Reena SenGupta
April 1, 2025 • 3 min read
For much of Albert Einstein’s life, he sought a unified theory to explain all the forces in the universe. It would link electromagnetism to gravity and explain the behaviour of particles, wrapping everything into a single, elegant description.
The great physicist was not successful in this endeavour, but his persistence exemplifies a deeply rooted human impulse: the desire to bring clarity to complexity, to find a way to bring messy reality into a coherent, graspable framework.
This is the purpose that underlies RSGI’s Resight Legal (India). The reality it aims to illuminate is India’s fast-developing legal sector – and while that may be less of a conceptual stretch than theoretical physics, Resight is still the product of years of thought and research.
My days of ranking lawyers began in 1995, when I joined the Chambers directories and, over the next six years, turned them into the most successful rankings guides then on the market. Later, seeing a need for deeper insights into the legal sector, I set up the consultancy that became RSGI. With my business partner, Yasmin Lambert, I have built the FT Innovative Lawyers programme – now in its 20th year – into the global standard-setter it is today, and established the RSG India Report, launched in 2008, as the leading ranking of law firms in India.
Resight India is the culmination of many years of thinking about – and putting into practice – the best ways to measure the success of legal professionals, be they lawyers working in private practice, in-house or in law companies. The platform 'unifies' three different intelligence inputs and combines them with a generative AI search layer so users can ask natural language questions and get meaningful and useful answers.
The intelligence inputs comprise: expert assessments from the research team at RSGI; user reviews from major legal service buyers; and third-party data from publicly available sources, disaggregated and recombined to yield new insights.
We have, if you like, combined a Gartner (market research) approach with Tripadvisor (customer reviews) and Bloomberg (news) to make something new: Resight Legal. Why “Resight”? Partly, of course, because it is a play on our company name. But we believe it also encapsulates the possibilities that RSGI’s new platform opens up.
The legal market is driven by relationships – it is arguably the most people-driven sector in the world. Everyone thinks they know everything and everyone that they need to. But in recent years, abundant data, together with AI that can help draw meaning from it, has challenged that certainty. New sources of knowledge allow us to see things in a different light, to revisit places we thought we knew as though for the first time – hence Resight.
The platform’s strapline is “legal intelligence revisited”. We hope to give users a more accurate, more nuanced and more valuable way of assessing the Indian legal market. A way to make better choices for outside counsel, or to assess recruitment options, or to make strategic decisions, or to drum up business.
It allows law firms to benchmark themselves and gain a deeper understanding of their markets and their position within them. It enables buyers to know their lawyers differently, even the ones they have known for many years, so that they can better leverage their favoured firms’ expertise – or initiate difficult conversations that may be long overdue.
Resight India is not just a tech platform. It offers “intelligence as a service”. Subscribers get to access the wealth of knowledge in the RSGI team, which is constantly accumulating new insights into both the Indian and global legal markets. Part of that team’s work for the FT Innovative Lawyers programme, for example, is to understand how lawyers will work with technology.
As technology has become more powerful, and particularly since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, the question of how to ensure that human intelligence remains in the loop has become more acute. With Resight India, we believe we have got the balance right. We are scrupulous in our use of data, robust with our ratings, and appropriately sceptical about law firm statements and user reviews.
Resight India is 'curated' intelligence and, just as important, it is real-time. The swift advance of AI poses a stiff challenge to commercial lawyers worldwide, and in India, the resulting uncertainties are amplified by rapid economic growth and geopolitical shifts. Our platform will deliver constantly updated ratings and information, allowing law firms and clients alike to gain up-to-date insights into lawyers’ emerging expertise, say, or rival firms’ digital maturity.
I say that the legal profession is relationship-driven. Resight India charts those relationships, offering users a means of navigating a complex sector. When it launches, over 100,000 connections will have been charted.
We too at RSGI are relationship-driven, and we believe in delivering continuous value while constantly looking for better ways to do so. Resight India will keep changing and expanding, drawing on the same kinds of innovation that will underpin the success of tomorrow’s law firms.
If physics ultimately eluded his effort to unify it, Einstein was never deterred from pursuing his curiosity. “Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow,” he is supposed to have said. “The important thing is not to stop questioning.” Our hope is that Resight Legal will give you the answers you are looking for, and the ones you don’t yet know you need.