Wilson Allen: Measure of measures
Lot of law firm business development activity hasn’t been possible in the past year (all manner of certain events of course). But the goals of the effort that has been worked up to replace it are the same – winning profitable work from new and existing clients, maintaining strong relationships as a predictable source of future work, and preserving hard-won brand recognition over the years.
Firms may also want to see a solid return on BD spend and time spent. However, it appears proof of that might well be one of the hardest prizes of all to net. And the challenge can’t be attributed to the year of Covid-19.
Sadie Baron, chief marketing officer at Reed Smith, highlights the dizzying range of potential success indicators – external barometers of brand, RFP results, PR, web analytics, client feedback scores, and more. “There’s just so much, so how do we make all of that meaningful for management? It’s really hard to make the connections and reliably prove that this event, or that piece of profile-raising, led directly to this introduction, which landed that piece of work.”
Deborah Fleming, marketing and business development director at Walker Morris, adds that some successes, such as revenue and cross-selling growth, are significantly easier to track than others – increased brand awareness, for example – and there’s a judgement call about best use of time. “It’s easy to get dragged into measuring whatever you can, rather than prioritizing what’s most useful,” she explains. “We regularly prepare a report, and find that every time it has grown through a new piece of analytics. We have to remember to keep asking whether new information will lead to doing something differently.”
Sean Twomey, director of marketing and business development at HFW, agrees. “Strategy is as much about what you don’t do, and law firms can really struggle with that idea. Once you understand the growth you want to see, you really need to agree your metrics.” Most interesting and indicative for him, he says, is referral numbers – which are a sign of both cross-firm collaboration and effective client listening.
Lake it or not?
Hogan Lovells global head of business development and strategy, Adam Soames, says his firm has invested in creating an enterprise data repository to help correlate finance, marketing and other data from a variety of systems for greater insight – and now it’s exploring which external data points can help with both client understanding and some predictive modelling. He agrees that complexity can snowball however, and cautions: “You can throw a lot of money at things and get nowhere fast. Focus is key. You need to be selective and work on particular proofs-of-concept in priority areas.”
Mark Parr, global director of IT, also at HFW, says that firms also simply hold onto too much old data. “Keep it if it produces insights by all means, but you shouldn’t need to accommodate data that is 20-years-old. It isn’t providing value.” Firm-wide data strategy and governance is one of his top priorities, he says. “It was most acutely in focus when looking at our journey of migrating to the cloud. We don’t want to take all that data with us.”
On the other hand, sometimes key data to make the right link can be missing. “You have so many data points, and of course it’s a challenge to connect them all,” says Jan Meyer-Berkhout, head of BD and communications at Germany-headquartered Noerr. But humans can also present a problem. “Even where data is ‘good for them’, some lawyers might not like the level of transparency around their work, or not pay enough attention to it. Referrals are great, but you can’t just pull them out of a hat. Somebody needs to record them.” In short, if they aren’t already, lawyers need to be persuaded of the value of having high-quality data in their systems for said data to be entered.
Others suggest that the top obstacle may lie nearer the top – lack of an overarching data strategy as a firm. Robert Smith at Geldards says: “Forget ROI – data first needs to be joined up to be modelled and understood, but you also need a fundamental shift in business model that recognizes it as a strategic asset.” A global IT director adds: “In order to interest lawyers in the bigger picture it also needs to be explained in a very visceral way.”
Cross that bridge
One aspect that many are exploring is the relative strength of cross-selling clients services across the firm. Baron at Reed Smith says success can be measured in several ways – but she agrees with Meyer-Berkhout that the relationship between measurement and behaviors is critical. For example, do firms run the risk of some retrenchment on recent progress toward sharing data and relationships in the fallout from the pandemic? “We have a data-management strategy, highly integrated systems, a single taxonomy set and measurement of relationship strength, but there’s still a risk of people deliberately holding on to relationships and work.” Are they sufficiently incentivized not to do so?
And for all the clear advantages of agile working, Smith at Geldards highlights that our long-term absence from shared office space has potential to reduce sharing behaviors as well. “We’re not bumping into one another in the corridors of course, and there’s also a focus on understanding ‘my day, my dashboard’. You don’t want technology to be driving even more siloed thinking. Perhaps even more than data or technology, I think this is a change management issue.”
Where these levers are effectively handled, Twomey at HFW believes that better measurement of results should also materialize: “If we incentivize and reward the right behaviors, the data ought to follow.”
But Fleming at Walker Morris highlights that data also has a part to play in changing the behaviors: “It’s the age-old problem of lawyers being measured in ways that might now be helpful to the whole. However, we’ve recently calculated that a department’s average revenue increases the more that other areas are sold – and we need to push more data like that out into the business. Law firms don’t do enough of that. Lawyers aren’t shown enough numbers for them to appreciate their value, and it needs to be built into the culture from the beginning of careers.”
In the meantime, Smith at Geldards adds: “Lawyers primarily deal in words, so you also need to think carefully about the way that the data is presented and explained to them for maximum effect.”
Michael Warren, vice president of client development and intake at Wilson Allen, recommends that firms create more solid stories from data points so that positive behaviors can be evangelized. “A statement based on client relationship scoring – such as ‘team-oriented clients produce higher revenues’ – can become a maxim that makes the link in enough people’s minds.
“Crystallize the results, remove some of the noise that is less relevant, but then have the detail ready to back up that you have been through a statistically-robust process. You do also need people to buy into the methodology to buy into the model.”
Incentive to change?
Soames at Hogan Lovells says cross-selling is an important metric, but so is evidence of client engagement. “How can we grow the relationship and where are the gaps? Are the clients happy to introduce us to other people in their business and in the wider market? Client engagement is very measurable. Brand is also critical, but I’m a firm believer that if you get engagement right, this will follow naturally.”
Anecdotally, he says, the Covid-19 period has certainly seen partners prepared to engage more thoroughly with their clients. But there’s a further common challenge to investment in other worthwhile BD projects – a longstanding reluctance to change or innovate when the existing business model has always been so profitable. Even in 2020, law firms have looked very resilient as a group.
“They now need to resist an immediate rush to defer too much change through cost-cutting in the short term, and continue to invest in projects that support longer-term sustainable growth strategies,” he adds.
Twomey agrees: “There will of course be new sets of winners and losers in the coming years. Investments must be strategically-driven, but an overly short-term outlook might see some businesses suffer.”
Finally, on this point, Warren at Wilson Allen also advises that the road to greater insight through business intelligence and analytics needn’t be as expensive as often assumed. “You don’t have to fix everything behind the scenes at once – in all the different systems – to get started. Firms once thought getting business intelligence to lawyers was necessarily a five-year investment project, but there are ways to model more iteratively than that. Making a start, so you have something tangible to show, can help to build the emotional capital for longer-term investment and change.”
This article was taken from Briefing February 2020: Hybrid powers. Read the full magazine here.
