One AI tool and database for all your legal directories information
Everything is catalogued once — matters, partner profiles, client referees, firm-level answers, confidentiality flags — and written back out into whichever ranking form you choose. Nothing is retyped, nothing is copied by hand, nothing is lost between seasons. Seven to fifteen hours saved per practice area. Days become hours. And all of it stays in one place, ready for the next guide and for your next pitch.
Book a free live demo See a Chambers → Legal 500 conversionRanking competence since 2004
Not a software company that discovered rankings.
Law Business has been preparing submissions for law firms since 2004 — for Chambers, Legal 500, IFLR1000, JUVE and the other guides on this page. Every field, every check and every comparison in RanXactly® exists because a submission season made it necessary.
Knowing how a ranking works is the easy half. The hard half is knowing what a submission looks like when it actually moves a firm up — which matters carry weight, which client referee gets asked, what a researcher reads past. That judgement is what the tool was built around.
Compass Law Firm Rankings — the first book on law firm rankings ever published, written by Law Business founder and managing partner Alexander Dillinger and published by C. H. Beck, MANZ and Stämpfli. The judgement in it is the judgement built into RanXactly®.
Quoted verbatim from our client page, where more law firms say what our submission work did for them. Both firms engaged Law Business for submission support — the service RanXactly® grew out of.
What is the concept of RanXactly®?
One idea carries the whole tool. A submission is not a document to be converted — it is a set of records waiting to be catalogued. Everything else follows from that.
Every ranking form is included
A matter written for Chambers can be filed with Legal 500, IFLR1000 or MIP / IP STARS without being retyped. The record is stored once — the form is chosen at export. Converting a Chambers submission into a Legal 500 submission — or a Legal 500 submission into a Chambers one — is a question of picking the target template, not of retyping anything.
What does not happen: no upload to a directory’s server, no one-way conversion, and no loss of the lawyer rankings that a file-to-file converter leaves behind. The records stay with your firm and are still there next season.
Import from any form, export into any other. The database sits in the middle; the template is a choice at the end.
Use submission material for anything you need
Converting is only the visible half. When a submission is read in, every piece of it is filed as a record in its own right — and nothing stays trapped inside the document it arrived in.
Read in once, used everywhere. The ranking form is one output among several — not the purpose of the exercise.
The functions
Functions tailored to the way ranking submissions actually work in practice — drawn from twenty-two years of filing them. Each one is explained in its own section below.
01 Drag in your submission files — two AI passes do the rest
You do not start with an empty database. Drop last year’s submissions straight from your desktop into the browser — several at once, plus the referee spreadsheets. A referee sheet dropped after its Word file is linked to it automatically. Set guide, jurisdiction, legal field and practice area once and apply them to the whole batch.
Then two separate AI passes run. The first reads and maps: it pulls every matter, partner, referee and personnel change out of the Word file and puts each value into the right field — and it recognises ranking-specific fields as such. Confidentiality, work highlight, referring lawyers, leading partner and other team, the ranking’s practice area versus your own internal field: same fact, different label in every guide, mapped rather than re-entered.
The second verifies: it compares every imported value back against the source document and flags what does not line up. It flags — a person decides. Nothing is written to the database before you confirm it.
A whole ranking season in one drag. The second AI pass exists so the first one is not trusted blindly.
02 See exactly what changed since last year
Ranking editors notice recycled text. So do partners who rewrote a paragraph six months ago and want to know whether their version made it in. RanXactly® puts two versions of the same matter next to each other and marks the difference word by word — description, value, lead partner, team, dates and publishability.
Struck through is what went, green is what came. You choose the version that gets filed.
The same comparison exists for the firm-level questions that are not matters — headcount, practice description, notable developments. Last year’s answer and this year’s answer sit in one table with a status column, so nothing is silently carried over.
03 Fifteen filters instead of a search through eight Word files
Among them: jurisdiction, guide, submission year, deal value, cross-border, start and completion date, lawyer name, lawyer role, practice area, client name, other team members, confidentiality, jurisdictions involved. Set three of them and the shortlist is on screen — for a submission, or for a pitch.
The evening-before-the-pitch question — what have we actually done in this field? — answered on the spot.
04 Client referees: you always know who was named, by whom, and when
Client referees are the part of a submission that firms most often get wrong twice — by asking the same person three years running, or by losing track of whose client they were.
Every referee record stays linked to the partner who brought them, to the matter they can actually speak to, and to every guide and year they were submitted to. Two fields do most of the work: how often a referee has been used, and how many years it has been since the last time. So you can see at a glance who has carried the last three filings, who was approached in 2024 and not since, and who has never been asked at all.
That is where the hours go for whoever actually does the work. Picking referees and matching them to the right matters is normally an evening of cross-reading spreadsheets and last year’s filings. Here it is three filters and a glance at a status column. And nobody starts from a blank page: the text that was approved last time sits next to this year’s version, word by word, so the job is editing a known-good matter description rather than writing one from scratch.
Referee, referring partner, related matter, last submitted, times used — one row, no reconstruction.
05 Assemble the filing, export the Word file
A five-step wizard walks from guide and year through matter selection, firm-level data and client referees to the finished document. What comes out is a populated DOCX in the target template — plus the referee spreadsheet, separately or as a ZIP. Every export is logged with the exact matters and referees it contained.
Ready to send, not ready to reformat.
The same database answers your pitch questions
A submission database is a track-record database. It already holds, in publishable form, what a pitch document needs: which matters a partner led, what they were worth, which clients will speak for the firm, and which of them have not been approached recently.
Cases per partner, referees per partner, values per practice area — the pitch evidence is already written and already cleared.
The work you already do for Chambers and Legal 500 stops being a once-a-year cost. It becomes the firm’s institutional memory — usable for pitches, panel applications, partner reviews and lateral conversations.
06 Experience management — the by-product that is worth more than the submission
Experience management is the discipline of capturing a firm’s own matter experience, keeping it current, and making it reusable. Its core is one record per matter — and that is exactly what a ranking submission already contains.
Client, opponent, practice area, jurisdiction, value, role, the lawyers involved, the outcome — and, decisively, what of it may be named outside the firm. A firm that files across several directories every year builds this dataset anyway: with confidentiality status, a clean matter description and a proper year cut-off. The only question is whether it stays a by-product that is thrown away each season, or becomes an asset the firm owns.
- Ranking submissions across every directory
- Pitches, proposals and RFP responses
- Panel applications
- League table entries
- Website references and lawyer profiles
- Staffing a team from actual track record, not memory
- Finding the partner with the closest matter for a pitch
- Cross-selling on evidence rather than on hunch
- Lateral hires whose experience is in no system yet
- Answering a client’s “have you done this?” the same day
Figures from ikaun, The State of Winning Work in Law Firms: A 2026 Benchmark Report, 14 July 2026, among a focused group of senior marketing, business development and proposal leaders at Am Law 100, Am Law 200 and NLJ 500 firms; a vendor-published survey, sample size not disclosed. The same report finds a third of firms keep experience data in no central place at all, and that over 50% still build proposals in Microsoft Word.
Built around your fields, not ours
Experience management only works if the record matches how your firm actually describes its work. RanXactly® is customised for that: fields can be added and renamed so the information you care about — opponent, role, outcome, referring office, industry sector, whatever your practice needs — is captured in the right place from the start, rather than pushed into a ranking’s vocabulary and lost afterwards.
Two things decide whether it holds up, and neither is a software question. The record has to be created when the matter is, not reconstructed a year later under deadline. And the lawyers have to confirm it — data pulled automatically is raw until someone who was on the matter says it is right. RanXactly® is built for both: the AI proposes, a person confirms, and nothing is stored before that happens.
Confidentiality is the point, not a footnote
Submission data is client data. What the tool does with it, who can reach it, and what the AI is and is not allowed to decide.
How client data is handled
A tool that handles submission data has to earn the same trust as the file it came from.
- Two-factor authentication is mandatory. It is active on every RanXactly® account and cannot be switched off — not by the user, not by an administrator.
- Confidential matters are marked at record level and stay marked through every export, in every guide, in every year.
- Named seats, visible roles. Owner and user roles, current 2FA status and last login are shown for every member; access can be withdrawn immediately.
- The AI checks, it does not invent. Verification compares imported values against your own source document and flags differences. It does not write your matter descriptions and it does not decide what is confidential.
- Hosted in Germany at Hetzner Online, under a data processing agreement and a separate professional-secrecy undertaking — see below.
Our host is bound by professional secrecy — not just by a data processing agreement
RanXactly® runs in Germany at Hetzner Online. Alongside the data processing agreement of 27 July 2026, Law Business signed a separate undertaking with Hetzner on professional secrecy under section 203 of the German Criminal Code on 28 July 2026. A hosting contract on its own does not reach that far. Hetzner issues this undertaking as a standard instrument for clients who are bound by professional secrecy — ours is the version headed “for customers from Austria” — so it is a position the provider has taken for law firms and tax advisers, not a one-off concession negotiated for us. The agreements are in German; the wording below is translated, and the German originals govern.
- Signed in knowledge of the criminal consequences. In the signed wording, Hetzner gives the undertaking “in knowledge of the criminal consequences of a breach of the duty of confidentiality under section 203 of the German Criminal Code”: to keep professional secrets confidential, and to access the data only as far as performing the contract requires.
- It reaches through to your firm. Where we act as the IT service provider for a firm that is itself bound by professional secrecy, Hetzner is brought in as a contributing person under section 203 — the same status the statute gives to anyone a lawyer lets near privileged material. Your client privilege does not stop at our server.
- Everyone who touches the data is bound and instructed. Every employee involved is committed in writing and instructed on criminal liability under section 203(4); subcontractors are informed, instructed and bound in the same way.
- No look inside. Hetzner takes no view of stored content on its own initiative — only where performing the contract requires it, or where we instruct it.
- The right to refuse testimony is exercised. Where the data falls under section 53a of the Code of Criminal Procedure, Hetzner will object citing that provision if questioned, and inform us so that we decide on the right to remain silent.
- German courts only. For its Falkenstein and Nürnberg data centres Hetzner states that it accepts requests and court orders from German authorities and courts only, and that requests or orders from foreign authorities are not accepted (Hetzner, Data protection FAQ).
- Searches and seizures are not handled quietly. On any request from an authority, search or seizure concerning our account or servers, Hetzner informs us immediately, points investigators to the professional-secrecy status, and resists orders under section 95a of the Code of Criminal Procedure with every means available — even where a gag order applies.
Both agreements are on file and can be shown on request in a due diligence review.
RanXactly® is built by Law Business — the team that has been preparing ranking submissions for law firms since 2004. The tool grew out of that work, not out of a whiteboard.
Which firms it suits, and what it is worth to them
RanXactly® suits any firm that files with more than one ranking. What it is worth depends on one number: how many individual submission documents the firm produces in a year. These are the three patterns we see.
- Files mainly with Chambers and Legal 500.
- Used by the BD team and by partners and their teams.
- Data is catalogued once, then written into each form and checked for quality.
- Files with special rankings such as JUVE, IFLR1000, IAM Patent 1000 and MIP / IP STARS in addition to Chambers and Legal 500.
- Used by the BD team and by partners and their teams.
- The same records also feed pitches and proposals.
- Files with all top rankings — Chambers, Legal 500, JUVE, IFLR1000, Latin Lawyer, Leaders League, IAM Patent 1000, MIP / IP STARS, Benchmark Litigation.
- Submissions run in at least two jurisdictions.
- Used by the BD team and by partners and their teams, across offices.
Each range is the firm’s own document count multiplied by a flat 10 hours per submission document — the conservative end of the 7–15 hours we see in practice, so the figures can be checked against your own. The third band counts per jurisdiction: a firm filing in three jurisdictions multiplies it accordingly. The saving comes from three places: the data is processed automatically instead of copied by hand, imported values are checked against the source instead of re-read in full, and the same records move on to pitches without being gathered again. On top of that, someone who has never touched a ranking submission can work with the tool after roughly half an hour. Figures per year, for the largest firms per jurisdiction; Law Business experience values from submission projects run since 2004.
The benefits for a law firm
A great deal of time is saved
Instead of copying data from one submission file into another, the records are already catalogued and the target form is written from them. Seven to fifteen hours per practice area; across a season, days become hours.
Quality goes up
No copying means no copying errors. A second AI pass checks every imported value against the source document and flags what does not match, so review effort goes where it is needed instead of across the whole file.
Confidential data stays protected
Every matter carries a publishable or confidential flag at record level, and that flag survives every export, in every guide and every year. Nothing confidential drifts into a publishable section by accident.
Pitches get faster and better
Filter by partner, practice area, client or value and the matters for a pitch are on screen — already written, already checked, already cleared for publication. Nothing has to be searched for, and nothing is overlooked.
New people are productive sooner
Twenty-two years of submission practice are built into the field structure and the checks. Someone new does not need to learn what a ranking wants before they can be useful.
One database instead of eight Word files
Jurisdiction, practice area and guide are filters, not folders. Everyone works on the same records, and last year’s approved text is always one click away.
Questions we get asked
Can I convert a Chambers submission into a Legal 500 submission?
Yes. RanXactly® imports a completed Chambers submission as records — matters, partner profiles, client referees, firm-level answers — and exports them into the Legal 500 template. The conversion also works the other way round, and the same records can then be filed with IFLR1000, JUVE, MIP / IP STARS or any of the other supported forms without being retyped.
Which ranking directories does RanXactly® support?
Chambers and Partners, Legal 500, IFLR1000, JUVE, MIP / IP STARS, IAM Patent 1000, WTR 1000, Benchmark Litigation, Leaders League, GAR 100, GIR 100, ITR World Tax, asialaw and Latin Lawyer. Any of them can be the source of an import and any of them can be the target of an export.
How is RanXactly® different from ConvertNow?
ConvertNow is The Legal 500’s own tool and moves data between the Chambers and Legal 500 templates. It covers those two directories, transfers 80–90% of the information the templates have in common, does not transfer ranked or unranked lawyer information, and is available only to firms holding a paid Legal 500 commercial profile for the relevant jurisdiction. RanXactly® covers fourteen forms, keeps everything as reusable records rather than performing a file-to-file conversion, and belongs to your firm rather than to a directory.
Can we export the data into something other than a ranking form?
Yes. RanXactly® catalogues the submission rather than converting one file into another, so every matter, partner profile, client referee and firm-level answer exists as a record in its own right. Those records are what you filter for a pitch document, a panel application, an RFP response or a practice-group profile — the same facts, already checked and already cleared for publication, without being gathered a second time.
What actually happens when a submission is imported?
Every part of it is filed as a separate record: the matter with its client, value, dates, lead partner and team; the partner profile; the client referee together with the matter they can speak to; the firm-level answers; the confidentiality flag. Nothing stays trapped inside the document it arrived in. Because the data is catalogued this way, it can be written back out into any target that asks for the same facts.
How much time does a ranking submission take with RanXactly®?
Law Business experience values from submission projects run since 2004 put the saving at seven to fifteen hours per practice area compared with copying data between submission files by hand. Across several practice areas, what used to occupy a submission team for days is finished in hours. These are experience values, not a measurement taken inside the software.
Does the AI write my matter descriptions?
No. Two AI passes run during import: the first reads the Word file and maps each value into the right field, the second compares every imported value back against the source document and flags anything that does not line up. The AI does not author matter descriptions and it does not decide what is confidential. A person confirms before anything is saved.
Where is our data stored, and is it confidential?
RanXactly® is hosted in Germany on European infrastructure with a data processing agreement in place. Two-factor authentication is mandatory on every account and cannot be switched off. Matters carry a publishable or confidential flag at record level, and that flag survives every export, in every guide and every year.
Can we use the submission data for pitches?
Yes. A submission database is a track-record database. Filter by partner, practice area, client or value and you have the matters a partner led, what they were worth, and which clients can act as references — already written and already cleared for publication, with confidential matters excluded automatically.
Can several people in the firm work in it?
Yes. Seats are named, with owner and user roles, visible two-factor status and last login for every member. Access can be withdrawn immediately.
How this differs from ConvertNow
The Legal 500 offers its own conversion tool, ConvertNow, which moves data between the Chambers template and the Legal 500 template. If those two directories are all you file with, it may be all you need — it is available to firms that hold a commercial profile with Legal 500. The differences that matter are these:
| ConvertNow | RanXactly® | |
|---|---|---|
| Directories covered | Chambers and Legal 500 only | Fourteen ranking forms, any source, any target |
| How much transfers | 80–90% of the information the two templates have in common, according to The Legal 500’s own 2019 beta testing | Every field is held as a record; what a target form asks for is what gets written |
| Ranked and unranked lawyers | Not transferred — has to be moved by hand | Partner profiles are records like any other and travel with the submission |
| Images, attachments, hyperlinks | Do not transfer | Nothing is lost in transit: the export is written from catalogued fields, never copied out of a file |
| Who may use it | Firms with a paid Legal 500 commercial profile, limited to the jurisdiction that profile covers | Any firm, any jurisdiction, licensed by seat |
| What happens between seasons | Nothing is kept — it is a file-to-file conversion | Every matter, referee and firm-level answer stays available next year and for pitches |
| Version history | None | Two versions of a matter compared word by word |
| Is the result checked? | No check is performed. The Legal 500 states the converted document will usually need a small amount of tidying up — but not where. To find it, the firm has to read the whole document. | A second, independent AI pass compares every imported value against the source document and flags what does not match. You review the flagged fields, not the whole document. |
ConvertNow details as documented by Alex Boyes, former editor at The Legal 500, in SavageNash, 10 April 2019, reporting The Legal 500’s own announcement and beta-testing results for ConvertNow 2.0. According to that source the transfer should work in both directions between the two templates. The Legal 500 no longer documents ConvertNow publicly; checked August 2026.
See RanXactly® on your own submission
The fastest way to judge the tool is on your own material. In a free 30-minute session via Microsoft® Teams we import one of your past filings and show you what comes back out — no preparation needed on your side beyond the file itself. Use the booking block below.
A stylised view of the workspace. In the demo we open the real one — with your own submission in it.
All illustrations show RanXactly® with fictitious sample data. No client information is shown.