How law firms can leverage data to win business and exceed client expectations
Data is the most essential asset law firms can put to work to win new business and improve the experience for existing clients. But they can do so much more to tell stories and attract new business.
Data is the most essential asset law firms can put to work to win new business and improve the experience for those clients already won. The availability and use of data are transforming virtually every industry, supporting and streamlining business development decisions. Now it’s the legal industry’s turn to see the benefits of that transformation.
Removing barriers that separate data into silos
Much of the data held by a law firm is spread out over many separate systems – time and billing, business intake, CRM, HR, and many more. Today’s challenge is normalizing and integrating all that data because lawyers and firm management ask questions that often require data from more than one system.
Broadly speaking, this challenge of creating a single source of truth underlies all efforts to leverage data for better decisions and more effective business development activity for marketing, business development, and knowledge management professionals.
A single source of truth for marketing and BD
Law is a knowledge-intensive profession; firms need to be able to communicate about the intangibles that differentiate their expertise and service delivery apart from other firms and engage clients in new ways.
It is essential to understand how law firm marketing differs from other industries and how industry-specific software best fits the needs of those new professionals.
The role of data in marketing strategy and communications
Law firms operate in a knowledge-based profession where expertise and experience are the product; establishing a firm’s thought leadership and brand attributes, and building trusted relationships, are critical in that context. The challenge for law firm marketing and business development is differentiating a firm from others and demonstrating the superior expertise and experience of its lawyers.
So how does having a single source of truth support marketing and business development functions in legal?
On the business development side, it means that teams have a complete profile for each client (derived from data about billing, matters, behaviors, content, events, industries, and markets, combined with additional context from lawyers) in a single location. Having that data aggregated and at hand enables BD professionals to spend less time tracking down the data and more time tailoring the conversations it wants to have and strengthening those relationships to win more business.
Today’s firms can do so much more to tell their stories in terms that potential clients will respond to. And the most significant difference between yesterday’s firm and today’s is the ability to easily access data to uncover insights that can tell that story.
Software tailored to the marketing needs of law firms supports that work in two ways. First, bringing critical data together provides the most accurate view of clients and enables marketing and business development teams to develop strategies to drive engagement and brand. Second, automating many of the motions it takes to deliver content and marketing messages conserves resources for the higher-value work of thought leadership and relationship building.
Biography content management
Despite the new technology-enabled marketing capabilities that firms now enjoy, the firm’s greatest asset is still the experience and expertise of its lawyers. The lawyer biography is still one of the most valuable marketing tools available.
Traditional lawyer bios have been seen as relatively static, text-based pieces of content. At best, firms could maintain current bios with a manual update and cut-and-paste as needed for various uses. Many firms are turning to software to leverage lawyer bios into a much more dynamic and flexible marketing asset, something much easier to maintain and distribute than with manual methods. According to a recent ILTA Marketing Technologies Survey, about 30% of firms actively seek to acquire new experience management technology.
“With a single source of truth about lawyers’ collective expertise, law firms can spend less time chasing down biographical data, credentials, publications, and the like and more leveraging material to build client relationships through tailored communications and proposals.”
Pricing and pitch development
With robust data about clients and software-based processes to maintain and deliver up-to-date lawyer biographies, law firms have the essential components they need to put that data to work in pricing and pitch development workflows.
The best of these systems pull data from multiple sources across a firm and integrate it with critical applications. Software can help law firms with every step of those processes:
- Enhancing pricing analysis. Firms with a single source of truth about their past work can identify similar matters to facilitate accurate pricing, staffing, and budgeting estimates.
- Identifying the firm’s expertise. The data captured in a firm’s systems enables marketing and business development teams to win business and better serve clients. Gone are the days of searching for lawyers with specific expertise through a broadcast email or relying on memory. Data-driven experience management unlocks the power of the data already in the firm’s systems to locate expertise across practices and geographies.
- Finding relevant experience. In addition to helping identify legal expertise, establishing a single source of truth about past matters, clients, and project types allows firms to identify lawyers with very granular experiences that can be extremely valuable in targeted pitches and proposals.
- Boilerplate content. An effective pitch or proposal often requires on point descriptions of the firm’s characteristics, such as a commitment to diversity and inclusion; practice group and industry descriptions; effective use of technology; value add offerings, and more.
- Transforming the pitch itself. Technology also plays a significant role in managing the process of generating pitches and proposals. Templates with firm-branded output pulling together and combining lawyer biographies, matter narratives, representative client descriptions, and boilerplate content make the process easier and more efficient for business development teams.
With a single source of truth about their lawyers’ collective expertise, law firms can spend less time chasing down biographical data, credentials, publications, and the like and more time leveraging that material to build client relationships through tailored communications and proposals.
A single source of truth for service delivery excellence
Once the work is won and the budget set, the focus turns to execution: deploying lawyers with the best-matched experience and expertise profiles and delivering work on time, within budget, and within scope. Ideally, well-planned implementation will reduce write-downs and write-offs and improve client transparency. Staffing, collaboration, and client experience are three areas of execution where a single source of truth emerges as the difference-maker.
In Altman Weil’s Law Firms in Transitions study, 72.5 % of firms report “conversations about project staffing” as a critical strategy for understanding client needs. An experience management system provides factual data to support decisions around talent and staffing in those conversations.
With the right industry-specific software, built-in intelligence can surface the profiles of the most appropriate people to work on a matter or even recommend the best team given the project’s parameters.
Once the pieces are in place, and a firm has access to updated sources of data about its talent, past matters, and clients, the data can be put to work in the areas that make the most difference to client relationships. Here are just some of the ways maintaining a single source of truth can enhance service delivery:
- Mitigating attrition risk by tracking partner engagement and a client’s ongoing activity across practice groups.
- Expanding business relationships by segmenting clients based on firm-defined criteria. Firms can quickly identify the clients and segments most likely to deliver the greatest opportunity.
- Discovering who knows what by accessing a combination of experience, client, and people information to learn who knows whom, who knows what, and who has done what type of work.
- Drilling down for insights by examining relationships from every angle to pivot across industries, markets, companies, lawyers, third parties, and more and then dig into the relevant details.
- Assessing client health and performance by tracking key client analytics that provide indicators to assess relationship health and inform client strategy at a glance.
- Targeting cross selling opportunities by looking for the “white space” – with reporting that identifies clients who have engaged the firm in one area but not another.
- Prepping for client briefings by giving client and practice teams access to rich client profiles summarizing the critical touch points of a client’s relationship with the firm.
- Tracking portfolio companies by unlocking the direct and indirect relationships and potential opportunities within holding companies, private equity firms, investment funds, and other interconnected clients.
All these tactics have always been theoretically available to law firms if only they had easy and standardised access to the data that flows through their systems. The digitisation and management of all that data will power enhancements to client service delivery and make the best use of the information already there.