Mastering Relationship Intelligence is the Key to Exceeding Your Legal Client Expectations

Fiona Jackson
May 29,2024

Services providers in the legal sector are often accused of being too focused on offering what they want to offer – as opposed to genuinely understanding their clients' needs and then devising products to help meet those requirements.

So, what do clients want? Simplistic as it may sound, I believe that there is broad agreement that at a minimum, clients expect their law firms to deliver relevant, efficient, and timely value-added advice to help them solve their business problems. 

Undoubtedly, some firms do better than others – but from working with many law firms in my capacity as Client Advisor, I find that there is one fundamental reason that prevent firms from providing the superior client service that their clients desire – it’s understanding the strength of relationships. 

Clients value law firms when lawyers maintain involvement across the relationship lifecycle to proactively offer guidance to help mitigate future business challenges. When firms are able to do this, they are seen as of “value” by clients.

Furthermore, clients want their legal advisors to demonstrate a deep understanding of their business challenges, of course, but at the same time also appreciate the broader arena and landscape they operate within so that the advice given is within context.

CRM for Relationship Intelligence

The good news is that firms can easily deliver against such expectations by utilising their CRM systems more effectively for relationship management.

Despite operating in a global business environment, frequently departments, practice groups and business units in law firms work in siloes – this may be due to cultural reasons, different approaches to business operation and even on account of the varied technology systems that are in use. There may be regulatory issues too that may force siloed working – data protection legislation is an example. 

To learn how LexisNexis^® InterAction+^™ helps law offices find, win and keep business, click here.

A CRM platform can facilitate a global, strategic approach to relationship management – whilst accommodating regional business requirements. A relationship-based CRM system that is deployed across jurisdictions can enable law firms to deliver joined up business advice to clients. Here’s a scenario: a GC of a Norwegian oil and gas company is overseeing an investment in a company in the UAE. The law firm undertaking the corporate finance related work for this new deal – on interrogating the CRM system – finds that the wider organisation can also support the GC in related legal areas such as employment and contract, cross border transactions, regulatory compliance due diligence, and so on, to ensure smooth and complete closure of the deal.

Today, best practice CRM systems provide relationship insight that can be leveraged to better meet client expectations. The advanced data visualisation and business intelligence capabilities that these technologies offer can enable firms to undertake routine “horizon scanning”, proactively initiating discussions and providing advice for commercial situations that may occur in the future. Firms that do this would convincingly demonstrate that they are working two steps ahead to help mitigate business risk – clients will most certainly see the firm’s value.

Routinely too, relationship intelligence can be valuable to lawyers. Merely by looking at a client contact’s information in the CRM system, a lawyer can have visibility of who else in the firm knows the individual, the level of engagement the firm has had with the client in question, new ventures the client organisation is exploring, uncover hidden relationships, and such.

Leveraging Legal Relationship Intelligence

A lawyer preparing to meet a prospect can interrogate the CRM system to understand the complexity of relationship intelligence, which is comprised of connections between the individual, the organisation, expertise and experience – from anywhere, on any device and at any time. Furthermore, CRM systems provide seamless access to information between interfaces too. A lawyer researching a prospect on the internet can have visibility of the relationship-related data residing in the CRM system – without the need to leave the browser environment. So, in effect, the lawyer as part of the initial information gathering exercise can have combined insight (external and internal) on the prospect, prior to the meeting.

The engagement scores in CRM systems also serve as great insight for Strategic Key Account Management and Key Client Initiatives. Data insight can be used to track business goals, fine-tune programmes and even undertake cross-functional planning, locally and across regions. The same data could help determine reasons for the firm’s poor performance in a business development context. The system might highlight that due to poor engagement with certain clients, the firm enjoys limited success in onboarding new matters even though it is a panel firm for those corporates.

Firms can use the insight to also ‘listen’ to clients, and improve the experience that clients have in dealing with the organisation. The way clients engage with the firm’s communication can help drive future development of content and thought leadership.

In essence, CRM is the glue that can bring together relationships, content, communications, processes, and service offerings – all of which contribute to delivering the best experience possible to clients. 

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Fiona Jackson Client Advisor, InterAction+ Fiona Jackson has spent over 15 years implementing and working with InterAction in professional services firms, including legal and accountancy. In these in-house roles, supported by InterAction, she managed marketing communications, devised and implemented business development strategies as well as trained and mentored fee earners. She worked closely with internal clients to understand their business processes end-to end and guided them in utilising the 'intelligence' gathered via InterAction to help them be successful at customer relationship management. Fiona was previously a Client Advisor for five years at LexisNexis Enterprise Solutions; and was often described as "an extension to our business" by her clients. She has now returned to the company to drive an InterAction ‘repositioning’ project for a large London law firm. Fiona is also working with other firms to help them align CRM to wider business development strategies. She specialises in strategic and tactical CRM best practice, and as an expert in devising user adoption strategies, her experience in rolling out and repositioning InterAction as a business tool is proving invaluable to clients. Fiona is mother to two teenagers, who keep her firmly on her toes. Living in Hertfordshire, she loves walking, is often found obsessing over the latest box set and enjoys all that country pubs have to offer. She also has a spectacular Gin collection of her own. Recently, Fiona has discovered a love for cooking – the varying degrees of success hasn’t stopped her from continuing to giving it a go!