One AI tool and database for all your Legal Directories, Pitches and Experience Management
Catalogue your submissions once, then convert a Chambers submission into Legal 500, IFLR1000, JUVE or MIP / IP STARS — and reuse the same records for pitches and proposals.
Ranking professionals since 2004 — not a software company that just discovered rankings.
Ranking competence since 2004
Not a software company that discovered rankings. Law Business is a consultancy that prepares ranking submissions for law firms — for Chambers, Legal 500, IFLR1000, JUVE and the other guides on this page — and has done so since 2004. RanXactly® is that work turned into software.
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®.
“We have mandated Law Business for several years to manage our submissions for legal directories. During this time, Law Business has helped us to improve our rankings in top rankings.”
“Law Business has assisted us with our ranking submissions for several years. During this time, our law firm was successfully placed in numerous rankings.”
“With our very first submission, we achieved a Legal 500 ranking through Law Business! This is quite extraordinary and we were naturally delighted with this success.”
“Law Business took over the complete compilation of our ranking submissions for us for several years. During this time, we were able to improve in rankings such as Chambers and Partners, JUVE and Legal 500.”
“We have now been ranked for the first time in both the Legal 500 and the IAM 1000! This is something that law firms only rarely achieve.”
“Law Business included our law firm in the WTR 1000 ranking (World Trademark Review) for the first time. … The team knows the subject matter and the market very well and is very well connected with the rankings.”
“During this time, we were included in the Chambers, JUVE and Legal 500 rankings and were also able to increase our ranking after our initial inclusion.”
“I am now ranked in Chambers for the first time, even as ‘just’ a sole practitioner with a niche business model.”
Quoted verbatim from our client page, where more law firms say what our submission work did for them. Every firm quoted here engaged Law Business for submission support — the service RanXactly® grew out of.
What is the concept of RanXactly®?
One catalogue — your matters, partners, client referees and firm-level answers, read in once. Two ways of using it.
Ranking submissions
Every ranking form, filled in and ready to file — in whichever guide is due next.
Every other document
Pitches, proposals, panel applications, firm profiles — built from the same records.
Every ranking form is included
One database, every form — import from any form, export into any other.
Import the submissions you already filed
Your firm’s database
Matters, partner profiles, client referees and firm-level answers — each held as a record of its own.
Export into any submission form
Use submission material for anything you need
RanXactly® does not turn one file into another file. It catalogues.
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.
Any other submission data you possess — plus anything else you have already written.
Pitches, proposals, RFPs and your internal matter templates.
The functions
Functions tailored to the way ranking submissions actually work in practice — drawn from twenty-two years of filing them. Pick one below and it opens in place; all illustrations use fictitious sample data.
Drag in your submission files — two AI passes do the rest
Drop last year’s Word submissions and referee sheets into the browser. A referee spreadsheet dropped after its DOCX is linked to it automatically. Set guide, jurisdiction, legal field and practice area once — Apply to All.
Pulls every matter, partner, referee and personnel change out of the Word file and puts each value into the right field. Ranking-specific fields are recognised as such:
Same value, different label in every guide — mapped, not re-entered.
A second, independent pass compares every imported value back against the source document. It flags. A human decides. Nothing is saved before you confirm.
The AI never has the last word. Someone who knows the matter looks at what was flagged and confirms it: reviewed and released by a named user, and only then written to the database. Without a human release, nothing enters the database.
A whole ranking season in one drag. The second AI pass exists so the first one is not trusted blindly.
A referee spreadsheet dropped after its DOCX is linked to it automatically.
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.
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.
Struck through is what went, green is what came. You choose the version that gets filed.
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 same filters answer the neighbouring questions: which matters did this partner lead, which are still confidential, and which have never been filed with a given guide.
The evening-before-the-pitch question — what have we actually done in this field? — answered on the spot.
Client referees: you always know who was named, by whom, and when
“Used” and “last submitted” are fields, not folklore — you can see at a glance who has carried the last three filings and who has never been approached.
The referring partner travels with the record, so nobody has to reconstruct whose client relationship it was before making the call.
A referee is attached to the matter they can actually speak to — which is the question a ranking researcher asks first.
Referee, referring partner, related matter, last submitted, times used — one row, no reconstruction.
Assemble the filing, export the Word file
Five steps from database to a filled-in Word submission.
Ready to send, not ready to reformat.
Populated into the guide’s own template — ready to send, not ready to reformat.
In the format the guide expects, matched to the matters in the filing.
One download, one filing.
Guide, jurisdiction, year, practice area — and the exact matters and referees the filing contained.
A matter marked confidential stays marked — in every guide, in every year, in every document generated from it.
Experience management — the by-product that is worth more than the submission
Called a by-product only because it falls out of the submission season — in practice it is worth more than the submission itself. Kept properly, the same record set stops being a filing exercise and becomes the firm’s own account of what it has done, who did it, and who will vouch for it.
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.
have no single, current source of truth for matter experience
say it is “very easy” to find relevant experience for a proposal
respondents ranked finding experience and matter data as the most time-consuming stage of proposal creation — ahead of writing
Figures from ikaun, The State of Winning Work in Law Firms: A 2026 Benchmark Report, 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.
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. Text that survived a ranking editor is text that survives a client committee.
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.
Confidential matters stay flagged and are left out of anything client-facing — automatically.
The referee list doubles as a reference list for a pitch — with the history of who has already been approached.
What it saves, for which size of firm, and what it is worth
Hours per practice area, the three firm patterns we see, and what changes for the people who do the work.
What used to occupy a submission team for days across several practice areas.
One record can be filed into all of them — entered once, reused everywhere.
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.
Mid-size national firm
Large national firm
Large international firm
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.
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:
↔ swipe to see the full comparison
ConvertNow details as documented by Alex Boyes, former editor at The Legal 500, in SavageNash, 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.
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. A tool that handles submission data has to earn the same trust as the file it came from.
How client data is handled
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.
Personal accounts, visible roles
Every user has their own account; owner and user roles, current 2FA status and last login are shown for every member, and 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.
Built by the people who file submissions
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.
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, Law Business has signed a separate undertaking with Hetzner on professional secrecy under section 203 of the German Criminal Code. 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.
Available for your due diligence
Both agreements are on file and can be shown on request in a due diligence review.
Want to see how RanXactly® works?
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.
Book a free live demo →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. The full comparison is in chapter 04.
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. The hosting arrangement, including the professional-secrecy undertaking, is set out in chapter 05.
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. The licence covers the firm for an agreed number of users, and every user has their own personal account, with owner and user roles, visible two-factor status and last login for every member. Access can be withdrawn immediately.
All illustrations show RanXactly® with fictitious sample data. No client information is shown.