What a Waste. CRM and some other ideas on what to do with all that stuff that s cluttering up your customer database

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1 What a Waste on what to do with all that stuff that s cluttering up your customer database This document presents some simple ideas that I hope will help you manage your practice and your business in a more efficient manner. Essentially, I m hoping to demonstrate some ideas to help you use your IT systems to build marketing campaigns and cross-selling processes that will make your business more efficient and resilient simply by making use of the information you already hold about your clients. These ideas come from over 15 years of hands-on experience working with both solicitors and barristers. At the end of the day, you can have any system in the world, but the output will only be as good as the data you put in and the care you lavish on it as you strive to keep it clean and relevant to your organisation s needs. Mike Sayers Park Lane Plowden August 2009

2 About the Author Mike Sayers is Chambers Director of Park Lane Plowden Chambers. He joined in 2000, having worked for 6 years as a Practice General Manager in a South Yorkshire solicitors practice. Prior to that he was a senior manager with TSB Bank plc. Park Lane Plowden is jointly headed by David Wilby Q.C. and Jeremy Freedman and was formed in October 2007 following the merger of Park Lane Chambers (Leeds) and Plowden Chambers (Newcastle). Both sets were already recognised as two of the leading Chambers on the North Eastern Circuit, with many members having individual testimonials in various guides to the legal profession. With 66 members, Park Lane Plowden is the largest civil and family chambers based on the North Eastern Circuit and has more personal injury and clinical negligence practitioners than any other set in the North of England. The Lawyer, on 4th September 2007, referred to the merger as forming a northern civil and family set powerhouse, and in 2008 Park Lane Plowden was awarded "Personal Injury Chambers of the Year" for a brand new awards scheme aimed at raising standards and recognising excellence within the personal injury sector. (i)

3 Contents About the Author... i What is CRM?... 1 Why do you need CRM?... 1 Why is CRM relevant to YOUR legal practice or chambers?... 1 General Solicitors Practice... 2 Commercial Law Practice and Barristers Chambers... 2 Tesco Law... 2 Implementing CRM CRM Culture and CRM Systems... 4 Challenges... 4 Supplier Selection... 5 Implementation... 5 Go Live and Beyond... 5 What do you do next?... 6 IRIS Legal Solutions The Legal Specialist... 7 (ii)

4 What is CRM? This paper sets out some ideas to help solicitors, barristers and their clerks understand how they can use their soft people skills and a little systems thinking to turn their list of clients into a customer database, and their customer database into extra business that benefits the client and makes more money for the practice or chambers. That client list may be just difficult to manage at the moment, but it could easily become a goldmine and the process that makes that change is called Client Relationship Management or CRM i. Why do you need CRM? Lawyers and barristers are good at law law is after all what they do for a living. Marketing and PR professionals are good at promoting services to potential customers. No-one expects a marketer or PR consultant to know how to manage property conveyancing or to be a defence advocate in a murder trial you get a legal professional to do that. However, since the removal of restrictions over how law firms can advertise themselves, and now the deregulation of legal work the creation of Tesco Law and the subsequent implications on the Bar - it seems that lawyers and chambers need to embrace the dark arts of marketing if they wish to remain commercially competitive let alone to prosper in difficult times. Lawyers are also good with people. Family law solicitors can be brilliant at helping people through the pain of a failed marriage. Probate specialists steer grieving families through often complex issues after the death of a loved one. Personal injury and employment lawyers can restore personal pride and a sense of justice to the wronged. The very nature of specialisation means too many do a great job with one area of a client s life only to let someone else do a great job with a different area usually because the client doesn t realise the firm that has served them so well in one speciality can also do a great job in another area. If yours is a full service law firm do you deliver a full service to your clients? The same is true of the Bar. How many of your chambers regular clients use you for other areas of law? How many know exactly what you specialise in? Are you maximising your revenue potential? This is a simple matter of using the information that you must already possess, which means this aspect of your marketing effort is very cost effective! Why is CRM relevant to YOUR legal practice or chambers? This is best explained by opening the office copy of Yellow Pages and looking for your firm s advert. Chances are that there are several (probably many) other law firms advertising on the same page, and possibly several other pages. Some of these adverts appear more professional than others, so what makes a prospective client select you? Some will be names you have never heard of, some that you are familiar with through your social life, some will be known because they advertise on television. More recently, some will be names that you wouldn t expect such as banks, supermarkets and maybe businesses based abroad. Competition is now a fact of life in the legal professions. Even those firms that have built a reputation on excellent service or by winning a high profile case will only gain commercial benefit if they actively go out and tell their buying public. 1

5 Legal Practices sit on a goldmine of information that is rarely used to best effect. Practice Management and CRM systems can be used to build simple, yet highly effective marketing programmes that deliver quick results and a stream of new cases and clients. More importantly, they can help you identify opportunities amongst the clients you already have. General Solicitors Practice If you are a specialist partner in family law, you have at your disposal the information your colleagues in conveyancing and probate need to sell their complementary services to your client. If you allow that client to find an advert in Yellow Pages for their conveyancing services, or to let their bank propose a new will as part of a financial review before your firm writes to them with details of the other services you offer, then you risk losing valuable business that would have cost just a few pence to secure. A CRM system or module linked to your practice management system would have dealt with this automatically for you. Commercial Law Practice and Barristers Chambers If you are a commercial practice, can you do something as simple as send a mail shot or Christmas cards to your clients? What about after you merge with the practice down the road? Do you hold client data in the same format? How can you de-duplicate the information at contact level? Who is authorised to commission work? CRM is all about having a unified view of clients and everything that everyone in a firm does with that client. It allows you to see which clients are being over-serviced and under-serviced which are the most profitable and, therefore, require the most attention and which are the least profitable. And it allows you to analyse why this is, so you can make decisions and take properly informed action to ensure you maximise on the opportunities they present to you, and minimise on the cost you have to put in to realise those opportunities. For example, corporate clients may be working towards an acquisition-based growth strategy or seeking an exit. You may wish to cement your relationship with clients like this through targeted marketing or corporate hospitality events to help ensure you are considered for the work such as strategy will generate. Equally, if you seem to get only one category of work from a client and not work that fits within the skill sets of other partners in the business, invite them to an event to demonstrate the full breadth of your capabilities. CRM systems will help you find these clients and identify others that you could also invite or contact for similar reasons. For example, why not identify your commercial property clients and invite them to an event to promote mergers & acquisition work, litigation, contract negotiation or employment advice? Or perhaps identify the profile of your most profitable clients and apply this to your prospect database so that you target and attract the most lucrative business. Tesco Law For many legal practices, the most worrying development in years is that of Tesco Law the deregulation of the legal market that allows banks, supermarkets and similar high-street brands to set up Law Factories for matters such as conveyancing and will-writing. Client loyalty and trust will only take you so far and will only generally work for existing clients. Prospective new clients have no such loyalty or trust. To compete, solicitors need to promote the added value of their personalised service versus the commoditised service offered by these organisations. 2

6 Practice management software allows some of these matters to be de-skilled by automating them through work-flow. This minimises cost as work can be done by paralegals and trainees requiring only supervision and authorisation by a senior, much of which was traditionally carried out by a partner. CRM allows you to market this in addition to creating opportunities for your more experienced (and expensive) fee earners to find other opportunities. 3

7 Implementing CRM - CRM Culture and CRM Systems Adopting a CRM system is only the mechanical aspect of CRM. Even more important is the culture because this is what helps the business see opportunities, and what encourages fee-earners and non-fee earners alike to realise those opportunities. Modern legal practices have become increasingly dynamic with complex relationship structures and multiple revenue streams. CRM systems can provide a unified, integrated, single source of knowledge for all business areas, and can therefore deliver significant rewards to both the firm and its clients, helping the organisation to realise its full potential and making it truly work as a coherent operation. It does not necessarily need to be a central, standalone system. Indeed, a practice or chambers management system will have much of the data and the workflow capability that can deliver excellent results within a business that has adopted a CRM culture. Much of what a standalone CRM system can contribute is analysis and reporting that allows the firm to make decisions about marketing activities. Implementing a true CRM culture can be a challenging task but by no means is it unattainable. The firm or chambers can achieve this by identifying the cultural challenges it will face during implementation and the measures it needs to take throughout the project to encourage staff to adopt new processes that will benefit the entire organisation now and in the future. Challenges Developing a CRM culture in a law firm or chambers starts from a thorough review of business processes. This will help you to understand where process reengineering enabled by which technology can deliver what benefits. Looking beyond the current needs is vital, as it helps the organisation to prepare for future changes and growth. In the high street practice environment, staff and fee-earners are typically driven by the needs of individual matters within their speciality and processes to pursue these matters and comply with the time-frames around them. Adopting a CRM approach can help develop processes and workflows that link specialities by prompting recommendations leading to cross-selling opportunities. These can be built into workflows so that clients can receive the recommendation in person during a visit, by letter or . Implementing a CRM approach supported by a new IT system can be a powerful and necessary catalyst for the changes needed to boost a firm s commercial success in an increasingly complex competitive environment. However, change may breed resistance from: fear of the different perceived criticism of current (staff developed) working practices concerns over data ownership and departmentalism Addressing these challenges at an early stage will help the staff to recognise the benefits to them and gain their support and enthusiasm. 4

8 Supplier Selection Staff input in developing a summary of requirements for a new system that supports CRM is fundamental in ensuring that the needs of the key business areas will be met. With the key staff involved (not just fee earners and partners, but everyone who deals with clients), commitment to the cultural change is more achievable. Selecting the right system to provide the foundation for CRM requires not only assessing the product functionality to meet the needs set out in the requirements summary, but also in considering the supplier credentials. A supplier with strong domain expertise and experience in implementing CRM in solicitors general practices, commercial law practices, family law specialist or barristers chambers will make a significant difference not only to the software being delivered, but in the vital areas of consultancy, training and advice providing greater user confidence and decreased project risk. To future-proof your investment you should also look for a supplier who offers integrated applications, hosted systems and professional services. These will allow your business to grow, specialise or diversify as you continue to make your legal practice more competitive. Implementation Any refocusing effort requires the acceptance of change management at the top of the organisation in order to succeed. The implementation of CRM should, therefore, be overseen by a project champion (e.g. a senior partner) who will commit to progressing and promoting the cultural shift, supported by a project team of key users. The benefits of organisational and process change need to be clearly communicated to staff; it is important that the internal project team consistently stays on message and wider expectations regarding timescales, phasing and deliverables are properly managed. Project acceptance can only be achieved if the implications are clear and everyone knows what to expect. It is vital that those who are bound to be the most involved or affected by change should be involved and consulted as to how best to implement it. The sooner an organisation can move from why must we do this? to how can we do this? the smoother the transition will be. Incentives, system training and ongoing support are essential tools to advance the process and maintain momentum. The pace of implementation should also go hand in hand with the pace of change. Phasing the implementation project by key milestones ensures that objectives are met in an agreed timeframe and on budget. More importantly, a staged implementation supports the cultural shift by providing staff with enough time to adjust to changes and grow confident on the new system and processes. Go-Live and Beyond Implementing CRM is by no means completed with the system go live. Maintaining a CRM culture, and ensuring continued return on investment for both the organisation and its stakeholders, requires constant revisiting, revamping and reinforcing to ensure changing business needs are met, to avoid brain drain through staff loss, and to maintain continuity. Establishing an internal user group and including system understanding and usage within staff development plans can be highly effective. Building a long-term partnership with the software supplier is crucial. Participating in client user groups and product testing provide early benefits from new product features and should feed into an upgrade 5

9 path to ensure continued growth and future-proofing. Ongoing training, refresher sessions and consultancy can all be important safeguards in ensuring the organisation and its people continue to realise their full potential into the future. What do you do next? When you have decided to develop a CRM strategy, you need to identify all the business processes involved in creating the activities you wish to develop. From there you can identify the IT and manual systems that manage those processes and then work out what you can automate with your existing software and what you need to either supplement or replace. Do you have IT deployed to manage the right systems? Do you have the right IT systems implemented in the most appropriate way? Do you have over or under capacity in any resource and can you redeploy more appropriately or do you need to invest? Being able to identify processes like this means that you can plan a series of small, incremental changes that could bring about a significant cumulative improvement, or identify an opportunity for a major step change maybe a new IT system to integrate several processes, speed throughput, share information across your business and help improve client service responsiveness. In many instances you will be able to identify these issues and the steps needed to resolve them for yourself. However, sometimes it helps to discuss options with a consultant able to take an objective and external viewpoint wood, trees and all that stuff, and ensuring you get value for your money. 6

10 IRIS Legal Solutions - The Legal Specialist With over 5,500 law firms, barristers chambers and coroners offices, IRIS Legal Solutions is the largest provider of software and services to partnerships in the UK and Ireland. Our aim is to help our customers improve overall partnership performance, specifically cash flow and profitability by providing modern and easy to use tools to improve efficiency through better workflow, to increase income through better use of data and enhance client service through an integrated approach to practice management. Designed exclusively for the legal sector, our software portfolio includes practice and case management (including workflow), electronic forms, customer relationship management (CRM), business intelligence, skills and resource management, document imaging, HR & payroll all underpinned by superior managed and hosted service offerings. With 30 years of experience and 300 specialist staff dedicated to servicing the needs of our legal customers we pride ourselves on a tailored approach to customer service, evidenced by 95% annual customer retention, amongst the highest in our industry. As an organisation, the IRIS values are: Customer focus, Honesty & integrity, Innovation, Passion and Service excellence. For further information on IRIS Software Group and IRIS Law please visit legal@iris.co.uk or call i Note IRIS is a leading provider of sector specific CRM solutions. Our recommended solution for most law firms is the marketing module of our specialist practice management system: the practice management database maintains all the necessary details and transaction records for each customer, the software includes a flexible workflow engine, and the marketing module creates a fully integrated method of reporting and using these facilities without the need to integrate the practice management database with a separate CRM system. This approach may not suit every firm, and our consultants would be happy to advice on the best approach for your requirements. 7