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Breaking Bad: The Pitfalls of Using Research and How to Avoid Them

By Marci Borgal Shunk
January 31, 2016

Let's face it. Law firms are neophytes at using competitive intelligence (CI) to inform strategic business decisions. It has been only three decades since law firms hired the first full-time, dedicated marketing professionals; and much less since they began relying on CI professionals to track industry or client trends. Law firms are just now learning how to incorporate CI into decision-making, rather than relying solely on tradition, individual partners' pet passions or anecdotal perceptions of “what's hot.” The resources, tools and professionals performing CI in the legal industry have come a long way. Yet we still have a long way to go.

In the research industry, we have a saying: “Our biggest competitor is bad research.” Bad research takes many forms. It may be the study that announces a newsworthy, and often counterintuitive, statistic based on a sample size of 16. Or the assertion that market growth in an area of state litigation has flatlined, only to learn that the research tool does not aggregate the most active county's data. Or ' my favorite ' the exciting finding that your competitor is the absolute best at XX from a researcher who interviewed just three of its clients. Ah, the list is seemingly endless, which is why, in a world where information has become the backbone of decision-making (and rightly so), it is that much more important to quickly ascertain what's worth listening to ' and what's not.

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