Law Firm 4.0 Blog

Where are the Dewey partners now - and how is your firm doing recruiting them?

Late yesterday Greg Lambert published a post on the 3 Geeks and a Law Blog called "Visualizing the Dewey & LeBoeuf Implosion." He includes several charts that track where the Dewey lawyers have landed. While the reports of departures have gone on for months, it's handy to see it all in one place - firms can compare their success in recruiting these partners against top competitors.

IBM publishes a free chart tool called "Many Eyes." You can interact with it right on the 3 Geeks blog. Completely worth taking a few minutes to dash over to Greg's post and view it.

 

Brilliant strategy and brilliant execution - are they strange bedfellows?

The CMO Network on LinkedIn has an interesting discussion sparked by the question: What is your opinion on Execution trumps Strategy?...Do you agree?... This is both a rapid and rabid-responding group, and those who have come down hard on the side of strategy (as they slap-slap the faces of the proletariat executioners), suggest that execution won't ever distinguish you if the strategy isn't sound. Fair enough.

As someone who has built a career around designing and executing strategies in the legal industry, I can't imagine execution without the clear, guiding light of strategy. When it comes to technology implementations (websites, experience databases, proposal centers, CRM tools), the reason that these initiatives are under-serving their firm stakeholders is that there is no strategy driving the execution. I wrote about this a few blog posts ago, while quoting Richard Hsu from King & Spalding.

Every initiative worth investing in demands strategy at the outset. If you can't clearly articulate what it is, then don't start your execution - you aren't ready. It will fail. What does failure look like? Scope that can't be defined, budgets that increase at all phases, expectations that won't be met, timelines that extend months or years beyond the original launch date, and dissatisfaction that runs up and down the organization. I have seen this failure side-swipe many careers.

I have also seen "strategy" kill law firms because the firms were ill-advised (i.e., the wrong strategy for the firm) or because the firms didn't have the commitment to execute (i.e., invest in the right people to do the job).

The first law firm for which I served as marketing director from 1987-1992 hired one of the industry's largest legal management firms to develop a strategic plan. More than a million dollars later (in 1991-92 dollars), the firm was completely ill-prepared to survive the recession of the early nineties. How the planners could have missed the economic and competitive indicators pointing to the financial collapse of the real estate and banking industries was astonishing to all of us. I never heard what the strategy was supposed to be because I moved on, but the firm failed two years later.

I also believe that one of the most strategic things marketers and IT professionals can do is brilliantly execute. That's where the results live. I have seen both teams wanting to be defined by how strategic they are, believing that the roll-up-the-sleeves parts of the job are too "blue collar" and that they are somehow a lower-class stepchild of strategy.

Designing a successful execution team is highly strategic. Too often we hire people to fill job openings comprised of job task lists, frequently without fully understanding how their daily work will support broader strategy, or how it will fit into the execution assembly line. The hIring of key law firm positions is often handled so far outside the executive office (and thus removed from firm strategy and goals), firms end up with well-intentioned people who have no idea what they should be doing. They are given orders by supervisors who are also too far removed from the strategic core of the firm. These new hires are doomed to be unhappy because their execution may never measure up. How can it? It isn't supporting strategy.

This goes for the hiring of young associates in corporate law firms as well. They are given discrete tasks to complete without a full understanding of what the client hopes to achieve. What opportunity is driving this research? What problem are we hoping to solve? What horizon issue are we hoping to get out in front of? I think, perhaps naively, that attrition among the young associates would lessen if they understood that the work they were doing was tied to a client's bigger goal or purpose. They could feel a part of something, as opposed to churning hours day after day.

The term "strange bedfellows" was first used in Shakespeare's The Tempest, when, according to Wikipedia, Trinculo crawls under the cloak of a man he believes to be dead to shelter himself from a storm, saying, "Alas, the storm is come again! My best way is to creep under his gaberdine; there is no other shelter hereabouts: misery acquaints a man with strange bed-fellows."

Strange bedfellows is defined as "a strange alliance, often formed between parites who would normally be enemies who have come together for a common, often urgent cause." I posit that brilliant strategy and brilliant execution should be so intertwined that they can't be separated. There should be no choice of one over the other. They are inextricably linked and both fundamentally essential to the success that we want to achieve.

 

Content Pilot's "Velocity" wins IAC Awards - Best Legal Mobile Application

NEWS RELEASE - March 26, 2012

THE 2012 INTERNET ADVERTISING COMPETITION AWARDS (iAC) HONORS CONTENT PILOT'S "VELOCITY"

The first mobile app to drive sales in the legal industry wins "Best Legal Mobile Application"

Dallas, Texas -- Content Pilot LLC announced today that Velocity™, the first mobile application that drives sales for lawyers and other professionals in professional services firms, won “Best Legal Mobile Application” in the 2012 Internet Advertising Competition Awards. The Internet Advertising Competition (IAC) Awards are produced by the Web Marketing Association to “honor excellence in online advertising, recognize the individuals and organizations responsible, and showcase the best in award winning Internet advertising.” In 2011, more than 86 industries were represented in the competition.

Law firms using Velocity have the clear advantage of their lawyers being able to search on their iPhone, BlackBerry, iPad or other mobile device at critical moments in business development discussions. The app intuitively organizes and pulls lawyers’ experience, client, team and other information so lawyers will never again miss critical business development opportunities.

“We are ecstatic that Velocity is getting this broad industry recognition. It cuts through barriers to success that lawyers have in sales and cross-selling, and it is ahead of the curve in terms of where smart phone and tablet technology is headed.” explains Deborah McMurray, CEO and Strategy Architect for Content Pilot and a former law firm chief marketing officer.

The IAC Awards were formally announced today.

About Velocity:

Velocity is patent pending, and is powered by Content Pilot, an industry leader that provides business development and marketing technologies to professional services firms, including proposal
centers, websites, experience databases and more.

About Content Pilot:

Content Pilot LLC (www.contentpilot.net) is a Dallas-headquartered marketing strategy and
technology company launched in 2006 that serves leading law firms and other professional services firms across the U.S. For more information about Velocity: Contact Deborah McMurray at
214.351.9690 or 972.897.4921 by phone or email at mcmurray@contentpilot.net.

The Elephant in the Room: Marketing Technology Trends you can't Afford to Ignore

That's the title of our ILTA/LMA panel at the Legal Marketing Association's pre-conference CMO session tomorrow. (This is the first formal joint venture between LMA and ILTA - the first of many, I hope.) Starting at 11 CT, Kate Cain, the new Director of Market Intelligence at Sidley, will kick off our session as moderator. Panelists are Joe Calve, CMO at Morrison & Foerster; Mark Greene, Chief Business Development Officer at Waller; Bob Robertson, Chief Marketing Officer at Greenberg Traurig; and me.

We had attendees complete a two-minute survey in advance of our session so we could tailor our remarks to their interests. The hottest button issues of this CMO audience are: CRM, experience databases and proposal centers, websites and social media. And we are covering all these topics, sharing trends, then discussing our real-world experiences to make the planning, process and implementations successful. All of us have a business focus - a use-case focus, rather than climbing into the features of the technology tools. We all believe this is where success begins.

If you are interested in receiving a copy of our handouts after tomorrow, please email me at mcmurray@contentpilot.net.

I hope to see you at the conference! (If you are at LMA, please stop by the Content Pilot booth - #316 - and say hi.)

Attorney business development: Here's proof - it's all about face time.

In my last post, I wrote about metrics and reports you can create to get your arms around the value of various forms of attorney business development. My post prompted a phone call from the President of a leading training company, where we discussed digging deeper into these business development metrics.

He has worked with law firm partners and tracked their business development activities and success since 1988. With more than 16,000 data points in his database, his company tracked partners' marketing and business development time (as lawyers reported it) as follows:

1. Creating visibility
2. Gathering market intelligence
3. Face time with clients and prospects in targeted business development activities.

The findings are staggering: Among all the 16,000 partners tracked, the average of all partner face time is only 30 hours per year. The median is 21 hours per year, less than one hour every two weeks. I think if law firm partners realized they were spending so little time face-to-face with clients and prospects, they'd be startled - and perhaps, embarrassed.

The next step, this consultant said, is to "Measure face time as an accounting code by client/prospect and by lawyer." You will be able to track the in-person touchpoints for your clients and prospects, as well as determine how well your partners are doing.

He continues, "There is a direct correlation for those firms that have this as an accounting code to greater revenue growth. Where firms were spending 80% of their time on non-face time activities (numbers 1 and 2 above), it has now shifted to 80% of their time focused face-to-face." He mentioned two firms that have created accounting codes for this, and noted their revenue increases. I hope to interview one or both of them for a future post.

It can also be tied directly to new clients and matters, so the often-elusive return on investment is palpable.

Finally, he said, "This is a trust-based business development model." I like it because it's the most real - the most authentic.

Experience Management - It's been elevated to mission critical.

I have had more than a dozen conversations with AmLaw 100 and 200 firm leaders starting in Q4 2011 and continuing through January 2012.  They identified cross-selling and revenue growth as their top priorities for 2012.

As resolved as they are about that, they also admitted that they aren’t entirely sure how to increase cross-selling success.  After all, lawyers have tried cross-selling since my first in-house legal marketing position in 1987 (and likely before then) – and at its most successful, it has had tepid results.

We all understand the obstacles to cross-selling.  A well-conceived experience database can’t fix all of them, but done right, it can fix these two age-old complaints:  “I can’t cross-sell, because I don’t know what my partners do.”  Or, they say, “I don’t trust the data.”

One more thing on the minds of managing partners that causes them to lose sleep at night: How can they fully integrate the lateral partners they’ve hired over the last year (read: so they can be profitable as quickly as possible)?  In 2011, we saw 60 law firm mergers, up 54% over 2010.  Every one of the partners who changed firms brought Excel spreadsheets and other documents filled with matters they’ve done, hoping their deals and cases would quickly be incorporated into the new law firm’s experience coffers.  This past January, in less than a two-week period of time, five U.S. mergers were announced.  If we keep up this pace, we’ll have more than 130 mergers this year (source: Altman Weil).

In the short lifetime of these experience management tools, they have gone from being an IT-only project, then they moved to the knowledge management team, then on to the marketing/business development department – and now, to the law firm’s executive office. We hope this means that the project teams will get the resources (people, time, technology) to do them right.

Results from the ILTA Experience Management Survey

To prepare for a January 31, 2012 International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) webinar on experience databases (It’s worth listening to the recording of the entire webinar on the ILTA website - with Lisa Simon and Kathrine Cain, it was excellent. ), we conducted a short survey.  We wanted to know:

• Where are firms in their experience database life cycle? Of 48 respondents, 29% were in the implementation stage, 23% were in each of the planning or maintenance phases, 17% were upgrading/replacing their systems, and 8% were still at the very beginning – thinking about it.
• Will they build it or buy one from an outside vendor? 53% said “Buy” and 45% said, “Build.”  The “Buy” group noted primarily two companies as their vendor, Hubbard One and Content Pilot each received seven votes, two other companies were mentioned once or twice, and several said they were still investigating options or “unsure.”
• With what systems will they integrate?  “Financial” had 70% of the responses, with conflicts and records receiving 23% and 30% respectively. “Other” received a high percentage of responses, and included systems such as CRM, website, ERM, proposal tools, document management systems and HR databases.
• Who is the content owner of your experience database?  Marketing and business development were the two largest groups, scoring 77% and 40% respectively. The IT department only received 4% of the votes and knowledge management (KM) received 6%.

Is this a big firm only initiative?  It doesn’t have to be, but 63% of the respondents were in firms 350 lawyers and larger.  37% were in firms 50 to 349 lawyers.

Your Tool is only as Good as the Content

Given the promotion of experience management from back-office-tactical to strategic, what’s the best way to ensure the trusted nature of your content?  One over-arching answer is to start your planning in the right place.  (That sounds like an over-simplification, but we regularly see firms with messes on their hands because of no strategic understanding of the project and its objectives, and ultimately poor planning, start to launch.) Whether a brand new system, a refresh or upgrade, or just adding new practices – start with these questions:

1. What data gathering processes and workflow already exist? 
2. What data are already accessible in documents or other databases? How clean is it?
3. Who will input new matters and how often?
4. How many fields per matter are too many – and therefore a barrier to entry and use?
5. Post-launch, how much lawyer time will be required for each new matter?
6. Who is the ultimate owner of the database and who will ensure the ongoing efficacy of the data?

Knowing the answers to these questions before you start building the tools is imperative to your successful launch and the ongoing vibrancy of your system.  The answers will dictate your strategy and the choices you make.  After launch, it’s often too late.

I can't stress enough that successful technology implementations are equally about people, process and technologies.  Often in experience database projects, strategy is missing entirely, and people and process get short shrift. 

What’s Next?

Given that it’s taken us a good 10-20 years to get where we are today, what’s next?  All the lawyers and marketers to whom I’ve spoken about this agree that for cross-selling success to improve, lawyers must learn to strike while the iron is hot.  Meaning, when lawyers are with clients and prospects at a conference, at lunch or having a drink, or riding together in a cab and the prospect asks, “Do you have anyone who does XYZ in the software industry?” – the lawyer must be able to facilitate a relevant conversation around that topic.  Right then and there. 

Waiting 24-48 hours for responses to the in-office email, “Does anyone handle XYZ in the software industry?” is not going to grow firm revenue.  The opportunity is long-gone.

Therefore, trusted mobility is next.  Look for a mobile app that integrates with your experience database and that is instantly accessible on your Smart Phone or tablet.  Clients and prospects think this is cool; consequently lawyers will think it’s cool, too.  Learn more about Content Pilot’s mobile app, Velocity™.

I also predict greater investment in these tools by law firms (in people, processes and technologies), and that there will be increased pressure from the top rung of leadership for lawyers to use them.  Hopefully daily.

How would you transform the legal industry?

Ayelette Robinson, Director of Knowledge Technology at Littler Mendelson, did a guest post on the 3 Geeks and a Law Blog a couple days ago asking, "How would you transform the legal industry?"  It got me thinking and I thought I'd carry her idea to my blog and pose it to all of you before you start your weekend. 

Here is her original question and my comment on her post. 

How Would You Transform the Legal Industry?

What resource (technological or not) would you invent to transform the legal industry?

This question isn't about what you think will transform the industry, but rather what you would, if you were all-powerful, create to do so.

Share your thoughts. And don't just step outside the box, get so far away from it that you can barely see it with a telescope.

And here's what I think:

How would I transform the legal industry? At some of the toniest restaurants, the kitchens are entirely open and visible. Patrons see all the chefs scurrying about at a dizzying pace, can peer across some specially designed barrier and watch all sorts of food prep, from searing tuna to whipping foam to garnishing a plate.

We have talked around transparency the last few years - buyers of legal services clamor for it. I envision a law firm set up like this kitchen - an entirely open environment, where clients enter the law firm space, work side by side with their lawyers, share resources, experience and intelligence.  Technology projects, at their heart, would be about openness and collaboration.

Everything in today's law firm would require rethinking - not the least of which is the architecture and office design. No more private offices for individuals. This isn't about throwing privacy and confidentiality out the window - it's about balancing transparency and privacy to better serve our clients.

Please share your ideas!

3 Geeks review our cross-selling mobile app, Velocity

In an ILTA hosted webinar yesterday about experience databases, Kathrine Cain (Winston & Strawn), Lisa Simon (Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck) and I spoke about our own experiences implementing experience databases.  As I mentioned in my introduction and observations, this is one of the hottest topics proliferating law firms today - and not just the IT or marketing department, but the executive suite and your managing partners' offices.

Firm leaders are clamoring to improve cross-selling and grow revenue.  And make lateral integration more successful.

I'll write more of a program recap in a day or two (and will alert you when ILTA posts a recording of the webinar on its site), but in my concluding "What's Next" remarks, I mention this:

All the lawyers and marketers to whom I've spoken agree that for cross-selling to improve, lawyers must learn to strike while the iron is hot.  Meaning, when lawyers are at a conference, having lunch or a drink, or riding in a cab with a client or prospect, and the client asks, "Do you have anyone who does <fill in the blank> in the ________ industry?"--the lawyer must be able to facilitate a spontaneous conversation around that topic.  Right then and there. 

Trusted mobility is next. 

Content Pilot has created Velocity, a mobile app that integrates with your experience database to do exactly this.  Read the review on the 3 Geeks and a Law Blog.

For more information, please email me at mcmurray@contentpilot.net

 

Experience databases: If you build it, will they come?

For many AmLaw 100 and 200 law firms, experience management is one of the most important stated initiatives for 2012.  Knowing what your partners do and knowing how to easily sort, parse and leverage this data is a top priority for managing partners, law firm chairs and executive committees.  If you want to learn more about the focus shift of these projects from the IT department to your firm leaders' agenda, you must register for this program. 

ILTA, the International Legal Technology Assocciation, is hosting a webinar Tuesday, January 31, 2012 called, "Experience Databases and Management:  If you Build it, (How) will they Come?"   It's free to all who want to dial in, because my company, Content Pilot is sponsoring it. 

Cheryl Disch, Senior Manager, Marketing Information Systems at Duane Morris is the program organizer, and our panelists include Katherine (Kate) Cain, Manager of Business Intelligence, Winston & Strawn, and Lisa Simon, Chief Marketing Officer, Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck.  I am the moderator. 

To prepare for the webinar, and to tailor our discussion to the interests of our audience, we are conducting a short Zoomerang survey.  If you are reading this and you haven't completed the survey, please do so -- I'll report on the survey results during the webinar and in my next blog post.  It won't take longer than 3 minutes - I promise. 

http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/WEB22EJEYC7Z7K/

During our webinar, we will discuss the technology and systems - whether to build or buy, and what Winston and Brownstein's integration strategy is.  In addition, you'll hear best practices for strategy, planning and the implementation of these critical tools so you can ensure success in your firm.  They will also answer the question, "If you could start over and do one thing differently, what would that be?"

Register for this free webinar:  http://www.iltanet.org/MainMenuCategory/Meetings/Webinars/WEB-PS-013112-828337.html

 

 

The best description of "strategy" I've read in years

I am having lunch today with the "3 Geeks and a Law Blog" trio - Lisa Salazar, Toby Brown and Greg Lambert.  To prep, I am climbing into their award-winning blog of the same name and came across this description in a post by Greg.

He's talking about another blogger at his firm, King & Spalding, Richard C. Hsu, who writes his own blog, "The One Page Blog."

As the set up to this great strategy description by Hsu, Lambert writes this:

Richard discusses his thoughts behind why he is blogging in the section of his blog titled "Lawyer's Confessions" where he admits that, although he is a super techie (CalTech grad and experienced programmer), he has found himself somehow "out of touch" with the new generation's mode of communications. He reminds us that, despite our experiences, there seems to always come a day when someone younger comes in and makes us understand that in order to "get with it" we'll need to climb outside our own comfort zones. For Hsu, that meant playing to the strengths that comes with age/experience, and that is understanding strategy.  He says it best in his explanation of technology and technology strategy:

And here is what Hsu writes:

On the other hand, technology strategy is not technology.  It is strategy.  And strategy’s half-life is more like plutonium:  what worked a thousand years ago works today, and will work in a thousand years....  Invest in understanding strategy now, and you will understand it just as well — probably even better [in the future.]

It's true!  Law firms too often assume strategy discussions (and strategic planning) are a necessary evil, led by expensive consultants who leave you with nothing more than a weighty document that isn't actionable. 

And strategy is almost non-existent in most major tech project implementations in law firms - from websites to proposal centers, experience databases, mobile apps, client extranets, intranets, CRM, KM and more.  Every technology initiative in your law firm should have a clear strategy component.  It's the strategy that will drive goals, objectives and measurements of success.

True, some consultants do leave you with fat stacks of paper. But if firms viewed strategy as a combination of vision, ideas and business transparency - and then took fear out of it, these planning sessions would be infused with hope and life. And your tech project implementation would be successful, and your internal and external teams accountable for meeting your stated goals.

And, like Hsu says, strategy has a shelf-life like plutonium - or the last Twinkie you ingested.