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The Maturation of Competitive Intelligence in Law Firms
When I was a young lawyer ' and all I ever was as a lawyer was young , having run screaming from the practice, if not the profession, as a fifth-year associate ' I was given a project that didn't have a proper name at the time, but today would fall under the loose heading of “competitive intelligence.” This was many years before that term was commonly used in the legal industry, way back before the Internet came along and kicked over all the tables. I was asked by a partner I often worked for to find out all I could about a client's rival company, which was then represented by a rival law firm in town, one with which we had somewhat friendly but also highly competitive relations. That both our client and the target of my inquiry were greyhound dog racing tracks, populated by Runyonesque characters who proudly referred to themselves as “Dog Men,” probably says more than I'd like to admit about how I was tracking as an associate at a firm that otherwise specialized in corporate tax and mutual fund work.
In any event, I set off to find out all I could about that rival dog track. God knows what I dug out of the law library ' maybe racing commission filings and whatever I could glean from available dog track trade publications, if such a source even existed. Lexis-Nexis did exist in some primitive form at the time, so maybe I found something buried in there. I really don't recall any specifics, except that my cloak-and-dagger investigation came to very little and the project was promptly shelved.
The point here is that the desire to compete and learn all you can about your competition has been around ever since capitalism first crawled on its belly out of the oceans. The maturation of meaningful competitive intelligence functions in the rapidly evolving world of law firm administrative operations is more about the proliferation of useful tools than it is anything else. Those tools just happen to have become widely available at a point in time when market conditions have amped up competition between law firms to levels unforeseen before the tsunami of the Great Recession.
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