Legal Technology Journal

Berwin Leighton Paisner’s IT director outlines the key considerations underpinning a service-oriented approach to client relationship management.

Making the Grade

Involving users

The question for both the marketing and IT teams is how to get the attention of lawyers and how to keep that attention and deliver to expectations. Firstly, there is a hearts and minds exercise – getting busy individuals to understand the value they can get from being contributors to and editors of the raw data that is held about the firm’s clients and contacts. This is where background work becomes an imperative to a successful implementation.

Collecting the data is hard enough, but even with support from external agencies and from de-duplication tools, it is exceptionally difficult to get the data into a robust and accurate form. This, however, must be done. It should be done independently of any project planning or other lawyer involvement. It needs to be rigorously managed – nothing spells doom more quickly to any system than that the resulting output is inaccurate – right down to the spelling of the Christian name! There is no short cut to this exercise. It needs time and effort to get that core name, address, title and so on right. Whilst this is not the real value-added stuff of CRM, it is the raw fabric from which all the other more valuable information is built. This exercise needs very little real involvement from lawyers, so can be owned and managed by the marketing team, probably with huge volumes of help from the general consumers of this basic information – the secretaries.

Synchronised data

Internally, it is also imperative to look at all sources of data. Nothing creates greater irritation for users than getting the right information from system A and the wrong information from system B. This, of course, is part of the core logic of an enterprise resource planning system – data being held in one place and consumed by multiple applications. Yet, much the same can be achieved with good data stewardship and with close links (probably hard crafted by the IT team) between the various repositories to ensure that the data remains in step.

Working together

Strong project leadership and sponsorship is another imperative. But here is the first trick we learned during the early stages of implementing our enterprise CRM – you need to find someone in the marketing team who knows, understands and enjoys the technology aspect of this service and someone in the IT team who really looks at what the users might want to achieve rather than what they say they want to achieve. Then you have to facilitate a close relationship between those two individuals – because their joint involvement will produce the most robust answer to the issues and concerns.

The manner and mechanism of offering the service needs to be carefully managed – involving the secretaries who consume at a basic level the data, becomes essential. We took time to work with pilot groups – and then not just take the feedback, but act on it – or work with the users to work around concerns or issues. So, accurate data and user involvement are the cornerstones of a sound implementation.

Lawyers own CRM

Now to the lawyer involvement. Linking the CRM as closely as possible with Outlook contacts was for us a critical issue. The more straightforward and more reliable that link became, the more contacts were created in whichever was the appropriate environment and then synchronised between the systems. Here, the contact information links and synchronises regularly so that when users add names and addresses to letters or documents they draw from a resource that is regularly refreshed and which has more than 1,000 data stewards. This was the next point of breakthrough – giving users within contained groups limited editorial rights rather than bottlenecking everything through the marketing team.

Bottlenecking creates delays in data updating. This creates irritation for the users and irritation stops individuals using the system. Giving editorial rights to group contact owners – with a good, sound and well policed audit trail through to the marketing team – had two impacts. The first was obvious: generally the data was up to date and accurate. Interestingly, the second advantage was that the data become the property of the individual users. Suddenly, the CRM had become the property of the lawyers and their secretaries, so the result that was wanted was achieved – but not necessarily by the most obvious route.

Maximising leverage

So once soundly implemented the opportunity to really leverage the value of accurate data becomes much more interesting for all the teams involved.

We have spent a long time focusing on what information might be sought by the legal teams and trying to provide that as a one-stop-shop solution. Lawyers searching for information on existing clients may start their search in the intranet, the practice management system or the CRM – the system does not care where the researcher starts and delivers the consolidated information from each of those repositories. Now you are starting to build real power – and increasing lawyers’ usage of the system. A single search will reveal the practice areas in which we work for an existing client, the billing for that client, the contact names, the ‘who knows who’, the matter list and even the individual matter teams.

Whilst in nirvana, one hopes that such searching is always done directly by lawyers; in reality we know that much of such searching is done either by the supporting business service groups or by secretarial support groups. Making sure the appropriate training and information is available for these groups is therefore a really important part of successfully offering a CRM service to the users.

Now we move to more interesting elements. What can be tracked by good use of captured data and what might that interesting information be used for? This is where the co-joining of the marketing expert with the IT expert starts to deliver real value to the project. Results from this team approach have been the development of a number of special reports, which of course the users do not see as reports.

Referral tracking is a holy grail and by closely aligning the information captured at matter inception with the information held within the marketing system, the data can be sliced and diced to product a picture of what the firm is doing in terms of internal, external and inward referrals. This allows teams at a glance to identify sources of work – and look to ensuring those contacts are maintained at the highest possible level.

Different views

This integrated approach is archetypal of a BLP system – trying to keep the helicopter view of the data sources and who creates that data is essential. One person involved in the project needs definitely not to have their feet on the ground, but rather have their feet about 10,000 feet high!

But it is not as simple as simply having the data available. The data needs to be available in readily consumable form. Increasingly, users need to be able to snapshot data and the easiest mechanism for snapshotting data is to have a pictorial presentation of information. Much of the data available to BLP users is either presented in raw form as a graphic image or at the flick of a button in a graphic image.

This is part of the acceptance of a robust CRM system – if you can easily get inform ation, and provide it in consumable form, then it becomes an obstacle not to use the database and service rather than an obstacle to make use of it. E-mail as a key data source

Earlier in this article, I talked about the importance of integrating data presentation – ensuring that information from the practice management system is available via the CRM and so on. However, one key data source, which is relatively untapped for data input, is your e-mail environment.

The all invasive e-mail is the means by which we increasingly keep in contact with friends and colleagues as well as working relationships. Knowing the strength of the e-mail traffic string between individuals in client organisations with individuals in the legal team becomes a hugely valuable tool. Looking at the changes in those patterns as relationships develop and strengthen allows the firm to monitor the impact of the structured communication made in relation with that client or contact. It tells you who the client regards as their key contact and sometimes that information becomes a really powerful tool when used to further deepen an existing relationship.

It is also worth noting that relationships with potential clients and prospects often exist within large organisations without anyone really knowing this. Data mining the contacts made via your e-mail environment can start to reveal a wealth of information about the strength – or indeed the weakness – of various relationships.

Sharing client information

Sometimes one forgets how important access to such information is to users who are not in the main office – remote offices often feel cut off from some of the developments in the headquarters. Accurate information on CRM systems allows each office to share data about prospects and contacts as well as about existing clients. Often for these offices this is the easiest and best way to find out what is happening in each physical area of the firm as well as with each client.

Once again a graphic analysis of the relationship – perhaps using e-mail tracking or appointment tracking – may well reveal how strong the relationship between, say, Paris and your target may be, and that might allow greater and more flexible use of the system to provide this background information to anyone involved in pitching. So for us the key elements are robust, tested data which is continually maintained and refined, presented to users in a manner which, as far as possible, matches their consumption requirements.A-300 page table is not easily digestible, but a pie chart showing the core work done by practice sector for a particular client may well show clearly the strengths and weaknesses of the relationship without wading through pages of information, which although relevant is not digestible.

Linking data so that users can consume a range of information from a single point is also critical. Users will not (nor should they need to) go to different repositories to find answers. How can it be right to expect the user to be looking at billing amounts in one system, contact names in another and special arrangement information in a third environment? Users will not do this – and rightly so – thus proper integration of data and an understanding of what the data is required become an imperative part of implementing CRM throughout the practice.

Imagination has played a large role in all this for BLP – the imagination of both the technical team and the marketing team. Listening to users and then trying to build service models that mirror user requirements.

How well is it working?

Like every system, our CRM is a work in progress – new elements, reports and analysis are regularly added. Each addition brings an improvement and greater acceptance. Perhaps the proof of the value of the BLP CRM lies in its usage – it features as our second most regularly used piece of software after Outlook. This could not have been achieved without proper data integration and those close working relationships together with the skills of the individuals involved.

Maybe the other important point to remember is that to date we have never called this the marketing system. It has always been the client relationship service and it is used and perceived as just that.

Janet Day, IT director at Berwin Leighton Paisner, was awarded City/National IT Director of the Year at the 2008 Legal Technology Awards.