Savvy Surveys for Lawyers

When a survey analyst sits down to corral and curry the data from a survey, one of the first steps would typically be to rename some or all of the variables. You do that so that they are intelligible and so that they are short. Assuming you use the variable in your code or graphics, you want it to be called “Title”, not “Please pick from the drop-down below the title that is most equivalent to yours.

At the end of my surveys, a message box thanks the person who just completed it and asks them to send me an email confirming that submission. When someone emails you after they have completed your survey, at the least you confirm their e-mail address. More substantially, it makes it easier for you to write to them if a problem arises with their response, such as a missing required value or a puzzling comment.

When you conduct a survey on behalf of a law firm or legal vendor, it might be shrewd to team with others who do not compete with you for purposes of expanding your outreach, whom we will refer to as a “collaborator.” A collaborator may see it in their interest to promote their name in the survey and thereby gather information and contacts that are useful to them. They might agree to e-mail a survey invitation to their proprietary mailing lists and contacts; everyone wins!

I dislike questions that ask takers of a survey to pick one of two choices – let’s call them binary questions. “Are you satisfied or are you not satisfied with the firm’s vacation policy?” The pair of choices is “Satisfied” and “Not Satisfied.” Surveyors should eschew that style of question for several reasons. Paternalistic: The either/or format tries to do the thinking for the respondents. It is arrogant to believe that you can pick the only two alternatives that all or nearly all of them want to go with.

Among the most sensitive questions a survey might present would be the seemingly simple “What is your gender?”. Years ago, no problem; with the current hyper-sensitivity to anything related to biological or behavioral expressions of sexuality, that is a thin-ice inquiry. However, while your law firm or legal vendor should be acutely wary of asking for gender, you are not prohibited from guessing the gender of respondents if you know their first name.