Jul

How Can Technology Win Business?

Recently I came across the question: “How can IT/ Technology innovation help a firm win business?”

I would instead reframe the question as: “How can a firm define its knowledge management and litigation/transactional processes, then support them with technology innovation?” Spending on technology tools without a clear idea of exactly how they will be plugged into your biggest intellectual assets – the knowledge and processes you use to perform superior to the competition – will not result in a good return on investment. In fact, poor use of technology tools, no matter how innovative they are, can actually result in a negative result, compromising productivity.

Having spent years as in-house counsel at a Fortune 500 company, the client perspective is that we are under tremendous pressure to get our hands around our outside counsel budgets. At the same time, we often face pressure from corporate procurement departments who want to take over our management of outside legal services. A law firm can assert a leadership role here in business development by taking large clients by the hand into the world of legal services strategic sourcing.

This approach means that the client relationship focuses on supply management: defining the best in class performance for a law firm, driving out the waste and inefficiency that makes the cost and time lines of legal projects difficult to predict, and using flat fee arrangements (with protections to provide a comfort zone for the firm) to achieve budget certainty and overall annual savings for similar services. Once you’ve taken this approach by defining your knowledge management and processes, technology tools can be extremely effective in driving the highest level of productivity among your people so that the firm can reduce hours expended on a project and make an alternative fee arrangement highly profitable.

The failure of knowledge management professionals in most law firms is to closely align their work with business development, which is the lifeblood of any firm. In all my years as in-house counsel, only one firm ever touted their knowledge management capability, supporting technology, and alternative fee arrangements. That firm captured all of our real estate legal services needs.

Also, bear in mind that technology tools do not have to be expensive. Even using word processor macros (which are already built into the word processing software you already have) can result in a tremendous increase in productivity via document creation. Low cost “software as a service” tools exist as well and are offered at a fraction of the cost of traditional enterprise software.

In sum, the first challenge is placing someone in a leadership role to define processes and knowledge management from a business development perspective, the second challenge is finding the most cost effective, high quality technology tools to support that approach.