7 minute read
Closing the Loop on the Client Life Cycle
Client life cycle INTERVIEW
Norm Mullock, VP, Strategy, Wilson Allen, discusses future-proofing the law firm by using client life cycle data more effectively to stay in tune with an ever-changing competitive landscape and customer base.
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Could you tell us a little about yourself and your role at Wilson Allen? I’m a 20-year veteran of technology in the legal and professional services markets, focusing on helping firms make better use of data, especially business intelligence, and integrating operational data flows. Broadly speaking, my role at Wilson Allen is corporate strategy, which gets delivered in a number of different threads to help create tailwinds on the growth of our services and products especially. About the time I joined the company, Wilson began a transition from being primarily a services vendor to focus more on introducing solutions it had developed in-house to the market. Before we speak about “future-proofing the law firm”, are you able to put the challenges faced into context? I believe the number one challenge that professional services firms have when futureproofing themselves, is the increased difficulty in growing. A lot of firms have had to deal with many issues such as having a flat or declining demand curve for legal services, customers taking more and more work in-house, increased rate pressures, and the impact of non-traditional providers like the “Big Four” getting into legal services.
The “Big Four”, for example, are well run, they have lots of resources, very good corporate governance, and have
access to broad customer bases and global networks. Consequently, this means that the average law firm faces a reasonably daunting task to figure out how it’s going to continue to grow. These firms have the opportunity to do that by professionalising their business development approaches, investing more in marketing technology, and by figuring out what it is that they do well to create a real competitive advantage.
Historically, the technical investments into a law firm have centred around either the delivery of legal services or the financial management of the firm – whilst underinvesting in the business development side of things. We believe this is now changing dramatically.
One of the reasons we merged with Stanton Allen is because of a very significant wave of change only just beginning in the industry. Firms are not just investing in business development technology; they’re reorienting the firm to focus heavily on business development and winning new work. You can see that not only on the business development side of things but with the increasing frequency that business development goals are dominating lawyer’s goals.
What can firms do to prepare for today’s changing business landscape? I believe what firms need to focus on is the continuum of the client life cycle. There are a lot of ramifications to the siloed way that some firms manage things. By this, I mean having both siloed data and siloed departments.
To tackle this, the finance and IT parts of the firm need to collaborate more readily on areas surrounding the adoption of enterprise-wide analytics. Though the traditional areas of analysis (e.g., profitability) are vital, bringing the business development and the client feedback pieces into the loop is something that is as yet to be accomplished by most firms.
Business development and marketing tend to operate in a relatively siloed environment. They’re unaware of party relationships identified during intake and of decisions that are being made in intake, so they’re still potentially marketing to people who have been eliminated as potential clients by risk (or should be). Most firms today still haven’t adopted a formal client feedback program, meaning there’s very little understanding of whether or not the firm is pleasing its clients. Yes, the clients are paying the bills, but are you winning their hearts and minds, are you building up a strong lifetime value? Are the experiences that the lawyers had in delivering value to the clients being shared in ways that the business management team could use them? And similarly, are there opportunities to engage further with clients in a timely fashion?
If you think about where where other industries have moved as it relates to client centricity and customer success management, I believe one of the keys to success for the legal industry going forward is adopting those same disciplines.
What are the advantages of closing the loop on data throughout the client life cycle? I believe there are tactical advantages, as well as strategic. The strategic advantage is that you’re going to be better at your business, you’re going to know where to go with your business, what you do particularly well, how to price it, how to deliver it, and so forth. That’s what I would call bigpicture advantages, and they are fairly obvious.
Nevertheless, there are a lot of tactical benefits, too. The reality is that customers expect to have their feedback solicited. So, if you’re not asking them how you did,
you’re already putting your clients off. Your risk team is investing in data sources around things such as corporate-tree relationships, or private equity holding relationships. They’re doing a whole bunch of relationship discovery around the clients to do a risk assessment. The problem is very few firms actually feed that information back to their marketing teams. Therefore, when marketing is figuring out who knows whom, they’re doing discovery work all over again because they don’t have access to the tools or information collected during the risk assessment process.
Knowing what you know now about the industry, how exactly would you advise firms to do things differently going forward? Fundamentally, firms need to have an information governance strategy including master data and data governance, analytics, and data quality. They need to have workflows identified as the authoritative source for information – not have duplicated manual data entry. Firms need to have an MIS strategy that isn’t just about the data in the PMS, or the financial management system, but instead has a view towards the essential elements of measuring performance beyond financial metrics.
It is then the firm’s job to take advantage of some of the technologies, whether it’s things like more agile analytic development or machine learning for spotting data trends and opportunities. I believe it is all of those things that help move the firm faster and faster and into a good position for the future. Nevertheless, it must be emphasised that this can only be done once a firm is able to have an understanding of the current state – and the definition of the future state – for firm data.
How can law firms identify where data exists that can be leveraged elsewhere? Part of it is inward-looking and part is outwardlooking. The inward-looking part is such that you can periodically revisit the different applications you have either in-house or data sets that you’re tackling. You can use some of the tools that have advanced to make playing with the data, doing that discovery, applying some data science, etc., much easier. It used to be that to assess other data systems or silos you’d warrant a sort of “architectural exercise” with your warehousing effort that’s not needed anymore.
You can also engage the market to find out what other people are doing – that can be through a vendor like us, or through your networking with peers. In my experience, firms are pretty happy to share information that relates to foundational infrastructural elements, but perhaps
not the information that ties directly to their business development strategies.
Wilson Allen have announced a number of strategic partnerships – what are you trying to achieve, what are the challenges of remaining agnostic while also doing implementations? Our strategy for partnerships is to go where the market takes us and to focus extensively on making our customers’ technology decisions successful. We have practice management, CRM, and business acceptance resources, and the whole general backoffice workflow side of things is in place. Matter management or case management is really interesting to us. Several technology vendors are looking to us to help them grow their customer base. It’s the inverse of the way that things used to be, where there were fewer technology companies and they were bigger. They had an ecosystem of services providers, and they tended to be reasonably small shops. We’ve now achieved a scale where that’s inverted with firms recognizing the value in a partner who can serve a firm’s entire application ecosystem.
Technology vendors look for services partners that can scale with demand, can be trusted with their customers, and in fact, can help them go to market faster by providing access to an existing customer base. When our customers look to new technology, they expect us to support them. Partners see that as a potential win for them because they won’t have to invest in as large a services team, and they can deliver a consistent experience to their customers.
Norm Mullock VP, Strategy, Wilson Allen
