The quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/230349
This approach has several shortcomings: • It relies on past activity rather than current developments to hone strategies — even though current information is available (despite the inherent challenges in making sense of it). • It ignores the potential of microstrategies, an approach to business development/sales that's been gaining rapid acceptance among corporate entities and hinges on being able to harvest and mine very specific real-time data in a meaningful way. By getting clear and current insights into various industry sectors and even specific customer targets, an entity can fashion both its product offering and its positioning/messaging to meet the needs of very targeted customer groups. In this alternative model, sales might combine very large databases of internal and external data, including demographics, social media chatter and competitive intensity. In-house experts would analyze the data, with updates occurring on a monthly, weekly or even daily basis. Sales coverage is segmented across dozens (if not hundreds) of micro markets, and resources are deployed according to future projections. Performance is assessed relative to the opportunities presented within the micro markets. This new model based on intensive analysis and incisive reporting is attractive indeed. It takes the ungainly behemoth of big data and transforms it into an opportunity. The linchpin of the whole approach is the gathering and sensible dissemination of the data that's at the core of this strategy — that is, turning big, unstructured, out-of-control data into targeted, meaningful, actionable information that's relevant to each stakeholder in the organization. 48 Peer to Peer This is no small task. According to a recent study conducted by the Harvard Business Review, fewer than 44 percent of employees say they know where to find information they need for their dayto-day duties. Further, half of all employees find information made available from corporate sources is in an unusable format. BRINGING STRUCTURE TO THE UNSTRUCTURED For several years, law firms have been aware of the need to monitor the Internet — not just news sources, but also LinkedIn, blogs and a host of other corporate-created content — to uncover developments regarding client activities, industry trends and the practice of law. Not surprisingly, business development and marketing personnel frequently were the first to explore the possibilities of deep data mining; this information would be invaluable for creating RFPs and giving client teams a deeper understanding of their clients and their industries. Early efforts to do so focused on the use of news aggregators — for example, Google Alerts — to gather actionable intelligence. These generally fell short. "In Google Alerts, we plugged in more than 100 clients, prospects, practice areas and legislative initiatives that had potential to impact our clients," said Jason Miller, Director of Marketing and Business Development for Ryan Swanson, a fullservice service firm in Seattle. "Most of the material that Google identified, 95 percent or so, was of little or no use. Every now and then we'd get something of worth, but it would take a lot of our time to sort through so many alerts, sometimes 150 in a single day, to get to a meaningful insight." At Mayer Brown, a more sophisticated news aggregation tool was used to gather business intelligence. "We'd use the aggregator to isolate news and other media alerts every morning for each of our 80 client teams," explained Elizabeth Kennedy, the firm's Director of Strategic Business Development Support. "The results the aggregator returned were so broad that we'd have to employ three or four contractors to sort through all the search results to find the five to 10 items that were truly relevant for the client teams. Without that human touch, the results were of little use." These examples underscore the idea that information without a meaningful structure poses little value. News aggregators lack the filtering mechanisms to generate content that's on-point, and nearly as important, that's relevant for the specific needs of individuals within the organization. A business development manager needs to stay abreast of activities pertaining to the clients under her purview, and that data are quite different from those of a knowledge management specialist gathering information for, say, the firm's weekly securities litigation newsletter. ONE SOLUTION: LISTENING PLATFORMS Listening platforms (also called "listening tools") pose a solution for law firms trying to make sense of client developments and