Client relationship management (CRM) systems have achieved ubiquity
in F1000 firms, but their usefulness, and even their feasibility, in
law firms has been, shall we say, less certain.
systems are designed to capture, in one central and widely available
database, all contact information about a client and their interaction
with the firm: Think of a sort of super-Microsoft Outlook "contact"
entry which is updated in real time with information about who has spoken
to the client about what, who’s working on what, the client’s particular
areas of interest, what email distribution lists they’re on, etc. If,
like everyone else in the country, you’ve phoned your credit card (800)
number and dutifully punched in your sixteen-digit account number after
the automated prompts, only to end up speaking with a human being who
does not have your account information in front of them, you have been
party to a dysfunctional CRM system.]
Now, Legal
Week has surveyed adoption of and attitudes toward
CRM in leading UK firms, with both predictable and somewhat surprising
results. But before assessing the value of a CRM deployment,
what are the obstacles to installing or maintaining it in the first
place. They are, to state the obvious, both technical and cultural:
- Data entered into the system must be "clean;" it is not a matter
of aggregating everybody’s Contacts list and dumping it on to a server. - Data must be maintained; if it takes associates (never mind partners,
who are truly key to the system’s success) more than a few minutes
a day to tend to the care and feeding of the system, it will atrophy. - "Confidentiality" of client data is a critical obstacle in many
cases: "You want me to share what with
the entire firm about my key clients?!" There is a technological
response to this (levels of permissions for sensitive data) and a cultural
response—once the benefits of a robust system are apparent, reluctance
to contribute to the system’s power will diminish.
Sharing information—and a CRM system is, at bottom, just a species
of knowledge management, so it is all about sharing information—is
the ur-obstacle. Sharing what you know about, say, structuring
project finance deals may seem to pose a risk of diluting your expertise
by spreading it across the firm, but sharing what you know about your
key client may seem to pose a risk to your livelihood.
Surprisingly, the survey found that a stunning 59% of respondents were
"not at all concerned" that information about client contacts would be
abused. Yet more telling is that a vanishingly small 3% of clients
complained of an unwanted contact from a firm.
This last statistic is, to my mind, the ball-game. 97% of clients,
in other words, welcomed (or did not have reason to object to) every
"touch-point" from their law firm. What other industry
could match that number?
We know from survey after survey after survey that clients’ biggest
single gripe about their law firms is that the firms do not truly understand
the client’s business. If CRM gives you a fighting chance of knowing
what’s top-of-mind for your client, knowing who down the hall (or around
the globe) has spoken to them about that lately, and can lay out the
opportunity for you to reach out to them, why on earth would your firm not do
it?
Unfortunately, I have my own theory: Far too many lawyers, even
now, are allergic to the reality that they have to fundamentally compete on
service, client focus, and demonstrating pointed and astute, distinctive,
business-centric expertise. To those of this mindset, a "CRM system"
sounds like a pox created by demented MBA’s clueless about the noble
profession of the law.
If serving your clients with perspicacity,
timeliness, and total-firm awareness is a noble goal (and it is), CRM’s
time has come.
