Our July newsletter covers our new partnership with Ranking Copilot, Sarah Bridgman joining as Global Rankings & AI Innovation Director, five resilience lessons from Ash Alexander-Cooper OBE, the partnership team’s week at Cannes Lions, and Legal 5K updates.
Partnerships, resilience, and a postcard from Cannes
It’s been a landmark month at MD Communications, with plenty to celebrate and share. In this edition, we’re bringing together highlights from our resilience evening with Ash Alexander-Cooper OBE, the partnership team’s trip to the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, and more Legal 5K news. But first, I’d like to share one of the most significant developments in our sixteen-year history: our new partnership with Ranking Copilot, and an exciting new addition to the team.
MD Communications welcomes a new AI partnership and AI Innovation Director
AI is transforming the legal directories landscape, but technology alone isn’t enough. The best results come from pairing intelligent automation with experienced advisors. That’s what we’re building.
Ranking Copilot
I am delighted to announce our new partnership with Ranking Copilot, one of the most advanced AI-powered workflow platforms in the legal rankings market.
Through this collaboration, we’ll help firms integrate AI effectively while ensuring every submission retains the strategic thinking, editorial judgement and evidence-based storytelling that delivers results.
Dmytro Fedoruk, founder of Ranking Copilot, describes the partnership as “bringing together the power of Ranking Copilot’s AI with MD Communications’ unrivalled strategic insights, editorial expertise and deep understanding of what drives success in legal directories”.
Our new Global Rankings & AI Innovation Director
Helping integrate Ranking Copilot and embed AI across our legal directories process is Sarah Bridgman, who joins the MD Communications team as our new Global Rankings & AI Innovation Director.
Sarah describes her role as “the ‘human in the loop’, combining AI with strategic thinking, market insight and experience to help firms build stronger strategies and deliver better results for clients.”
Working alongside Partner and Head of directories and bids, Linsay Leslie, Sarah brings over 20 years’ experience in the legal sector, including eight years leading the directories programme at Shoosmiths, and has been a driving force in teaching firms how to use AI to transform their rankings programmes.
With Sarah and Ranking Copilot part of the MD Communications team, we can’t wait to offer a smarter, faster and more effective approach to legal directories, with experienced people at the heart of every decision.
Get in touch for more information on how we can help with your legal directories needs.
Resilience under pressure – an evening with Ash Alexander-Cooper OBE
Last week we welcomed guests from across the legal sector to ‘Resilience Under Pressure: An Evening with Ash Alexander-Cooper OBE‘.
The second event in our Culture Series saw Ash, a former specialist military unit commander, world championship athlete, international musician and author of the newly published The Mindful Soldier: Building resilience to overcome life’s challenges, in conversation with RPC Managing Partner Antony Sassi.
Drawing on lessons from 28 years in the military to his current senior role at OpenAI, Ash reflected on leadership under pressure, overcoming adversity, building resilient cultures and the importance of wellbeing in high-performing environments.
A huge thank you to Ash for a fascinating and inspiring talk, to Antony Sassi for expertly guiding the conversation, and to our co-hosts RPC for helping make the event possible. You can find the professional photos from the evening here.
If you would like to read more, we’ve shared five key insights from the event on our website.
Postcard from Cannes
In June, Head of International Linsay Leslie, Global Marketing Director James Hayhurst and I spent a packed week at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
It was a week of full immersion: panels with lawyers and regulators from around the world at Cannes Rules!, lunch with M+C Saatchi, and an afternoon among agency founders at the Independent Agency Forum.
A personal highlight was being invited to the LinkedIn Lounge to hear where the platform’s heading next. Two exciting developments stood out for the legal sector:
💥 LinkedIn’s new Collaborative Posts feature will allow firms and individuals to co-author posts, expanding their reach and building visibility through each other’s networks.
💥 A shift towards personalised, interest-based feeds means content shaped by focused expertise will outperform generic content every time.
LinkedIn was just one conversation among many, though. Everywhere we turned, creative minds were wrestling with the same questions from completely different angles.
My biggest takeaway from the week? The legal market can be guilty of looking inward. Cannes was a reminder that some of the best ideas can be found outside it.
If you would like a roundup of everything we learnt at Cannes, please get in touch.
Legal 5K – Signed, sealed, delivered
It was a pleasure to present James Carroll, Managing Partner at Russell-Cooke, with his trophy last week as the fastest male Managing Partner at this year’s Legal 5K.
Not only did James claim this title for the first time this year, but he also neatly captured the essence of the event when interviewed after the race, noting that events like the Legal 5K “break down barriers” within the profession by bringing together trainees, business service teams, associates and partners outside the pressures of the office.
The Legal 5K has always, at heart, been about building relationships across the legal community, supporting wellbeing and raising vital funds for Skylarks Charity.
More than a race, it’s a reminder that some of the best conversations happen outside the office – and even when race numbers and trainers replace titles and suits.
And in other 5K news, we sent each team their own personalised Legal 5K Wrapped video – a short highlights reel of each team’s achievements and statistics from this year’s race. It’s our small way of saying thank you, and giving each team a chance to look back at what they achieved.
If you’d like to see your firm’s personalised video, get in touch.
Once again, a huge thank you to the 800 runners from the industry who took part.
Don’t miss out on joining the race again in 2027 – please do contact us to express your interest.
This is an extremely exciting time for MD Communications, and I can’t wait to share with you the collaborations, hires, and company announcements we have planned over the coming months.
