It is not who you know – it is whether you know who knows who.

There are three main topics that arise every time I talk to a top 100 law firm, and they have remained constant for some time. Everyone wants to increase revenue, to beat the competition and to improve their client service. The first two of these are clearly the key to any business, but it’s perhaps the third that is the most intriguing. We all know that it is much easier to keep or build existing business than it is to win new. So why does this area sometimes get less notice than the excitement of winning a completely new client?

If you can improve the way you deal with your client, whether that’s through enhanced legal services or through a better approach to communicating with them, then you stand a better chance of not just keeping them as a client but also of building their business with your firm. What then, is the best way of addressing this challenge – what are the technological answers to making your clients stay with you and grow?

The answer, I believe, is in managing your relationships with clients in the best way you can. Client relationship management (CRM) is now an established part of every major law firm. Systems such as InterAction from LexisNexis have proven themselves to be invaluable tools in capturing and recording
information and contact details about clients and in helping to manage a firm’s interactions with them. Furthermore, electronic marketing tools such as Tikit’s eMarketing solution have enabled firms to manage their communications with their clients, creating real dialogues between the firm and client.
Now, there’s a new game in town that builds on these technologies and offers a new depth of insight for law firms – enterprise relationship management (ERM).

Whereas CRM is a fantastic tool for collating and deploying explicitly stated information such as contact details, records of interactions and client data; what it can never see is the hidden, deeper information about relationships between individuals. Sure, you can keep records of explicit marketing interactions and you can capture information about who’s contact details belong to who, but you can not get a deeper view of who is talking to who and who has the strongest relationship with who. What ERM tools do is to automatically delve into communication systems to extract implicit data about relationships to help you build a better picture of the networks that underlie your firm.

To give an example, Tikit has been working with the firm Contact Networks, who provide a system, ContactNet, which integrates seamlessly into tools such as InterAction and Outlook in order to figure out the nature of relationships between individuals. It looks at things like e-mail traffic, CRM data, Outlook address books and marketing databases and then uses this information to bring to the surface the hidden data that shows where relationships lie in a firm. As well as identifying the existence of a relationship, ContactNet can actually try and deduce the strength of that relationship. So, for example, you can identify which fee earner has the best relationship with a client-side individual – hugely useful for business development activity.

The implications for this sort of technology are huge. While InterAction and Tikit’s eMarketing Solution have always enabled you to identify individuals and target them directly and in a personalised way, tools like ContactNet can take this to the next level. Think about it – you can now make your marketing communications come from an individual who you know has the best relationship with the target recipient. If there’s a potential up-sell opportunity, why not route it through the individual who already has the greatest depth of relationship with the relevant client?

The potential of this type of system becomes even greater when you consider them in conjunction with the capabilities of these other CRM tools. For example, using the profile screen on InterAction, which can give you an up-to-date view of the financials of a deal, the relationship search on ContactNet, showing you which partner knows the relevant firm best, and the ability of Tikit’s eMarketing Solution to understand what a contact has been sent and what they wish to be sent, you can start to build truly personalised, up-to-date and relevant communications.

What ContactNet, in conjunction with existing CRM tools, does is to create a new level of CRM capability built not just on raw data garnered from fee-earners, but also on a hidden level of implicit data that gives a new realm of insight. The benefits of this new CRM combination are not just theoretical. I know of one top 100 law firm, who shall, of course, remain nameless, who lost a £14m+ account simply because of a failure of relationship management. If the right person had been identified to talk to the relevant client at the right time, then millions in future revenues could have been saved. Indeed, using CRM, eMarketing and ERM in conjunction, it could have been possible to actually grow the account – a fact the losing firm surely does not wish to consider!

What CRM, eMarketing and ERM can bring to your firm is a new level of relationship with your clients, which, hopefully, brings a greater appreciation of your brand amongst the people who pay your fees. Any individual likes to feel they are important to their suppliers but also to deal with people they know.
Using the implicit information you can gather from communications between contacts combined with the existing intelligence you have secured in your CRM systems, this new approach to CRM can, in theory, help you to build more lasting, sustainable business relationships with the clients that matter to you.