How long it takes a typical respondent to complete your legal industry survey goes far to determine the participation rate. If an invitee glances through the survey and senses that it will be a time suck, or starts in and begins to worry that it goes on and on, they might never answer the first question or might drop out. If a lawyer or paralegal is motivated enough to click on the link he or she will probably answer at least a few questions to get a sense of how quickly they move through the questionnaire.
No survey should be released into the wild without the thoughtful input of a person who knows in depth the domain of the survey, a **subject matter expert (SME) **. Put positively, embed as an integral contributor to your project team someone who knows deeply what they’re talking about regarding the survey topic. Mostly, SMEs surface from with the law firm, law department, or legal vendor behind the survey, but an outside resource might be retained.
On a survey of law firm lawyers, what is a weakness of the following question? “On a scale of 1 to 7, with 1 being terrible and 7 being excellent, how do you view the firm’s IT department responsiveness?” The blunder is that it places no temporal limit on the respondent’s retrospection. Some respondents might have long memories, or a dramatic example of the far past remains salient – “Remember that time six years ago, the law department dropped the ball completely.
You should ask for the email address of the person responding to your survey on behalf of a law firm, law department or legal vendor. As to the order of that question, place it as one of the first questions because otherwise people who spend time slogging through the questionnaire might not want to find at the end that you want them to identify themselves, that they are not anonymous. [Whether you make the question a required question raises other issues beyond the scope of this section.
A popular format on online surveys requests respondents to consider a list and assign priorities. “Consider the following challenges of work from home as compared to at the law firm:” could be the format of one such question; the list that follows has “inadequate software, interruptions, noise, pets, social isolation, work-life balance, Other.” [Note that the selections are in alphabetical order, with “Other” at the end.] The instructions say to assign those list items one of several kinds of priorities.