A timely piece of research that we developed with My Customer Lens and delivered using their AI supported feedback agggregation platform to give law firms a fresh, big picture view of how client intelligence and relationships have evolved, but also practical insights to prepare effectively for the next steps.

Understanding the changed perceptions and expectations of clients, prospects and partners provides insight that ensures you have got your priorities right on strategy and plans on all fronts - technology, service propositions, pricing, communication, skills ... and much more.

153 page report from the University of Oxford based on extensive research.  In addition to defining and exploring "Innovation and legal technology adoption" (p.14), there is useful information and interesting segmentation of the legal services market.  "PeopleLaw vs BigLaw" (p.44) and different activities and implementation of technology. 

Are you paying / being paid above or below the market rate for for roles as permanent employees and contractors?

This FREE report from our partners Crimson includes, for example, bands for IT jobs in the UK,.  Also, key insights into the impact of Covid-19 on the IT sector, identifying in-demand ksills, roles and projects, with spend up.

For good measure, we include the 2016, 2017 and 2019 reports too.

A series of 3 articles introducing the new drivers and approach to "Client Listening" for law firms in 2021.  Use Zoom and Teams for video calls.  Automate the capture and evaluation of feedback from multiple sources to provide real time data to share and work with.

An  82-page report reviewing the current state of play and outlook for development  of AI solutions in the services sector, with a focus on Legal, Insurance and Accountancy.

"Innovation in the LegalTech segment in the UK remains more focused on efficiencies and automation than on delivering ‘new types of law’ with innovation being less disruptive than other types of technology. This is also reflected in the solutions of LegalTech companies identified for this study. In contrast to the insurance segment, few were currently developing, or had developed, technologies aimed at disrupting the legal sector. Instead, innovation is focused on delivering products and services that help law firms undertake their activities." [p. 34]

Law firm Lupton Fawcett invested in relationship intelligence to generate more business from existing  relationships with clients and introducers, realising a 350% return on investment.

Deploying Introhive across 450 + seats (lawyers and partners) enabled them to:

• Reduce admin time in CRM (contact / activity sync)
• Increase data quality and quantity in their database
• De-risk CRM deployment / greater usage and adoption

As a leading commercial law firm, Lupton Fawcett sought a solution that was easy to implement to automat the capture, enrichment and sharing of client relationship information across the practice.  Traditionally, these are the key obstacles to effective adoption of pro-active Client Relationship Management (CRM).

Learn how Lupton Fawcett delivered the following results within the first year of deploying Introhive:

• 220% increase in CRM contact data accuracy
• 675+ hours saved by automating pre-meeting research
• 22,000+ total contacts enriched more accurate data within CRM

This survey report uncovers the most common types of attacks during "work from home" 2020, which exposed more businesses to cyber attacks - and the monitoring tools that have been put in place to try to manage them.

To understand more about the future of Cyber Security, Crimson and threat intelligence specialists, Cyjax developed a nationwide Cyber Security survey to share insights amongst the technology community.    Survey respondents included CIOs, CISOs, IT Directors and other C-level representatives from a range of sectors.

Key findings explored here:

• 62 percent of respondents said they experienced a rise in attacks
• Cyber Security has climbed the priority ladder by around 44 percent during 2020 and is now a more visible risk; 
• The impact of COVID-19 on Cyber Security strategies adopted during 2020.
• How IT departments can bolster their Cyber Security strategy during 2021and going forwards.

If you would like advice on your plans, you can book a free 30-minute appointment with Frank Manning at Inpractice from the link top right on this website.

Allan Carton reviews 3 topical business development initiatives in law firms where client listening should be playing more of a role.  Engaging more deeply with clients would help to produce a better return on time and money invested - and more tangible results to help get more lawyers on board.

The challenge of delivering better value to clients has never been more critical.  Clients define what represents “value” for them – not their lawyers.  Lawyers focused on business clients but failing to hear what these clients are telling them will soon be left behind and likely to become less competitive as others ramp up new initiatives based on a more enlightened understanding of their clients.  

If you are working with or targeting work from in-house counsel and legal departments, it would be worth sharing these findings with your management team.   

A sound basis to help set the agenda for continuing development of your practice. We would welcome the opportunity to explore potential initiatives to respond to this with you.

"The vast majority of law firms (88.3%) reported that they now receive "Outside Counsel Guidelines" (OCGs) from clients but law firms do not have the processes, staffing or technology to properly manage them."

198 law firms took part in the US based survey that led to this report in October 2019, but it is valuable information to inform your plans on building  and managing your relationships with in-house counsel and legal departments in the UK.

OCGs tend to cover:

• Process & procedures such as conflicts, case assessment, status reporting and staffing
• Policies and policy management including security and cybersecurity, general compliance and confidentiality
• Client billing guidelines, including fees, expenses, invoing procedures and appeals.

When you make a will for a client, what do you do for the EXECUTORS who are likely to be amongst your best prospects as new clients - as, probably, the closest friends, family or colleagues of your client?

Could you do more to bring them closer, with longer term business development in mind?  

You can download our free  template letter for executors below - to be sent ONLY with express consent of your client, the will maker.

When you make a will for any client – but only with your client’s consent, which most give easily if asked as this is good for them - send something useful and tangible with your logo and name on it to their executors  (a good, helpful factsheet, leaflet or FAQ's about their role etc) when the will is complete, inviting them (the executor) to get in touch? 

These executors are likely to be amongst your best prospects to become new clients for any private client services as best friends, family and colleagues of your new client.

The objectives are to:

a) Add value for your client by providing useful information to the executors, if your client agrees that would be good.

b) Make the executors aware of and comforable with you, to prompt them to think of your practice for their will or conveyancing or when they start their job as executor - or anything else as they are amongst your firm’s best prospects as new clients … if they are not clients already?

To do this, prompt yourself and your team to ask the clients and keep a record of that. 

Howard Kennedy Increases User Adoption of CRM & Grows the Firm’s Marketing Database by 400% 

Learn how Howard Kennedy's 200+ lawyers used Introhive to centralise and clean the firm's database across disparate tools and spreadsheets to deliver a 400% increase in contacts for business development and marketing campaigns.

Deployed across 300 seats  (lawyers and partners), Howard Kennedy has benefited from:

• Effortless meeting prep (time savings)
• Passive, automated data collection on behalf of lawyers
• Faster (GDPR compliant) database growth for marketing campaigns
• Higher data quality for business development
• Improved accuracy and completeness of the information in CRM

Case study highlights include:

• How to automate client information and meeting activities into OnePlace CRM
• Discover insights into "who knows who" across attorneys to accelerate business development
• Deliver Key Account reports to partner and lawyers with deep relationship intelligence
• Drastic reduction in time spent manually entering data into CRM.

This white paper explains how basic security controls can protect organisations from the most common cyber attacks.  It will help you understand what a common cyber attack looks like and explains why all legal practices should establish basic security controls and processes, to protect themselves from such attacks.

It can be read alongside the recently updated 10 Steps to Cyber Security (see below), which offers more comprehensive guidance on the practical steps organisations can take to improve the security of their networks and the information carried on them.

Following the path to Cyber Essentials Plus accreditation provides the assurance that you have these areas covered.

In 2018, Wilson Legal Solutions formally merged with Stanton Allen, uniting their software and services businesses. It was imperative they quickly bring together disparate data sets to understand the collective relationships they have with their clients and prospects.

However, the joint business was using two different instances of Salesforce CRM, so this information was hidden and difficult to extract. Introhive provided Wilson Allen with a simple way to identify, score, and map business-wide relationships, all in one instance of CRM, to accelerate their cross-sell opportunities.

Learn how Wilson Allen delivered the following results within the first 120 days of using Introhive:

• 584% return on investment from cost savings
• Accelerated the company's successful CRM merger
• Delivered greater insights into company-wide relationships to drive cross-selling opportunities

As a result of deploying Introhive across 100 seats, the merged business has been able to:

• Clean and combine contact data in preparation for a CRM migration
• Map business-wide relationships with clients and prospective clients post merger
• Gauge the strength of business relationships to find quick wins across the software and services sides of the business
• Use pre-meeting digests that save time and increase meeting readiness
• Enabled the merged company to identify and close cross-selling opportunities more efficiently.
• Identify and pro-actively develop relationships conversations taking place across all areas of the merged business

Defining and communicating your  Information Risk Regime is central to the overall cyber security strategy for your practice. The National Cyber Security Centre recommends you review this regime – together with the nine associated security areas described below, in order to protect your practice against the majority of cyber attacks. 

Following the path to Cyber Essentials Plus accreditation provides the assurance that you have these areas covered.

Here we outline how we recommend that a smaller to medium-sized legal practice should think about and plan any new initiative to replace or upgrade legal technology, thinking primarily about practice and case management systems.

Key steps to follow, how best to get started, your approach to suppliers, compiling the RFP, key challenges to pre-empt, the critical role of an IT Steering Group and other key considerations. 

Find out here how the performance of your practice compares with others and explore components of the operation of your practice where changes can be made that are likely to improve performance.  We include a variety of current reports, with some dating back, so you can evaluate longer term trends.

Businesses do much more to protect themselves from cyber threats AFTER they have suffered an incident.  An opportunity for your business to learn from them before it happens to you?

Download and share this comprehensive, insightful, 55-page government survey and report covering:

• awareness and attitudes towards cyber security
• approaches to cyber security, including estimates of spending by organisations
• the nature and impact (including estimated costs) of cyber security breaches
• differences by size, sector and geographic location.

More than £11 million of client money was stolen from law firms  by cyber criminals between 2016-17.   In the last year, 60% of law firms reported an information security incident- an increase of almost 20% from the previous 12 months.

Lawyers need to be more pro-active to protect their own and their clients' money from cyber crimes.  There are some very revealing examples here of real-life incidents that have occurred ... in UK law firms like yours.

This objective, independent repor from the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), focused on law firms, outlines clear and actionable guidance to follow, such as how to defend your practice against phishing, reduce the risk of malware infection and take effective control of your supply chain. 

Engage your people and clients to improve and innovate to make your practice more competitive.  Whether or not you decide to apply for formal accreditation to the Customer Service Excellence standard, you can usefully use it to focus your plans to improve how your practice consistently focuses on the needs of clients.   This comprehensive framework defines the component parts of service delivery from understanding what different clients value to benchmarking routine constant improvements. 

Could this help you improve your business?   To explore how this could work for you, just call Allan Carton on 07779 653105.

A presentation to the Law Management Section’s Finance & Business Conference.  We highlight how Cloud applications are widely used routinely but with limited control of users, which creates cyber breach risks.  Also, the opportunities to do more in the Cloud.  But cyber threats inhibit innovation, so lawyers should be working harder now to deal with cyber risks - to be able to make the most of opportunities.

This 99-page report on extensive research carried out for the LSB  identifies the opportunities that solicitors are currently missing out on in this sector.  It also points at some of the ways in which lawyers prepared to develop more focused and attractive services for SMEs can target new business more effectively ... with the right strategy, services and support.

This was research we carried out for the Legal Software Suppliers Association (LSSA), looking at business development initiatives that innovative solicitors were introducing back then; also exploring what might develop over the next 10 years.  Although it includes an IT survey, the research and conclusions focused on business initiatives.  Interesting to see now how they developed ... or not.