Competitive Intelligence: A Must Have

In today's evolving technological legal market, it is not enough for a law firm to perform tactically, using best practices. Competitive marketing for same client market share necessitates strategic planning. And strategic planning, in turn, mandates Competitive Intelligence (CI) initiatives tag teamed with information analysis.

What is CI?

Although, long-range growth plans are still a requisite component of law firm longevity, cognition of the market place is vital for securing prime client matters be they litigious or transactional in nature. Raw data alone is not sufficient for predetermining client and industry needs. Sophisticated business information, digested and analyzed becomes Competitive Intelligence that enables law firms to map key client's legal needs as well as identify cross-selling opportunities. Competitive Intelligence therefore is the process of gathering data and turning data into information and then into knowledge. This knowledge defines customer needs, customer decision-making processes, the competition, conditions in the industry, and general economic, technological and cultural trends. CI is a group effort exemplified by moving from reactive to proactive, intuitive to the more consistent structural, and going from the next move to multiple moves. Competitive Intelligence enables sustainable competitive advantage.

How Do You Practice CI In Firms?

At Dorsey & Whitney, a large Midwest law firm with multiple offices, the meeting juncture for the Information Resource Center and the Marketing and Sales Department, is CI. Indeed one of the IRC researchers is actually titled Competitive Liaison to the Marketing Department. Having a CI/IRC point person to interact with the marketing and sales team not only commands teamwork and lack of duplication, it fosters a relationship. The IRC team itself is committed to establishing a roll in the firm's revenue generation structure. As well, it is dedicated to empowering the firm to make its most important strategic decisions with a fact base, a rather novel and untraditional concept for law firms who many times make decisions wistfully based on intuition.

Succinctly, Dorsey's three home grown initiatives are comprised of: specific strategic planning on targeted industries, current awareness alerts on those industries as well as key clients and cross selling to existing key accounts.

Strategic Planning of Targeted Industries

When Dorsey decided to move into the biotech market place in the Bay area, various sets of data were gathered from a variety of resources. First, Jan Rivers, the Competitive Intelligence Librarian assigned to the project, consulted many news sources to include newspapers and trade journals. Given the popularity of Biotech, mammoth documents had to be vetted for precise pieces of information that was used to analyze the state of the Bay area's Biotech industry This information then in turn had to be further granulized to types of industry within the parent biotech industry. By example, did the firms deal with the pharmaceutical industry, medical devices, chemical engineering etc.? The online version of Martindale-Hubbell was searched (using keywords) and resulted in a listing of law firms practicing Life Sciences in California. Inclusion in either the AmLaw 100, 200 or NLJ 250 was another noted discerning factor. News articles were then perused checking these competitive firms as well as surveying their clients and market share. While checking news sources more law firms were unearthed that had not been listed in Martindale (because they did not use the before mentioned key words in their law firm profile) yet were none the less, biotech practice law firms. Dockets were searched to see who was litigating and the nature of these litigation filings. Finally, all of the information mined had to be analyzed, synthesized and resolved to a succinct PowerPoint created to brief attorneys on the new practice project. Laborious? About 20 hours work for a very experienced researcher. Required? Abso-lutely, in order to provide the necessary Competitive Intelligence the firm needed to make business decisions.

Current Awareness Alerts

Apprising the attorney team on news events in the industry was a little less time consuming. Rivers went online every morning, using Internet sources to cull articles related to the Biotech/Life Sciences industry. The articles were categorized by location and linked from an electronic newsletter that Rivers created. This in turn was delivered to the e-mail boxes of the attorneys involved. As well, this electronic newsletter later became a marketing initiative in and of itself: sent to new clients to attest that the firm was vigilante in it's monitoring of the industry. But again, the task was extremely time and research consuming.

Cross Selling To Key Accounts

Finally, Client Pages were created in the firm's DMS, which is web based. Each Client Team consisted of several attorneys, a marketing professional and a research librarian, whose responsibility it was to keep the team updated. A variety of resources were consolidated and then categorized, to include Company Information: Stock Option Plans, Organizational Charts, Risk Assets etc, News and Research: news articles, Web cites, SEC Documents, Billing and Matters: billing guidelines, retainer agreements, information from Elite and even a Blog, where attorneys from a variety of locations conversed on clients events and needs.

Client Relationship Management

Finally, there was one other venue from which the firm drew information pertaining to it's key client initiatives. Purchased a year before, the firm's CRM, Interaction (recently purchased by Lexis-Nexis) had not evolved far in the law offices beyond its proverbial box. Although CRMs are hailed as an intelligent way to keep client data current, track interactions with clients and analyze business opportunities, many law firms have found them to be apoplexic. According to the new 2004-2005 American Bar Association Legal Technology survey, 56.3% of law firms with more than 100 attorneys have CRM software and yet only 28.3% of attorneys in those firms use the tools. Mode of Operation for most large law firms is the main culprit for the underutilization of CRM. Partnerships tend to be more lone wolf than collaborative and present billing protocols continue to foster client ownership. Attorneys are concerned about privileged client information, how it will be utilized and who will have access. In large law firm environments, lawyers are reluctant to share clients whom they have nurtured and home grown. And they often become silent when it comes to sharing outlook contacts, much less delicate personal relationships. That the marketing department and other attorneys will have access to their private contacts is considered by many as a true sacrilege.

As stated previously, CI is not just a consideration it is pivotal for the success of a large law firm. It is not all about one database or resources, rather it is an amalgam of many sources, some of which are explicit and others tacit. The challenge then becomes how a firm transfers both explicit information and tacit or internal information into crystallized knowledge that in itself becomes an asset. It is this combination of Business Intelligence with the knowledge that already exists in an organization that can be used to create a differential advantage. Therefore a handicapped CRM, was not acceptable if the firm was to be successful in the competitive law firm marketing environment.

West's Firm360

Released in May of this year, Firm360 reveals information about a firm's clients, markets, competition, even the firm itself, in ways not available before. This suite of services which serves as a tool for strategic business development goes beyond the traditional definition of a CRM. Drawing external information from several Thompson resources to include Legal and Financial, Firm360 is almost a reverse image of the traditional CRM. Like Alice looking through the looking glass, the platform is created as an opposite. Rather than first populating a database with a firm's internal and attorneys privately held information, that will later be augmented with information from proprietary databases (such as Lexis, West, Dialog, Duns), Firm360 takes a different tact. Key, competitive external information is first compiled to promulgate key strategic information to assist in crucial firm marketing. Later, when attorney's confidence in the system stabilizes, Firm360 information can then be appended with internal firm resources.

The three components of Firm360 are:

1. Litigation Profiles: Draws information from Westlaw to reveal litigation trends of companies, industries, law firms, attorneys, and judges.

2. Company Monitor: Aids in client development by creating company watch lists using information from Westlaw, Thompson Financial, and numerous third party providers, and

3. Report Builder: Automatically compiles reports on clients and competitors in less than 5 minutes.

A good marketing person understands its customers real needs and challenges. As well, an informed law firm, several steps ahead of its clients needs, will be able to demonstrate it's ability to better handle a client's problems than the competition. And in that vein, Firm360 is not just about what it is now, but even more about what it will become. It is much easier to begin with a database of explicit knowledge than a skeleton of the tacit or internal. By having a strong information platform, law firms can then begin to create a more potent Competitive Intelligence advantage as attorneys slowly start to donate vital information to the entity as a whole.

In hindsight I wished I had know Firm360 was coming, for I might have been a bit more conservative when using precious knowledge workers and resources. At the time however we needed to fulfill the firm's need for sophisticated researching in order to strategize the firm's growth. Firm360 cannot only provide the same information we laboriously culled, but with using it's stable of information resources, dramatically enhanced our homegrown database. Again, Firm360 provides a plethora of important business resources from a variety of sources. A home-grown app can be a real tar baby if proper resources are not continually dedicated to updating information. However going forward I am delighted and energized that there is a commercial response to an obvious legal market need. Elite was listening.

We will be adding a link to Firm360 on our client pages not only to enhance our information that is posted but to validate the information as the best, the most timely and the most reliable. For we all know that information is power and that an informed law firm will certainly win its share of battles. But now, however, we know that it is the competitive intellectualized law firm, that will win the war.

In today's evolving technological legal market, it is not enough for a law firm to perform tactically, using best practices. Competitive marketing for same client market share necessitates strategic planning. And strategic planning, in turn, mandates Competitive Intelligence (CI) initiatives tag teamed with information analysis.

What is CI?

Although, long-range growth plans are still a requisite component of law firm longevity, cognition of the market place is vital for securing prime client matters be they litigious or transactional in nature. Raw data alone is not sufficient for predetermining client and industry needs. Sophisticated business information, digested and analyzed becomes Competitive Intelligence that enables law firms to map key client's legal needs as well as identify cross-selling opportunities. Competitive Intelligence therefore is the process of gathering data and turning data into information and then into knowledge. This knowledge defines customer needs, customer decision-making processes, the competition, conditions in the industry, and general economic, technological and cultural trends. CI is a group effort exemplified by moving from reactive to proactive, intuitive to the more consistent structural, and going from the next move to multiple moves. Competitive Intelligence enables sustainable competitive advantage.

How Do You Practice CI In Firms?

At Dorsey & Whitney, a large Midwest law firm with multiple offices, the meeting juncture for the Information Resource Center and the Marketing and Sales Department, is CI. Indeed one of the IRC researchers is actually titled Competitive Liaison to the Marketing Department. Having a CI/IRC point person to interact with the marketing and sales team not only commands teamwork and lack of duplication, it fosters a relationship. The IRC team itself is committed to establishing a roll in the firm's revenue generation structure. As well, it is dedicated to empowering the firm to make its most important strategic decisions with a fact base, a rather novel and untraditional concept for law firms who many times make decisions wistfully based on intuition.

Succinctly, Dorsey's three home grown initiatives are comprised of: specific strategic planning on targeted industries, current awareness alerts on those industries as well as key clients and cross selling to existing key accounts.

Strategic Planning of Targeted Industries

When Dorsey decided to move into the biotech market place in the Bay area, various sets of data were gathered from a variety of resources. First, Jan Rivers, the Competitive Intelligence Librarian assigned to the project, consulted many news sources to include newspapers and trade journals. Given the popularity of Biotech, mammoth documents had to be vetted for precise pieces of information that was used to analyze the state of the Bay area's Biotech industry This information then in turn had to be further granulized to types of industry within the parent biotech industry. By example, did the firms deal with the pharmaceutical industry, medical devices, chemical engineering etc.? The online version of Martindale-Hubbell was searched (using keywords) and resulted in a listing of law firms practicing Life Sciences in California. Inclusion in either the AmLaw 100, 200 or NLJ 250 was another noted discerning factor. News articles were then perused checking these competitive firms as well as surveying their clients and market share. While checking news sources more law firms were unearthed that had not been listed in Martindale (because they did not use the before mentioned key words in their law firm profile) yet were none the less, biotech practice law firms. Dockets were searched to see who was litigating and the nature of these litigation filings. Finally, all of the information mined had to be analyzed, synthesized and resolved to a succinct PowerPoint created to brief attorneys on the new practice project. Laborious? About 20 hours work for a very experienced researcher. Required? Abso-lutely, in order to provide the necessary Competitive Intelligence the firm needed to make business decisions.

Current Awareness Alerts

Apprising the attorney team on news events in the industry was a little less time consuming. Rivers went online every morning, using Internet sources to cull articles related to the Biotech/Life Sciences industry. The articles were categorized by location and linked from an electronic newsletter that Rivers created. This in turn was delivered to the e-mail boxes of the attorneys involved. As well, this electronic newsletter later became a marketing initiative in and of itself: sent to new clients to attest that the firm was vigilante in it's monitoring of the industry. But again, the task was extremely time and research consuming.

Cross Selling To Key Accounts

Finally, Client Pages were created in the firm's DMS, which is web based. Each Client Team consisted of several attorneys, a marketing professional and a research librarian, whose responsibility it was to keep the team updated. A variety of resources were consolidated and then categorized, to include Company Information: Stock Option Plans, Organizational Charts, Risk Assets etc, News and Research: news articles, Web cites, SEC Documents, Billing and Matters: billing guidelines, retainer agreements, information from Elite and even a Blog, where attorneys from a variety of locations conversed on clients events and needs.

Client Relationship Management

Finally, there was one other venue from which the firm drew information pertaining to it's key client initiatives. Purchased a year before, the firm's CRM, Interaction (recently purchased by Lexis-Nexis) had not evolved far in the law offices beyond its proverbial box. Although CRMs are hailed as an intelligent way to keep client data current, track interactions with clients and analyze business opportunities, many law firms have found them to be apoplexic. According to the new 2004-2005 American Bar Association Legal Technology survey, 56.3% of law firms with more than 100 attorneys have CRM software and yet only 28.3% of attorneys in those firms use the tools. Mode of Operation for most large law firms is the main culprit for the underutilization of CRM. Partnerships tend to be more lone wolf than collaborative and present billing protocols continue to foster client ownership. Attorneys are concerned about privileged client information, how it will be utilized and who will have access. In large law firm environments, lawyers are reluctant to share clients whom they have nurtured and home grown. And they often become silent when it comes to sharing outlook contacts, much less delicate personal relationships. That the marketing department and other attorneys will have access to their private contacts is considered by many as a true sacrilege.

As stated previously, CI is not just a consideration it is pivotal for the success of a large law firm. It is not all about one database or resources, rather it is an amalgam of many sources, some of which are explicit and others tacit. The challenge then becomes how a firm transfers both explicit information and tacit or internal information into crystallized knowledge that in itself becomes an asset. It is this combination of Business Intelligence with the knowledge that already exists in an organization that can be used to create a differential advantage. Therefore a handicapped CRM, was not acceptable if the firm was to be successful in the competitive law firm marketing environment.

West's Firm360

Released in May of this year, Firm360 reveals information about a firm's clients, markets, competition, even the firm itself, in ways not available before. This suite of services which serves as a tool for strategic business development goes beyond the traditional definition of a CRM. Drawing external information from several Thompson resources to include Legal and Financial, Firm360 is almost a reverse image of the traditional CRM. Like Alice looking through the looking glass, the platform is created as an opposite. Rather than first populating a database with a firm's internal and attorneys privately held information, that will later be augmented with information from proprietary databases (such as Lexis, West, Dialog, Duns), Firm360 takes a different tact. Key, competitive external information is first compiled to promulgate key strategic information to assist in crucial firm marketing. Later, when attorney's confidence in the system stabilizes, Firm360 information can then be appended with internal firm resources.

The three components of Firm360 are:

1. Litigation Profiles: Draws information from Westlaw to reveal litigation trends of companies, industries, law firms, attorneys, and judges.

2. Company Monitor: Aids in client development by creating company watch lists using information from Westlaw, Thompson Financial, and numerous third party providers, and

3. Report Builder: Automatically compiles reports on clients and competitors in less than 5 minutes.

A good marketing person understands its customers real needs and challenges. As well, an informed law firm, several steps ahead of its clients needs, will be able to demonstrate it's ability to better handle a client's problems than the competition. And in that vein, Firm360 is not just about what it is now, but even more about what it will become. It is much easier to begin with a database of explicit knowledge than a skeleton of the tacit or internal. By having a strong information platform, law firms can then begin to create a more potent Competitive Intelligence advantage as attorneys slowly start to donate vital information to the entity as a whole.

In hindsight I wished I had know Firm360 was coming, for I might have been a bit more conservative when using precious knowledge workers and resources. At the time however we needed to fulfill the firm's need for sophisticated researching in order to strategize the firm's growth. Firm360 cannot only provide the same information we laboriously culled, but with using it's stable of information resources, dramatically enhanced our homegrown database. Again, Firm360 provides a plethora of important business resources from a variety of sources. A home-grown app can be a real tar baby if proper resources are not continually dedicated to updating information. However going forward I am delighted and energized that there is a commercial response to an obvious legal market need. Elite was listening.

We will be adding a link to Firm360 on our client pages not only to enhance our information that is posted but to validate the information as the best, the most timely and the most reliable. For we all know that information is power and that an informed law firm will certainly win its share of battles. But now, however, we know that it is the competitive intellectualized law firm, that will win the war.