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SONOMA, Calif. — As law firm marketing and business development professionals gathered late last month to discuss an array of challenges and opportunities facing their industry — on everything from talent to technology — one factor seemed to seep into many of the discussions: Data, and more specifically, how law firms should be using it to engage clients and pitch the firm’s offerings.

“The key question — not just for marketing purposes, but for law firms’ overall success — is what is your firm’s data strategy? What is its structure?” asked one panelist at the recent Thomson Reuters Institute’s 32nd annual Marketing Partner Forum, held in late-January. “How best can your firm cut through the clutter and getting to what your clients really want to talk about.”

Indeed, panelists went through numerous impactful ways that law firms can leverage their internal data to refine their marketing strategies, including by collecting and analyzing information about past and current clients and identifying common characteristics among them, which could enable more personalized marketing campaigns and engagement. Firms can also build out case studies and success stories using their own internal data that can be highlighted on the firm’s website, shared on social media, or used directly in client proposals.

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Also, running the data on firms’ performance metrics around various marketing campaigns — determining such key indicators as email open rates, website traffic, and conversion rates — which can help optimize future campaigns for better results. Overall, panelists discussed how by effectively using their own internal data in these ways, law firms can create more targeted, efficient, and impactful marketing campaigns that attract and retain clients, enhance the firm’s reputation, and ultimately drive growth.

“Even those law firms that don’t have a lot of time or money can still get insight and value out of analyzing their data,” one panelist said.

Understanding what you have in your data

Ideally, this requires marketing professionals to look at their firm’s data more holistically, before deciding what client-centric data could be used to help lawyers in writing pitches and engaging with clients, several panelists explained. “The best data is that which gets looked at and understood,” offered one panelist, adding, however, that many law firms simply aren’t there yet. “Clearly, so many firms are still struggling with the use of their own data,” the panelist noted. “It is daunting — however, data will take you farther down the road than you would have gotten with index cards in a recipe box.”

Several panelists described their own experiences with trying to wrestle their firm’s data into a structure that could be leveraged to provide marketing and business development professionals — and by extension, the firm’s lawyers — with the insights and understanding to more effectively pitch work or write the kind of proposals that will get clients’ attention.

“The best data is that which gets looked at and understood... Yet so many firms are still struggling with the use of their own data."

“We looked at our data overall and saw what worked and what didn’t work,” another panelist explained, adding that this data included the RFPs the firm won, the ones it didn’t, the business mandates it received, and the situations in which it lost out to other law firms or legal service providers. “And once we looked at the data we had, we had to figure out what we should do with it. There were a lot of expectations and challenges right off the bat.”

Very quickly, however, once a firm is involved in the data retrieval and analysis process, other questions rise to the surface. “You need to draw up a roadmap for innovation,” a panelist explained. “And that means taking inventory of the data you have, no matter what form it is in, and then examining who within the firm uses what and how it’s being used.”

For example, using data for client mapping can reveal key touchpoints and areas where clients may drop off, become disengaged from the firm, or worse yet, take their business elsewhere. By leveraging internal data, panelists said, the insights gained can be used to enhance the client experience, from initial contact to matter resolution, and ensure a smoother and ultimately more satisfying process.

Getting the data in front of people

Of course, one of the primary ways to make all this work is collaboration among the parts of a law firm that touches the data as it makes its way to utilization. “The key to collaboration is that you all have to speak the same language — those that collect the data, own the data, and ultimately use the data. And there is a lot to do to make kind of collaboration happen.”

Yet, firms that undertake this process can see benefits immediately. “We needed to create a plan that would keep our data strategy in front of people,” explained another panelist. “And one thing we found right away was that we could cut down on the number of meetings we had by using more actionable data that team members could follow up on.”

While clearly, an AI-driven examination of the characteristics of successful work pitches, for example, could be quite useful, one panelist explained that their firm saw almost right away that it had too few professionals who could analyze this data in that way. “We saw that data cannot be a side-project, rather there has to be someone in a role that manages it, whether that’s within the practice innovation team or somewhere else, someone has to own this data,” the panelist said.

“The need to solve for the disconnect between data that offers insights and those business development professionals who may be uncomfortable bringing this to lawyers is crucially important."

To solve this problem, many law firms make the mistake of simply creating data positions often using those existing team members who may be more data-inclined; but it’s actually more important to bring on a data specialist — whether internally or through outsourcing — because someone has to have the knowledge and skill to interpret the data and guide against any misuse.

Then, panelists explained, comes perhaps the most difficult, yet potentially rewarding, challenge: Once you have identified and collected the data and used it to identify critical insights, you have to make sure the firm’s lawyers will accept and use what you’ve found.

“The need to solve for the disconnect between data that offers insights and those business development professionals who may be uncomfortable bringing this to lawyers is crucially important, as is making sure your lawyers have a way to discuss these insights and opportunities with clients,” another panelist offered. “All of this has to be brought through, ultimately to sales, for the use of your firm’s data to be considered a success.”

And as advanced AI-driven tech evolves, it will become more important for lawyers to have the skills to use this tech themselves, which will allow them to see first-hand the interactions, the engagement, and the opportunities. “That will be the ultimate test — when lawyers are using these data-driven insights themselves to improve their clients’ experience, that’s the win.”

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