Every survey sponsor wants as many participants as possible to take their survey. Law firms want oodles of employees to take part or swathes of invited corporations; law departments want every internal client to weigh in or every paralegal and lawyer on the rolls. However, with survey data, quality outranks quantity, and respondents need to be both acceptable and to provide qualified answers to the online questionnaire for their answers to count.
Put in the appendix to your report material that a few readers might want to consult, but for most readers is either irrelevant or too much to read. If it clutters the report, digresses from the major findings, or obscures the flow of the report but you don’t want to jettison it, consider adding the material to the appendix. The table of contents of the report should make clear by sub-entries what is in the appendix.
Designers of surveys by law firms, law departments, or legal vendors use a slew of names for the capability of an online survey to jump to a question based on the answer to a previous question. The names designers give to this kind of question include “skip logic,” “branching,” and “conditional” questions; I will use the term conditional question. Conditional questions create a custom path through a survey because the answer to one question (or more than one) dictates what the next question (or a later question) asks or how it is structured.
A respectable survey conducted by a law firm, law department, or legal vendor gives respondents ample opportunity not only to pick items from selections or prioritize items but also to expand on their ideas. They add their own thoughts in text boxes, which often accompany multiple-choice questions that have an “Other” choice. Or free text might emanate from open-ended questions like “How do you feel about the training you have been offered for confrontation management?
When a law firm or a law department launches an online survey, the invitation email should include a projected closing date. “We urge you to take the survey on or before May 31st.” For internal surveys by firms and legal teams, two to three weeks should be sufficient to accommodate holidays as well as employee vacations, illnesses, technical glitches in the hosted software, procrastination, or stretches of high-pressure workloads.
The psychology of setting a date motivates people to put it on their to-do list.