Helping RSGI Evolve the FTIL Research Process Using HighQ

The Client

RSGI Limited  is a global intelligence and advisory agency behind some of the legal industry’s most prestigious benchmarks, notably the Financial Times Innovative Lawyers (FTIL) Reports and Awards. Each year, their expert team sifts through hundreds of detailed submissions nominating firms and in-house legal teams doing genuinely groundbreaking work.

Despite being a relatively small team, their research is rigorous, analytical, and trusted across the legal research and innovation community. The prestige of the FTIL Programme owes much to the care and scrutiny RSGI brings to the process.

To manage such a vast and complex review cycle, they rely on HighQ , a powerful collaboration and workflow platform from Thomson Reuters, which has become central to how RSGI runs the FTIL research process.

RSGI instructed echo.legal, a specialist legal automation consultancy, to help refine and optimise the implementation of HighQ to improve this process.

What is HighQ and How Does RSGI Use it?

HighQ is an advanced collaboration and project management platform that brings together secure data storage, collaboration tools, automated workflows, and dashboard-style reporting. Legal teams use it to manage everything from client portals to internal project management. But it’s more than just a file-sharing tool. It’s a fully customisable workspace that lets users automate manual steps, standardise inputs, and track data at every stage of a process.

For RSGI, HighQ is the operational engine behind the FTIL submission process. Law firms and in-house legal teams enter their submissions through a HighQ form, which feeds directly into a centralised system the researchers use to manage the entire process.

Patrick Shortall, Research and Editorial Producer at RSGI said:

"HighQ is our knowledge management system for the entire FTIL process - from the collection of submissions, to our initial assessment, to interview notes and final write-ups."

This use case is especially interesting because RSGI uses HighQ in a way that’s quite different from how it’s typically deployed in legal teams, showing just how versatile the platform can be when adapted to a unique, data-driven research workflow.

The Challenge

Originally, the FTIL process was managed using Excel, which was sufficient at the time, but quickly became overwhelmed by the growing volume and complexity of submissions.

Several years ago, RSGI adopted HighQ as a centralised platform to handle submissions and store previous years’ data. It was a major improvement. HighQ helped them move away from spreadsheets and evolve their process as their research for the FTIL awards grew.

But as submission numbers increased and the research team continued to expand the scope of their work, RSGI needed to take HighQ further, to make it fit the next phase of their evolution.

Their current HighQ process across each awards cycle involved:

• Creating a new HighQ site for that year’s submissions
• Using separate sites to store reference data from previous years
• Opening submission forms via open links for law firms and legal departments
• Removing external access post-deadline and then beginning weeks of structured interviews and in-depth analysis, all of which needed to be captured and managed by the system.

The team were still handling a lot of manual support queries from submitters, cleaning up inconsistent data entries, and managing workflows that weren’t yet tailored to the way they operated day to day.

They could see HighQ’s potential, but they didn’t have the in-house expertise to unlock it. Patrick continues:

"A year ago, I found that you could create data visualisations based on the status of submissions, which gave me a much clearer view on my workload. After sharing with colleagues, we realised there's a lot more that we could do with this system."

That’s where echo.legal came in.

The Solution

echo.legal partnered with RSGI to make their FTIL process simpler, smoother, and more powerful by using HighQ in smarter ways and designing workflows that fit how the research team works. Patrick commented:

"In a relatively short time - especially given our non-standard use of HighQ - echo.legal were able to understand our processes and what was important to us."

The echo.legal team started with a scoping session to understand RSGI’s goals, reviewing how the current process operated and what was causing friction. From there, they reshaped the platform to reduce the load on RSGI’s team, enhance the experience for users, and improve the quality and consistency of the data being collected.

Here’s what echo.legal delivered: