FEATURE

Deciphering the Chatter That Matters
Listening Platforms Provide Insight Into Clients, Prospects and Industry Trends

By Stuart Goodman

For business development professionals in larger law firms – or attorneys charged with the business development function – the challenge in staying informed about client, practice, and industry developments is rarely a lack of information sources. More often, it’s the lack of information organization that makes it difficult to synthesize legal news and industry market forces and extract the implications for a law firm’s client service and business development initiatives.

“We work hard to track developments about our clients, our prospects, our competitors and even our own attorneys,” said Kate Stoddard, Practice Development Manager at Kelley Drye & Warren LLP. “The challenge has been distilling all information out there so that we can act on what's important in a timely way. There certainly are information gathering tools available, like Google Alerts (which can be set up to perform daily searches on pre-defined criteria). But an application like that might send you several emails an hour, and reviewing alerts for different terms/clients/competitors independently can be time consuming.”

“I was working on a report not long ago, researching a new general counsel at a prospective client,” said Elizabeth Bevins, Competitive Intelligence Manager in the Client Relations Department at Perkins Coie. “I looked at LinkedIn and the company’s website, trying to get a sense of what he’d done in his career. I then did searches on what law firms he’d retained at past employers, including law firms that were hired to handle litigation that had been filed against one of his past employers while he was there. I also tried to review any news I could locate on his new company regarding new business initiatives or potential lawsuits. After reviewing as many sources that seemed relevant, I condensed relevant information into a report. A busy attorney can’t wade through 500 pages of research, so I aim to keep reports to five pages or less. Even with Google Alerts, there are still many searches I must conduct manually on a given client or competitive intelligence topic—not to mention a vast amount of search results I have to review to find salient information.”

"Faegre & Benson prides itself on its client focus," said Adam Severson, who until recently served as the firm’s Director of Business Development and Marketing. (In 2012, he joined Baker Donelson as Chief Marketing & Business Development Officer.)  “The firm is always looking for new ways to stay on top of what’s going on in its client’s businesses. One of the challenges that’s been faced is trying to keep up with chatter in the marketplace so the firm can brief clients and respond in a proactive manner. For this reason, the firm is always looking for tools that make it smarter and more efficient.”

SUB: Aggregating Client Intelligence in One Place

Listening platforms (sometimes called “listening tools”) pose a solution for business development professionals trying to make sense of client developments and competitive intelligence. Listening platforms, as defined in a recent Forrester white paper, are “technology and analytics infrastructures that mine and analyze social media (and other informational sources) to deliver insights essential to making informed marketing and business decisions.” Several tools, such as Nielsen Net Ratings or Radian6, have emerged to serve corporate America’s social intelligence needs. While quite adequate for consumer facing brands, these platforms are not well-suited for the very specific needs of the legal profession.

The good news is, several tools developed specifically for law firms have emerged in the last year. These listening platforms help legal professionals to stay updated on client, practice and industry developments while also keeping abreast of competitive intelligence. Users set up parameters about what clients, industries, and practice areas they want to follow; the application searches and analyzes legal and industry-specific news sources, blogs, Twitter feeds and other social media, and delivers only results that are relevant to the legal and business professional, categorized in a manner that places that information in a clear context.  Where marketing and business development staff once needed to track down important and relevant information proactively, the information now essentially finds them. A number of firms are now using listening platforms to generate:

• Client Insight - Uncover important information about existing and prospective clients, revealing opportunities and risks
• Competitive Analysis - Helps benchmark competition at the firm, practice, and attorney level
• Brand Intelligence - Gives attorneys, practice groups, and firms visibility into their online presence and share of voice
• Practice & Industry Perspective - Helps legal professionals to understand topics, trends and developments within their practice and industry sectors

“Listening platforms pose a new product category for the legal marketplace,” Adam Severson continued. “Before this category emerged, the firm had been using a variety of products to provide trending information. These services provide lots of historical information going back three to five years. If you dig in, there’s good data there, but there’s less about what’s happening right now. The listening platform provides real-time, actionable information in a manner that’s easily digestible. The platform gives you many ways to filter content that shows up in search results, and cull out the information that matters in its proper context. For example, Faegre & Benson work for a large corporation that’s affiliated with a branded event venue. Every day there are communications going out regarding concerts or sport events at the venue that have nothing to do with the corporation’s business activities. It’s very easy to set up a “tracker” in the listening platform that ignores mentions concerning the event center and instead hones in on mentions regarding the client’s business units that are relevant to firm activities. My staff can quickly review this client intelligence and forward key items along to lawyers in salient practice groups.”

“We’ve been using our listening platform in a number of ways,” said Kate Stoddard from Kelley Drye . “We monitor news about current clients, track our media mentions, research prospects and stay up-to-speed on news and developments for our various practice areas. It’s nice to come into the office in the morning, click into my dashboard, and see news highlights for all of my various areas of focus and quickly drill down to the details about issues of particular interest. The attorneys appreciate when I email them with a nugget of information gleaned from the platform that may impact their clients.” Ms. Stoddard provided a recent example: “We began representing a new client in a product safety claims investigation by a government regulator, and we created a tracker for the company in the listening platform. A few weeks later, the platform alerted us of a press release issued by a plaintiff law firm announcing their investigation of our client and other companies in its industry, in preparation for bringing a consumer class action law suit. Within moments, it was in the lead attorney’s inbox. I can say with some certainty that I would not have seen that news had it not been for the listening platform.”

Elizabeth Bevins from Perkins Coie believes that the listening platform has already improved her team’s efficiency in preparing competitive intelligence. “One of its great appeals is that it aggregates all the salient information about both clients and competitors in one place,” she said. “I no longer have to do ten different searches to find the intelligence I’m trying to gather. I can sort and view it according to client or industry group. It’s made it much easier to monitor clients on a daily basis—both what’s being said about them in the news and what individuals are writing in blogs, on Twitter and in other social media.”

“Before this technology came along, the business development team simply didn’t have the resources to do the sort of client analysis we can do now,” added Adam Severson. “It was too time consuming. As the competitive landscape is ever-increasing, finding new ways to stay abreast of developments that might impact clients – like listening platforms– will become even more necessary.”

Stuart N Goodman, J.D. is Counsel, Senior Vice President of Sales and Channel Partnerships for Manzama (www.manzama.com), which provides the first Listening Platform designed exclusively for legal professionals. Email him at stuart@manzama.com.