TLOMA Today

As the temperatures drop and snow threatens to fly, I cannot tell a lie, November has arrived. It is time to pull out the cozy sweaters and book an appointment to put the snow tires on your car. Whether we are ready or not, winter comes each and every year; that you can count on. This reminds me of the importance of planning and a line I always remember from a lunch and learn we did on time management; “failing to plan is planning to fail”. To turn this into a positive, I would say; “when you take time to plan you are planning to succeed”.

Planning is truly one of the keys to success and achieving results for both you and your firm.  Good plans are written down, they include the end goal, what progress looks like, leaves room for flexibility, identifies decisions that need to be made, uncovers hurdles and obstacles, and identifies key stakeholders and deliverables.  Let’s face it, creating a plan, working the plan and seeing success just feels good.  We all deserve to engage in an activity like that.

The TLOMA Board and team have excellent planning systems in place; we set our actions and objectives and have monitored and measured every step of the way.  Later this month we will have the association’s annual strategic planning meeting where we will move forward items that are ongoing and set new actions and objectives for 2020.  If you have ever wondered how we achieve that, I thought I would let give you a peek behind the curtain if you have never been a part of that process.

Each year the Board, Executive Director and Committee Chairs prepare Year End Reports.  These reports, along with the membership survey results we received this year, thank you to all who completed it, will be used to drive decisions and actions and to create strategic actions for the upcoming year and beyond.  We will also spend time reviewing the 2019 budget comparing to actuals in order to measure our success on meeting our targets.  We will also engage in a preliminary discussion on the 2020 budget.  There will be more to share with you soon.

The membership task force is currently in the process of creating an Executive Summary for you which will be provided in the December issue of our newsletter.

Another aspect of planning TLOMA engages in is finding volunteers to fill various roles, the Nominating Committee has done an amazing job this year filling all of the roles for 2020 and beyond.  Thank you to the 2020 Nominating Committee for your hard work and efforts, you have worked tirelessly since the Spring finding the perfect candidates.  The slate will be circulated to the membership shortly to initiate the voting process.  If you are interested in volunteering with TLOMA, it is never too late.  Please send me an email, pharris@oatleyvigmond.com.  I would love to speak with you about my personal experiences and roles that will become available.

In your personal plan, don’t forget to include attending our Special Interest Group meetings this month.  There is a Facilities SIG Roundtable event on Friday, November 15 and a Finance SIG event on Tuesday, November 26.  The website will be updated soon and please watch your inbox for further event details and registration.

Have you planned to attend the annual Holiday Networking event? Wait, you haven’t.  STOP what you are doing and register now. I will wait. Theme from Jeopardy plays in your head.  Okay, now that you have done that, I promise you will love this year’s event at The OMNI King Edward Hotel, such a beautiful location, full of warmth and history, fantastic food and of course, outstanding company of your TLOMA peers.

I would like to take a moment to appreciate our event sponsor Thomson Reuters; without your support these events for our members would not be possible; Thank You. A reminder that TLOMA will be supporting Fight to End Cancer cause and if any of the members are interested in donating please use this “link” to make a Donation.

It’s said that wars are won by strategy and battles are won by tactics. If that’s the case, then uncertainty around upcoming international political events—Canada’s federal election, Brexit, the 2020 U.S. election and forecasts for a financially soft 2020 worldwide—may be among the factors that spur discontented clients to force change upon traditional law firms that currently serve them or leave them high and dry.

Best to be prepared strategically. Better yet, employ a proven and rarely used tactic that builds trust and loyalty, and brings in new work: client service interviews.

Glance Back

Unless you've been living under a rock, you’ll be aware that in 2008 demand for legal services fell dramatically along with productivity and profits for most traditional law firms. Demand has been relatively flat ever since.

On the flip side, the in-house crowd has been bulking up internal resources—people and systems along with expectations—while the continuing proliferation of alternative providers ranging from small startups to international behemoths are causing the global legal services market to heave like the dance floor of a nightclub at midnight.

The study, Alternative Legal Service Providers 2019: Fast Growth, Expanding Use and Increasing Opportunity was published recently by Thomson Reuters Legal Executive Institute, The Center on Ethics and the Legal Profession at Georgetown Law, Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford and U.K. research firm, Acritas.

It found that the growth rate for alternative legal service providers is exceeding expectations. Currently, alternative providers account for $10.7 billion of the market for legal services, which is a compounded annual growth rate of almost 13 per cent compared to two years ago. Furthermore, 25 per cent of corporate users expect to increase their spending on alternative providers this year alone.

Regardless of how they’re defined, alternative service providers are not a trend; they’re a major factor in how the world conducts legal business.

Here and Now

While many traditional law firms are reacting to the increase in legal service competition and client expectations, others remain inert. For firms determined to remain solvent and vital, the criteria are what they’ve always been: client engagement based on personal service and genuine care.

Client engagement starts with active listening. This is when two ears and one mouth used proportionally are critical to legal service delivery excellence. And, really, there is no reason why any law firm worth its salt should be coming up short in this respect. However, there seems to be a chronic hitch in the giddy up.

Historically, client service interviews have been non-starters, at least in North America. In 2009, Canadian Lawyer’s general counsel survey found that 72 per cent of respondents had not been asked by their top law firms to participate in a client satisfaction survey. And over the last 10 years, these findings have gotten worse.

A recent Canadian Lawyer annual corporate counsel survey found that 87.8 per cent of large companies asked were not surveyed by their law firms. This finding is echoed by the 2019 Managing Partner Forum survey of 167 U.S. law firm leaders, which revealed that 77 per cent do not systematically measure client satisfaction in any way. However, 85 per cent said marketing and business development was their firm's top priority.

This disconnect and continuing point of failure is not lost on clients who confirm that their law firms aren’t listening to them, don’t ask for input, appear not to be improving service levels, aren’t innovating in ways that benefit clients directly, and all in all, aren’t adapting to the new reality.

Is it any wonder that when law firms chose to turn a deaf ear, clients move more work in-house or seek other solutions?

Focus Forward

At its core, client care is human-oriented and low-to-no tech. It’s a cycle of listening, clarifying, and responding—the same traits that nurture any relationship, whether personal or professional. Automation, robotics, do-it-yourself fill-in forms or other technical functions are not particularly helpful and, frankly, they can be harmful. This is because when client care is demoted to a technical function with no human interaction, relationships can be damaged due to asking a client to provide feedback alone and often without full context.

It’s long past time for law firm leaders to ensure that they have a solid, institutional process for listening to and collaborating directly with clients.

Sophisticated law firms have been doing this in one form or another for the past 10 to 15 years. In comparison, the Big Four professional services firms have had client interview processes in place for over 30 years. Their interview teams do quantitative reviews of a client’s service on a regular basis while one-on-one qualitative conversations often happen yearly with the firm’s biggest and most valuable clients.

While quantitative measures can be helpful, feedback through conversation instills a greater sense of partnership and collaboration, enables a deeper understanding of what clients value, and can reveal untapped opportunities.

Disengagement and Engagement

When employed strategically, client service interviews can also enable a firm to learn which services are most valued and need to be grown along with those that should be downplayed or mothballed. As a growth strategy, these kinds of results can help a firm reposition to a more profitable market, right-size service offerings and teams, and/or ease the departure of unprofitable or troublesome clients.

Getting lean opens capacity to deepen relationships with current clients and take on more of their work plus attract new clients with work that sits squarely in your expertise wheelhouse. The results are positive and bountiful: higher market profile, better expertise strength, stronger brand recognition, tightly targeted growth, supportive clients and trusted relationships.

As we head into uncertain times, it’s inevitable that there will be skirmishes and perhaps more than a few battles. But by determining your strategy and tactics now—and following through on execution while having clients you want onside—you’ll be much better positioned to win the war.

This article first appeared in Canadian Lawyer, September 2019.

Most professionals agree that thought leadership is an effective form of marketing. It helps you get known publically for your expertise, the research required helps with personal development and publishing articles helps other people find experts which can lead to new files and additional marketing opportunities.

However, does the value of thought leadership differ based on your practice and target audience?

The basic premise of thought leadership is to provide free and thoughtful insight in areas you practice and is of most importance to your audience. The concept is simple and has been discussed at length. For example, a corporate tax lawyer creates content on tax laws that CEOs/CFOs are interested in. The audience is specific, the content is written in a manner that is easily consumable and provides guidance or answers to, “what to do in case you come up against this problem….”

But what if your audience can be easily defined but not easily found. For example if you are a litigation lawyer who helps individuals that have been harmed, your audience could theoretically be anyone in the province which you are licensed. Writing content for an audience of millions will be more difficult and may not resonate the same way as our corporate tax lawyers’ content. There is value in the litigation lawyer’s content but its value requires a different measurement. The audience may not necessarily be looking nor care for a thought leader in the traditional sense.

With all thought leadership pieces, starting with a real problem will draw in potential readers, providing a solution to the problem will keep readers around and help you develop your platform. When your audience is unknown, how the information is shared becomes increasingly important. Including a great deal of legal information, citations, etc. will not interest a broad audience in the same way it is for a defined small audience. You need to present the problem in a different manner, pose questions that will attract readers while providing enough detail so that you come across as knowledgeable. Using a lot of legal language will not be engaging to the broad audience.

So the answer is yes, thought leaders are relevant to all practices and all audiences. There is value. If your audience is difficult to define, make sure the content is easy to digest and searched by potential clients. The more defined the audience, the deeper you can go with the content and developing your platform. The expectation in both cases is your in-depth understanding of the problem and solutions.

Customer Relationship Management systems have the potential to give firms a huge competitive advantage – but all too often they don’t because the data being entered is partial, patchy or out of date. Firms have a lot to gain if they can raise the consistency and quality of data entry, argues Adam Michie. The trick lies in utilising software that makes it a painless process.

It’s all too easy for CRM systems to get a bad name with lawyers. And when that happens it can trigger a vicious cycle. After all, lawyers are being asked to take time out of their busy days to input data into the CRM system. They may do so diligently and regularly at first – only to find that their colleagues aren’t doing the same. And as soon as a lawyer gets embarrassed by not spelling the client’s name correctly; or not knowing there’s a new CEO; or not knowing the precise status of a potential client’s relationship with the firm the inaccurate or out-of-date information in the CRM discredits the whole system in their eyes.

It is at this point that a lawyer may decide, on some level, not to be so diligent any more. Not to waste time on a CRM system that’s giving limited value back. And so the vicious circle begins. As fewer and fewer lawyers put accurate, current and comprehensive data into the system, the quality of the information it generates begins to degrade. Over time the system becomes less and less useful.

It’s tempting at this point to just give up on the whole thing as a bad idea. But don’t – for two good reasons. One is that the potential value that a CRM can deliver has never been so high. The second is that it’s now much easier to get data into the system without causing pain to lawyers.

Why CRM matters so much

I’m not making it up when I say that the biggest challenge faced by firms in relation to CRM systems is getting people – and by that I particularly mean lawyers – to enter data. Recent research [1] shows that:

• 88% of CRM users admit to entering incomplete contact information
• 69% of firms have out-of-date information in their CRM
• 63% have duplicate contacts in the CRM
• 62% of CRM users admit to not logging all activities

The problem is that this makes CRM systems weak. And that’s an important problem and one that prevents many firms even starting to implement such a system.

Right now, as you know, the legal arena has never been more competitive. New business models are emerging; more and more firms are getting eaten alive in consolidations; clients increasingly don’t like hourly fees; and they’ve never been more discerning, cost-sensitive and disloyal.

At the same time, because of the world we live in, a firm’s reputation matters more than ever. It plays an increasingly large part in why potential clients choose one firm over another. And reputations aren’t based on what firms says about themselves, but rather on what their clients say about the firm. Clients therefore need more love than ever, so firms need to get better at nurturing client relationships. QED: Customer Relationship Management systems matter more now than they ever have.

Why quality counts

What’s more, I have to emphasise that it matters how good a CRM system is. A poorly performing CRM is a positive hazard. It cost you money to buy and install it in the first place. Potentially it will continue to cost you money if people are wasting their time entering data that no one looks at or trusts. Needless to add, contacting clients with flawed, inaccurate data could be disastrous to the client relationship and ultimately very costly indeed.

Conversely, a high-performing CRM delivers all kinds of benefits. People can find reliable contact details and client information quickly because they trust what they have to hand on the system. And the firm will always be more efficient if client data is consolidated.

At the same time, it makes a difference if you’re getting people’s names and job titles right, and are able to contact the right people, at the right moment in the sales cycle, with the right offer. You can be sensitive to who they are and what they care about. You can demonstrate better internal collaboration on key accounts. You can more easily make “warm” as opposed to stone cold introductions. From the client’s, or the potential client’s perspective, your firm looks coordinated, sharp and in control. It all enables the firm to generate new business more cost effectively and quickly. And to keep track of current clients, understand their pain points and act to ensure they’re retained.

With so much to gain from a strong CRM system, and so much to lose from a weak one – it’s an area firms really should tackle. The good news is that they can make their CRMs much more effective and valuable in two steps without even having to change system. This is how.

Taking care of attitude

The success of a CRM system hinges partly on the system, partly on people’s attitude to the system and partly on what can be done to make the system work more effectively for all concerned. Assuming you already have a system in place, and that there are no radical modifications you can make to its usability at this point, let’s leave that one alone.

As for people’s attitude towards the system – this is to do with the culture within the firm and the training and support people get with using the CRM. A way forward on culture is to communicate a clear understanding of the value of the CRM. Of course lawyers need to earn revenue in the here and now. But they also need to be clear about the importance of investing time in ensuring future work. In other words, if you never look to the horizon, the danger is that you walk off a cliff. Firms need to make sure that inductions, on-going training and regular communications set clear goals as to how the CRM is used, and a clear rationale as to why it matters.

Letting technology take the strain

That is not to say that technology doesn’t play a huge part. At Tikit we focus our offerings around four ecosystems. An ecosystem is an integrated suite of software, consisting of Tikit own products together with selected partner offerings, which work efficiently together to support key processes within a law firm. Our Marketing and Business Development Ecosystem has been constructed to eliminate some of the key challenges that traditionally prevent CRM being fully adopted.

One of the important ways we achieve this is to leverage technology to simply remove the need to manually enter data. The bonus here is that it not only saves time, it also eliminates the errors that can creep in when it’s up to humans to do the keying. This starts right at the beginning of the process with initial data capture. The solution scans interactions through Outlook, including emails, contacts and calendars. When it picks up a mention of a contact that is not in the CRM system, it will research the contact to present as complete a record as possible and send the user an email asking for permission to synchronise the data into the CRM system. All the CRM user or lawyer has to do is click to accept the new data. It constitutes an extraordinarily painless way to update client and contact records in the CRM. And because of its sheer simplicity it ensures that the CRM is much better informed and up to date than before.

Similarly, from the marketing side, data flows seamlessly between the CRM database and the e-marketing activity to allow full exposure of activity against the contact record. Lawyers can see who has received a mailing, opened it, read an article, been invited to an event, accepted an invitation and whether they actually attended.

The aim of the system is that every crumb of information is captured, building a comprehensive, accurate and current view of the contact. Further, the system proactively feeds this information to the lawyer just when they need it. The system can see from a lawyer’s calendar when they have a meeting scheduled, and can automatically prepare and send an email briefing on that client a day before the meeting. The briefing can contain pretty much any information held about the client in any system – this can include recent marketing activity, recent meetings, who else in the firm knows the contact, billing information and news from external sources.

Better still, after the meeting has happened it sends an email asking for an update. The lawyer simply replies to the email and the update makes its way automatically into the CRM.

The lesson is that firms should neither abandon nor despair of a CRM system which isn’t performing at its optimum potential because it lacks good, accurate, up-to-date data. The introduction of a data entry system will not only claw back the time that lawyers and others spend on updating the current system (quite a significant amount of time, by the way). It can also radically improve the depth and quality of data that the CRM system has to work with. This can make a real difference to the firm’s client knowledge, and it can stop lawyers hating CRM.

For more information on the subject please join us for a free webinar on December 12: 
https://www.tikit.com/news-events/tloma-webinar-circle-of-trust-contact-management-best-practices/