I remember the first business reporting job I did years ago, covering the debt securities market for a specialist wire service. It was a stretch picking up the market jargon and economics, but the thing I really remember is watching the guys who supplied the commentary, who were mostly ex-bond traders.

I could write about a deal and reckon I'd made a decent fist of summing it up, but when I watched them give interviews on Reuters' TV channel it was obvious I was miles off. If I could get to within 50 or 100 basis points (bps) of where a bond should price, they would get within five bps and know why the lead managers had mis-judged the swaps market and gone for the wrong maturity.

The long-winded point I'm making is that it taught me that in business coverage, getting to what's really relevant matters. A lot. Superficial is easy – superficial is everywhere. But if you can get to accurately targeted and authoritative writing on hard-to-grasp subjects, you are doing something right. It was trying to address this challenge that appealed when I worked on the rollout of Legal Week Law, our online library of legal briefings and white papers.

The idea was that if we did it properly, we could use the site to help sift through the mountains of legal briefings and research produced by law firms to identify the material that is genuinely valuable to clients. Now, that is a lot harder to achieve than it sounds. What business publications rarely admit is that, while industry audiences will always say they want technical writing, such pieces are not often that popular or widely read. Partly, this is due to the logistical challenges of turning around such pieces. Partly it is the difficulty of combining good writing with excellent technical grasp of the issues. Many have one, few have both.

But the flipside of that is that if you achieve the right mix on the right subject, it works very well. My hope was that Legal Week Law would become a tool to help us achieve that formula. With more material to work with and a chance to build up our commissioning skills we could get a better sense of what mattered to clients. More importantly, we could then use data on downloads and reader recommendations to identify and make available the best pieces.

And, so far at least, it has worked. It's this aspect of Legal Week Law that really appeals to me (admittedly, the editorial team's eyes tend to glaze over when I start talking about it). Anyway, to build on this – and hopefully bring readers some useful material – we are launching a quarterly review based on the site's material and data. The idea is simple: to highlight the key trends and topics on the minds of clients and bring readers some of the best content according to a very well-informed audience.