At LDC, we have noticed that we have an exceptionally high promotion rate for Corporate and M&A. For example, for Legal 500 UK 2025 we had 5 out of 6 practice promotions for the area, while for Chambers France 2025 we had 4 out of 5 promotions.

As such, here are a few pointers on how to prepare the optimal version of your submissions for this area:

1. Include your deal values – this is an all-too-common mistake. Firms will have deals valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions, and not disclose these to the directories. If the deal value is confidential, this is fine; just mark it red or provide a bracket (e.g., $200–300m or >$1bn). Much of the submission review is subjective, though if your deal values are superior to firms in your current tier and comparable to those above, this can offer some objectivity for your promotion credentials.
   Naturally, in line with this, be sure to include your highest-value deals in the submission.

2. Explain why the matter was complex – deal values are important, as per the above, though they are not the only form of assessment. Use the matter summary to provide the commercial context of the transaction (i.e., why it was business-critical or strategically important to the client). Explain why the matter was complex; this can include cross-border elements, complex structuring, time constraints, and ancillary areas such as tax or employment requiring input from other departments. See our guide on how to draft M&A matters here.

3. Make sure your exhibited matters are relevant – for example, if the directory in question has a separate category for Commercial Contracts, Private Equity or Restructuring, then you should not be including such matters in your Corporate and M&A submissions.

4. Tailor the workload to your objectives – is your fundamental aim this year to have a practice promotion? In such a case, you should include the absolute best matters regardless of which lawyer is leading them. On the other hand, already Band 1 and looking to have more ranked names? In this instance, you may need to set aside some big deals led by an already ranked lawyer to create room for an ample number of work examples from the lawyer you are pushing.

5. Profile your clients – unless your client list is exclusively made up of mainstream household names such as Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft, it’s likely that the researcher will not recognise all of your clients or appreciate their quality. If you have large names in industries the average person may not interact with day-to-day, such as pharma, manufacturing and construction, the quality of these names may be lost. This can be remedied by using the practice introduction or rankings feedback to bullet-point your largest clients with a one-sentence explanation of their size (e.g., “the 3rd-largest construction company nationwide with annual revenue of €2bn”).

6. Detail your role in any cross-border elements – if your team is co-ordinating the international elements, be crystal clear on this, as it will score a large number of points. By the same token, if you have only been engaged to support the domestic elements of an international deal, explain what these were and why they were complex/significant; otherwise the researcher may believe that the local elements were minor.

7. Feel free to re-include your best deals – you should always look to exhibit new deals in each submission, though you do not need to come up with 20 entirely new matters. The directories understand that the most complex deals will span multiple submission cycles, so you can re-submit your best deals from last year, assuming they have been worked on over the past 12 months and you have updates to add.

8. Use the practice introduction or lawyer bios to refer to historical standouts – researchers are predominantly focused on your past 12 months of work, though this does not mean that your practice’s more historical standout deals need to be omitted entirely. You can briefly bullet-point some previous headline deals in either the department overview or the bio of the lawyer in question, and this helps showcase your track record.

9. Demonstrate a broad range of industries – if all of your best deals are in the energy space, this will certainly be noted. Sometimes a specialised focus may just be the reality of your practice; though, where possible, try to give mind to the scope of expertise you are showing in the workload.