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<b><i>Law Firm CI:</i></b> More Data, Less Action?

By Marcie Borgal Shunk
May 02, 2017

A BigLaw Director of Business Development recently lamented to me, “we want to do more with our data and CI function, but I'm just not sure the firm is ready.” Despite her firm's best efforts to give the lawyers access to information, little was changing. Actions continued to stall, decisions weren't being made and, most importantly, the firm wasn't generating better outcomes as a result of the insights and analytics.

Sadly, this is a familiar refrain. In many firms, the primary challenge lies in having information, not intelligence — insights on which one can act. In this instance, however, the situation was more nuanced. Despite the sophisticated analytical skills of the team, my friend's firm was unable to incorporate the learnings into its daily activities. An early 2000s title, The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action, addresses this very phenomenon. In it, Stanford professors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton explore a variety of factors that incite a type of paralysis in firms, an inability to progress despite knowing what to do.

Fear, internal competition and endless deliberation are among the issues Pfeffer and Sutton tackle. Perhaps not surprisingly, these are some of the same obstacles preventing today's law firms from taking optimal advantage of the knowledge available to them. Over the course of working with law firms, four challenges, in particular, have presented themselves most frequently.

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