How this is built
This is a record of what law firms published, not a view of the market. Everything below is here so you can tell the difference, and check us.
One rule
Record only what the release states. Never infer, never complete a pattern, never fill a gap with something plausible. A missing field is correct and expected. A guessed field is a defect.
That rule sounds obvious and is expensive. It is why a deal with no stated sector is not quietly filed under Other, why a lawyer who appears at two firms stays as two records, and why this site will never tell you someone moved firms. A release announces a deal. It does not announce a career.
Every field cites its sentence
When a fact is taken out of a release, the exact words it came from are stored next to it. That is not decoration: it makes checking mechanical. A span either appears in the source character for character or it does not, so a hallucinated fact cannot hide behind a confident tone.
Across the record so far, 98.7% of spans match the source verbatim. The ones that do not are almost always a span stitched together from two separate places in the release, which is exactly the defect the check exists to catch. Those are flagged, not published quietly.
Money is read, not trusted
Every stated value carries the figure exactly as the release prints it, and the number is recomputed from those printed words rather than accepted as given. That check earns its place: in the first batch it corrected 170 of 882 stated values, mostly cases where the word "million" had been dropped and £704 million had been recorded as 704.
It also catches the more dangerous ones. A per-share offer price is never dressed up as a deal total. A share count is not money. And where a release states two figures and no total, the figure is withheld and the words are shown instead, because adding them would be our arithmetic rather than the source's.
Every value also records what it measures: a whole transaction, an enterprise value, a facility, an issue, a fund. A filter that mixes those is a filter that lies.
Names are merged carefully, places barely at all
Firm and lawyer names are recorded exactly as written, then merged only where the merge is safe. People are matched on name structure, so a middle initial or a title merges and a different surname does not. General text similarity is not used on people: it pairs strangers who share a first name and buries the real cases.
Places get less latitude still. Fuzzy matching on place names offers Austria against Australia, Niger against Nigeria, Iceland against Ireland. One bad merge there corrupts a region filter and nobody notices for months. So places merge on an exact match or a written-down alias, and nothing else. An unfamiliar spelling becomes its own place and waits for a person.
What the numbers are not
Firm counts here are published deal activity. A firm that issues announcements and has them published will look busy. A firm that does neither will look quiet, whatever it actually did. Treat every ranking on this site as a ranking of announcements.
Corrections beat complaints
Anyone named can ask for a correction, a name removal or a withdrawal, with no account and no lawyer. A name removal takes effect across every deal at once, and the daily sync will not undo it.
Claiming a profile adds contact details and a biography and changes nothing else. A paying profile gets no advantage over a non-paying one on the same page, deliberately.
Current record: 1,368 announcements, 93 firms, 6,796 named lawyers. Figures on this page are recomputed on every build, so if they ever contradict the rest of the site, this page is the one to trust.