Legal Technology Journal

Respond quickly and persuasively to an-ever-increasing number of RFPs with D3 (dynamic document drafting) from Microsystems.

The softening economic climate, downward pressure on rates and fees, perceptions of certain legal services as a commodity and pervasive demand for custom-generated content combine to place extreme pressure on law firms to respond quickly and persuasively to an ever-increasing number of request for proposals (RFPs).

As outlined in the 2008 Client Advisory from Hildebrandt International, ‘The increase of corporate procurement departments selecting outside counsel is a significant contributor to the widespread use of RFPs for legal services.’ Yet, law firms are not increasing their business development staff to keep pace with the increased quantity of RFPs. The questions then become these:

• How does a firm comprehensively and efficiently identify how its experience, expertise and objectives align with an RFPs’ requirements?
• How does a firm quickly craft a pitch reflective of the prospective client’s legal needs and requirements?
• How does a firm’s business development team maximize its productivity to meet an increasing demand for pitch books that win new business?

Best practices for producing winning pitch books

To effectively compete for proposal-driven business, leading law firms are developing the following capabilities within their business development workflows:

• Improved search of firm expertise and experience – eliminate the overly broad results garnered with ‘keyword’ or ‘Google’ type searches when searching for relevant experience and expertise. This allows a firm to fully evaluate how well its experience matches the new business requirements and increase the speed at which it can respond to an RFP with relevant firm experience.
• Faster pitch book drafting – in minutes (instead of hours), create an initial draft of a pitch book with the most relevant, firm-approved content.
• Better pitch book tailoring – ensure the core pitch book document is easily configurable to the various offices and practice areas, and includes a mechanism for classified search of the firm’s expertise and experience.
• More efficient data sharing – extract content from the pitch book and ‘push’ to the CRM or proposal tracking system.
• Easier usage – leverage Microsoft Word as the drafting platform for quick adoption and easy use by the marketing and business development departments.

D3 case studies

Business development groups at law firms in the UK and abroad have chosen Microsystems D3 (Dynamic Document Drafting) to improve their competitiveness and win more business when responding to RFPs.

Field Fisher Waterhouse LLP desired to improve the storage, retrieval and manipulation of its experience and expertise. The firm knew that the time it saved not opening spreadsheets and emailing other fee-earners to gather information would greatly enhance not only its productivity, but also its win rate. With D3, the firm categorizes its expertise and content by practice, industry sector, deal size, client type and sector expertise; this information is served up as searchable content fragments that can easily be added to the draft pitch book. All of this is presented simply and intuitively within Microsoft Word, which minimizes training time.

Faced with the challenge of responding to more than 300 RFPs annually, Thompson Hine LLP needed to reduce the time spent drafting a proposal in order to be able to allocate more time to customizing the proposal. Using D3, the firm can now produce a first draft proposal in just minutes. As a result, the firm is using the time it used to spend ‘looking’ for information to now ‘super-tailoring’ the proposal to reflect a prospect’s specific needs. In addition, the intuitive D3 user interface allows any of the firm’s business development staff to be able to quickly produce a high-quality first draft proposal, thus insuring that a lawyer’s request for a draft is swiftly accommodated.

A global 50 law firm wanted to eliminate the non-value added efforts associated with its previous proposal generation process and grow the efficiency of its business development team. With D3, the firm collects deal information at the beginning of the proposal process and enters it once. At that point, the information is inserted into the proposal or RFI response and added automatically to the firm’s proposal tracking solution.

Conclusion

To compete effectively in a world of increasing quantities of RFPs and downward pressures on rates and fees, a law firm must use technology to automate non-value added processes and assist users in storing, sharing and accessing firm expertise, experience and marketing content. With the ability to quickly draft a high quality pitch book, a law firm’s business development department is empowered to work with lawyers and ‘super-tailor’ a proposal that reflects the prospective client’s needs as well as the firm’s competitive advantages. The combination of highly tailored content and an efficient process is a winning advantage.