When a law department polls its own members or clients (employees who ask the legal department for services) or when a law firm polls its lawyers or staff, those are what I call internal surveys. They take place withing the walls of the firm or department. We have no way of knowing how many internal surveys take place in the United States. I have done dozens as parts of consulting projects, but I can’t extrapolate, and I’ve never seen data about the frequency of the non-public facing practice of conducting surveys.
The starting point, the sine qua non, of survey projects that get off the ground are adequate lists of e-mail addresses. The more people you can reach through your bulk e-mail software, the more likely your survey is to build up a sufficient participant base.
Large email lists are not always a prerequisite, because focused surveys may know their population and not need to supplement their e-mail addresses. For example, any internal survey by a law firm or law department exemplifies that.
Sponsors of a new survey, whether or not they have previously conducted a survey, always want to know: “How long will the project take?” From the jumping off point when the firm, vendor or legal department decides to proceed with a survey, how long might a sponsor reasonably anticipate it will take before the final report is published?
Internal surveys by a law firm or law department can be pulled off relatively quickly.
Borrowing from the saying, “Data leads to information, which creates knowledge, and cumulates in wisdom,” we can analogize to the ladder of value and sophistication that survey reports can offer.
Response data presented in the raw, as numbers, is the most fundamental output in a survey report. You show tables or graphs that aggregate and represent the data from the survey respondents but do little more than regurgitate the numbers and explain how to read them.
Hard as it is to reach people and persuade them to start your survey instrument, you’re not done at that point. Respondents drop out as they move through the survey, which we will refer to as attrition.
If attrition afflicts them early, you collect only dribbles of useful information. If they submit a partial survey in which they went further, you have gained more, to be sure, but you would like them to have completed the survey.