Legal Technology Journal

Lewis Silkin’s CRM system is underpinned by close collaboration between the firm’s marketing and IT departments. The firm’s IT director and director of business development describe how it works.

From the ‘off’, even before we made the business case, CRM technology at Lewis Silkin was never going to be about ‘another IT system’ – it was always going to be how we could enable the business to manage our relationships with clients even more effectively.

Several years ago, it was obvious that what we had been using for CRM just was not cutting it. (We will not embarrass the vendor by naming the product!). There was a whole list of requirements which ranged between ‘absolutely necessary’ and ‘would be nice’ and we went off to see what was out there in the market. We did our usual Lewis Silkin thing of not just looking at the best of breed (I think everyone would agree that for many years, for law firms, that product has been and continues to be widely acknowledged as InterAction). We looked at what other industries used and we looked at the then Microsoft offering. We cannot comment on what offerings are out there now, but at that time InterAction knocked all the other products completely out of the picture both on functionality and pricing. An example of lack of functionality: one of the products did not even have a deduplication function! We therefore followed the herd and signed up for InterAction 5.5 and are still very glad we did.

Clean data

Our next issue was the huge amount of rubbish data we already had. We did not want to pollute our shiny new CRM with it and end up with ‘garbage in, garbage out’ (GIGO) and lose the buy in that we had worked so hard to gain from the business in deciding on implementation. The partnership sensibly agreed with us that we should invest in the data cleansing services of a company called Shamrock. This was invaluable – we had no idea how to approach this problem and were very fortunate that we engaged them as they gave us pointers about what to take over and what to forget about. Helping us to set clear parameters and agree those with the business was, again, invaluable. One practical example of how they helped us avoid GIGO is that we agreed if a contact had not attended any of our events, had not been sent any Christmas cards or mailings and had not been billed for anything for the past five years they were not a ‘live’ proposition.

The cleansing, however, was not all black and white. There is a huge swathe of grey between the highest billing client and the type of contact I have just described. One great thing about having gone through this cleansing exercise though, is that people are still very loath to put any rubbish in our database and it is generally kept updated. We use a combination of external resource and internal data stewards and champions to keep our data up to date – but generally the business understands the value of clean data and we are pretty self-sufficient. We have reduced our return rate significantly thereby saving money – and the environment! And of course as we move to more electronic mailings, we are able to carry out highly targeted campaigns which have measurable return on investment.

Joint ownership

Our CRM system is managed jointly by the marketing and IT departments – but the critical point is that it is ‘owned’ by the stakeholders in the business. All professional services firms need to constantly reinforce a client-focused ethos; the trick is to ensure that there is acceptance of a step change in approaches to client management before introducing systems and processes that underpin this. It is much easier then to get end user buy in to implementing technology. And if you can set metrics to demonstrate the value add, then there is an even better chance of successful implementation. Working those metrics through with the stakeholders so there is joint ownership is crucial.

Customised software

Making the business case for implementation of a system to underpin CRM over a year ago was a joint effort between marketing and IT, working closely with the partners to set an action plan and key performance indicators. Following a rigorous review of all available technologies against a set of key criteria, the decision was taken to install InterAction software, customised to our needs. We were well aware of what we were committing to. We knew we needed to commit to associated data cleaning and migration. We knew we needed to include add-ons to enable (inter alia) the exploitation of this software for mass e-mailing/mailing and integration with existing installed IT systems and client databases. We could also demonstrate that there would be very considerable benefits for our client care programme and our prospecting, resulting in time efficiencies, greater sales and increased fees. InterAction was to be a key enabler of our business development activities; we were able to show that maintaining accurate contact data and generating effective mailing/e-mailing lists to drive sales and marketing programmes would become significantly easier. We also considered integration with existing systems – it is not just how we share and make available client and contact information within Interaction but how we link this to other information such as billing data so that we can present to partners and others a rounded view of our clients.

Phased roll out and training

We rolled out with the web client version only – this was obviously much easier for the IT department with the only onus upon us being integration with other applications. The IT department also took on the training of the system, working with the marketing team to ‘get the message across’ that CRM really does add value to the business. We majored on the business benefits rather than the technology per se – training was interactive, based around live client examples and was fun! We decided on a phased training approach. At the beginning, we gave everyone an hour and a half ’s training on the basics so they got used to the product and then followed up with another two hour session. We gave individual training to those less technologically ‘savvy’; we organised floor walkers at key times and at key points in the roll out who could ‘drop by’ users’ desks to fix problems quickly or provide hand holding tuition. We also attended a huge number of departmental and partner meetings to give demonstrations and answer questions.

Perhaps critically, we really demonstrated that a CRM system is an enabler of effective client management rather than an end in itself – so much of the training and induction was linked to other activities we were carrying out around key client management. During the training, we stressed to our users the importance of them taking the time to synchronise with their

Outlook contacts

We are sure that most business services heads in law firms do not retain a file of testimonials from users of their systems – they may have one of complaints. However, this is a quote from one of our senior secretaries post rollout of our CRM: ‘I use InterAction every day – not only is it a firm-wide contacts folder, but a really useful, shared, database. I can get information such as principal client numbers, members and details of client teams, information we as a firm provide to them, who from the client has attended what function, and it allows individuals to maintain correct up-to-date information at the touch of a button. It is really user-friendly and I personally could not live without it!’

Next steps

By the end of 2008 we will have three main repositories for information:

• Thomson Elite’s 3E – for financial information;
• Microsoft SharePoint as our main repository for documents and e-mails; and
• InterAction as our client relationship management system.

Our aim, however, is to make this transparent to the end user. We are working at a brisk pace to be able to present them with the information they want, in the format they want on the device they want without them having to interrogate a number of databases. We will be achieving this through our Microsoft Office SharePoint Server portal using workflows so the database that is being populated and/or interrogated is not something of which our users need to be aware.

We are also looking to the future and focusing on a number of potential benefits to deliver to the business. For example we will be tracking referrals from multipliers and our HR function will be able to maintain trainee application data and re-contacting programmes much more effectively. We are also looking at our alumni programme and how we tie that to our CRM system. Other opportunities that could lead through to revenue growth and cost savings are emerging all the time. We do know, though, that we need to prioritise the benefits that CRM can deliver. We will always rigorously test assumptions against stringent key performance indicators that have been developed with, rather than for, the end users. We will, of course, continue to ensure that our CRM system continues to deliver value at its core – that is by allowing our lawyers to leverage our client database, increase client satisfaction and hopefully increase fees. In touch with the business

We continue to try not to take a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to, for example, training. We have found that there is still a need for one-to-one as well as group training. We take part in client team meetings to demonstrate how our CRM system can underpin client specific objectives. We continue to ‘walk the floors’, provide clinics and a dedicated helpline. Our internal communication tools regularly feature hints and tips on getting the best out of CRM technology. We regularly network with our peers in other firms to ensure that we are adopting best practice – if not leading its development! We are already considering some innovative add-ons to our CRM system which will really move forward the value we can deliver to the firms’ business development efforts, which we think will lead the field.

Jan Durant is the IT director and Mark Grant the director of business development at Lewis Silkin.