, leaving BD and partners to focus on the top 10%: selecting the strongest matters, choosing referees carefully and shaping persuasive narratives.

Beyond directories: turning ranking data into a BD engine

A powerful secondary use case emerged as firms began using Ranking Copilot as a structured knowledge base of their experience.

Because the system links matters, teams and jurisdictions in a consistent way, firms can now:

• Paste an RFP into the platform and ask it to suggest an optimal team (for example, one partner and two associates in a specific legal system) based on actual matter histories.
• Generate tailored capability statements in seconds rather than days.
• Use past experience for promotion cases, performance reviews, and internal talent mapping.

For smaller firms, directories may drive activity roughly three or four times a year. For large firms, the process never really stops. In both cases, structuring matter data once and reusing it repeatedly – for rankings, RFPs and internal purposes – can transform the return on effort.

AI, LLMs and the future of rankings

Asked about the impact of tools like ChatGPT on rankings, Fedoruk drew a clear line: large language models are powerful, but they do not have access to a firm’s carefully structured internal data by default. Ranking Copilot positions itself as an infrastructure layer that LLMs can query, rather than a competitor.

As for the directories themselves, he sees no imminent existential threat. Their value lies not only in published tables but in the opaque, experience-driven methodologies that sit behind them. As long as clients trust those processes, there will be demand – and law firms will need to keep playing the game, ideally in a far more efficient way.

Key takeaways for law firms

• Rankings still influence premium instructions, especially in cross-border and institutional work.
• The real ranking advantage comes from disciplined submissions and smart referee management, not just “better” deals.
• Automating the rules, templates and tracking can free BD teams to focus on strategy.
• Treat submissions data as a long-term asset you can reuse for RFPs, capability statements and internal talent decisions.
• AI is most powerful when it sits on top of a well-structured database of your matters, not when it operates in a vacuum.