Persistent inflationary pressures, high interest rates and the threat of a potential recession hung over global markets for much of 2022, and volatility and geopolitical disruption continue as 2023 unfolds. This environment has slowed the growth for many businesses, including some law practices, which has made corporations seeking legal counsel more price conscious when choosing a particular firm.[1] Given this, firms must find ways to work more efficiently and take steps to drive new business.
Members of the strategy team at this large U.S.-based law firm had crafted a plan that could significantly streamline workflows and deliver valuable intelligence to the professionals responsible for client retention and acquisition. This involved creating an integrated database to house both internal and external information relevant for the firm's work with corporations to negotiate, structure and complete transactions. This data could then be leveraged in dashboards that presented important market insights to help spur conversations with current clients and prospects to drive new engagements. To move forward, the strategy team needed to find the right datasets and delivery system to feed this new information warehouse.
Pain Points
The research department at this law firm was responsible for gathering market intelligence to support the legal and business-building professionals when they requested information to learn more about a client's ongoing activities or to identify potential prospects. Members of the strategy team wanted to put this information directly in the hands of the end users to make it readily available and actionable. To deliver on their vision, they needed to collaborate with the research team to find a reputable third-party provider that could offer:
- Financial data for both public and private companies.
- Details on deals underway or completed, including M&A, private placement and venture capital.
- The ability to tag fields to bring together common data for an industry.
- An efficient delivery system to easily mesh external data with other internal information.
The strategy team knew that S&P Global Market Intelligence ("Market Intelligence") was a leading information provider and contacted the company to learn about its offerings.
The Solution
Specialists from Market Intelligence described a number of datasets that would enable the strategy team to access critical data and build dashboards to help the firm's professionals:
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Tap into extensive financial information |
S&P Capital IQ Financials provides global standardized financial statement data for over 150,000 companies, including over 95,000 active and inactive public companies. The data enables users to extend the scope of their historical analysis and back testing models with consistently standardized data from all filings of a company's historical financial periods, including press releases, original filings and all restatements. S&P Capital IQ Financials includes:
Private Company Data covers 50+ million private company profiles, 9.6+ million private companies with recent financial data, 85+ million private company financials, 3+ million corporate structure relationships and 1.04+ million early stage companies supported by data from Crunchbase |
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Review primary and secondary market business transactions |
The Transactions Dataset provides the entire lifecycle of primary and secondary market business transactions, across public offerings, private placements, mergers & acquisitions (M&As), buybacks/repurchase, corporate restructuring, bankruptcies, spin-offs and split-offs. It covers 2+ million high-quality transactions across the globe, providing essential intelligence to identify new opportunities, assess potential deals, perform deal comparisons and maximize exit strategies. Users can leverage the data to confirm a private company's pre- and post-money valuation, use the valuation details of an M&A transaction for a merger arbitrage model or get details on stock repurchased in a particular period. With global coverage of approximately 2 million transactions collected within 24 hours of disclosure, this dataset can be used to get information on:
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Connect the dots across datasets |
The Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS®) includes the current classification for active companies in 120+ countries. It provides 47,000+ company classifications and covers 61,000+ global securities. |
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Store data in a centralized warehouse |
Xpressfeed™ is a powerful data feed management solution that delivers data directly into a client's workflow. Data is delivered in packages that are zipped and posted to a secure location accessible via FTP or Xpressfeed Web Service so users can customize and receive only the data needed. |
Key Benefits
All groups within the law firm saw the benefits of this digital transformation by subscribing to the Market Intelligence services and now have:
- Access to trusted data to understand the financial performance of a company and the deals that have taken place, or are currently underway, as well as those of their peer groups.
- A streamlined process for delivering data to an internal warehouse, plus the ability to tag data by industry classification to easily bring together information to round out a picture of financial stability and ongoing developments.
- Data visualizations via customized dashboards that enable client retention and acquisition teams to monitor activities and uncover important insights to be used in business-building discussions.