1. EMPLOYING BUSINESS
ANALYTICS
to achieve better sales
results for your legal firm
TOTAL BUSINESS
VISIBILITY
WHITEPAPER
INTRODUCTION
Business generation and customer acquisition is changing within the
legal sector as newer providers enter the market, offering services at
much lower rates. Even supermarkets are now starting to deliver
transactional legal services, putting pressure on firms to transition
their businesses into being well-oiled commercial operations;
complete with marketing and sales functions. This is drastically
different to the traditional customer acquisition process generally
employed by legal firms where business generation relied on repeat
orders built on long-term relationships with clients.
Fast forward to 2015 and legal firms are today putting sales and
business development at the centre of day to day operations – with
many partners focused purely on generating new business for their
fee earners.
And information sits at the centre of this change – providing
opportunity in a challenged market. A Dun & Bradstreet (2013) report
cited better management information being key to helping spot trends
for business generation. Recent research conducted by C24 found that
87% of legal firms were mainly motivated to investigate business
intelligence solutions so that they could achieve better visibility of sales
and business development information.
Reasons for achieving better sales visibility ranged from aiding with
general business growth, better client retention and sales success
probability planning; showing that business development is high on the
agenda for many legal firms and analytics plays an important role in
achieving sales success.
WHY IS THE LEGAL MARKET IN THIS POSITION?
Many legal firms have found themselves in a highly competitive market
as newer entrants enter the sector offering volume, transactional
services at lower costs. This is difficult for traditional legal firms to
respond to overnight as it requires a complete overhaul of systems,
processes and job roles to compete effectively.
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2. A report from RBS (2014) on the legal market showed
that in recent years, high street firms have seen
traditional sources of income from services such as
legal-aid funded clients and conveyancing reduce by
over 50 per cent. The report also outlined worrying
results: that nearly 31% of law firms are at risk of
financial failure in the coming year due to pressure
created by competition from new volume market
entrants. Alternative business structure (ABS) law
firms such as Direct Line who are predominantly an
insurance firm and KPMG from an accountancy
background are able to offer lower cost legal services
by relying on larger teams of support staff to
complete the majority of work – compared with
staffing structures in a traditional legal firm where
high-cost fee earners take on the majority of a
client’s work.
This calls for restructuring across a legal business’
processes but also its infrastructure; from the law
firms interviewed by C24 the vast majority cited an
inability to pursue better analytics for business
generation due to legacy infrastructure and a
complex mix of multiple applications and reporting
systems that made it difficult to collate information
together.
THE CONSUMER MARKET
– sales analytics in a volume-
focused business
Legal firms are approaching customer acquisition in
different ways and one of the methods gaining
popularity is social media. Attorney at Work (2015)
conducted a survey across legal firms and found that
of the 91% of lawyers that use social media, 60%
identified social media as playing a part in their
marketing strategy. 39% perceived LinkedIn as the
most effective customer acquisition tool in terms of
social media, but when considering ROI of social
media marketing, only 4% rated social media as
being “very responsible” for acquiring new clients.
Whilst social media alone may not be a method for
client acquisition, what is clear is that many firms are
relying on it to collect information about their
customers or to promote their own businesses to
prospects. The next step is to make this information
useful and valuable so that it can form part of the
customer acquisition strategy and help with making
decisions and devising plans for business generation.
Being able to effectively collate this information and
make it relevant and integrated into day to day
business operations is a challenge for many firms
whose systems are not yet integrated or where
business intelligence tools are not yet able to unify
external information with the internally collected data.
Analytics deployed across a legal firm can help with
providing sales teams with a more accurate view of
customers and an awareness of their clients’ buying
behaviour. Using analytics to collect information
about how your customers engage with your firm
(this could be any interaction point such as website,
phone calls, meetings, social media), how often they
engage, the types of services they typically purchase
and the client’s demographics – enables the forward-
thinking legal organisation to turn this incoming
information around and transform it into outward
facing marketing for better business generation.
For example, a firm may notice that, over time,
younger customers tend to first engage on social
media, then through the firm’s website and finally
download a service overview PDF before they take the
decision whether to call the firm and speak to a
partner directly. This information would normally
exist within a firm, but may not be collected together
to create a customer lifecycle, from which marketers
can develop a plan on how to engage those clients.
The plan may be that as soon as someone follows
them on social media, a message is sent to them
asking if they would like to connect further via a
phone call to discuss their legal services in more
detail. Without analytics, a firm would not be able to
measure whether this would be an effective approach
or a relevant activity for their customer base. With
analytics, organisations can see whether, over time,
the proposal of a call early on in the prospect’s
engagement results in better success rates and more
client calls.
Employing Business Analytics to Achieve Better Sales Results for Your Legal Firm – C24 Ltd | 2015

3. Outside of general marketing and business
generation activities, there is much more pressure on
consumer-focused firms to be more agile and cost-
effective in their service delivery to compete with
ABS firms who are capitalising on their size and
scale to deliver low-cost services. This means it is
more important than ever for traditional firms to
understand their customers and have a clear
awareness of what their clients want and how much
they expect to pay for that service so that the firm
can align their business to suit.
Once the customer has been acquired by a firm, it is
critical that organisations are able to retain clients
through the effective management of a volume
customer base. Managing an existing client base of
tens of thousands of clients is very different to
managing hundreds of corporate clients – so analytics
can play a crucial role in helping with client retention
by tracking customer behaviour and enabling sales
teams to take action before losing a client.
The legal sector can look to certain universities for
their innovative way of tracking student behaviour to
take action based on behavioural triggers (such as
absence from a certain number of lectures, social
media negative commentary etc.) to engage with
students to aid with study concerns or discourage
students from dropping out of their university
programmes.
Analytics can support the law firm in spotting these
trends to enable action – moving analytics away
from being purely a reporting and information-
providing service to a solution that promotes and
directs immediate action. This ensures that analytics
demonstrates a tangible ROI and provides a ‘next
step’ rather than just being a collection of data.
THE CORPORATE CLIENT AND
ENTERPRISE ACCOUNT
MANAGEMENT
Social media within the corporate legal world is also
employed for firms looking to win larger, enterprise
clients over typically longer sales cycles.
A recent report from the RAIN Group (n.d.)
highlighted the RAIN Group Strategic Account
Management Process which separated the enterprise
sales process into a number of key stages. In the
Research Stage, data was highlighted as being key
for pulling together information to create a big
picture outlook for clients, and for gathering
together client data to inform sales strategy. At the
Strategy Stage, data was crucial for establishing
success metrics and criteria whilst at the final
Review Stage tracked data was central to analysing
success metrics and KPIs.
Within a legal firm specifically, analytics can provide
useful information to help manage larger clients for
increased customer satisfaction and better client
retention levels. Analytics can be employed to
determine whether the customer is receiving regular
contact from your firm’s sales teams or to help
predict outcomes to customer cases to provide more
calculated judgements on case successes. Social
media sentiment analysis from business intelligence
tools or social selling software can be used to track
clients’ sentiment towards your firm and to guide on
what action to take if a customer is in a particular
business scenario that your firm could assist with.
Using analytics to spot trends within your own
customer base is key – for instance, tracking your
customer’s news and social media feeds to get real-
time information on potential mergers or
acquisitions is a way of staying up to date and
quickly sifting through information to quickly find
the most relevant data.
Firms can also use social media analytics to track
industry trends and issues of particular importance
which may inform their thought leadership strategies
– helping their marketing activities to have more
impact with prospects.
For wider client retention, analytics can assist by
providing an up-to-date and easy-to-access source
of individualised client information whose sole
purpose is to keep the client informed on
Employing Business Analytics to Achieve Better Sales Results for Your Legal Firm – C24 Ltd | 2015

4. performance against set KPIs, billing information,
contract changes and fee data.
THE WIDER SALES PROCESS
WITHIN LEGAL FIRMS
When looking at the wider sales process within a law
firm, many organisations are now starting to deploy
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems
across their businesses, however many are still
relying on spread-sheets to collect client data. CRM
systems can help to drive sales behaviour; pushing
partners to collect data that may not appear relevant
but becomes more important in a win/loss analysis,
for instance.
Many firms collect information about their clients,
but it is siloed between different applications,
between digital and paper formats and within
individuals’ own computer and storage systems –
making it difficult to bring this data together for
organisation-wide visibility.
The first step for any firm looking to make use of
analytics in their business generation activities is to
look at ways to pull data from different tools,
spread-sheets, applications and formats into one
place – where they can be reviewed and processed
holistically. Certain business intelligence tools can do
this without needing to replace legacy infrastructure.
Once this data is in one place, or contained centrally
within a CRM system, firms must then look at new
ways they can extract information to make
judgements. CRM analytics is an important starting
point for creating a sales strategy – by evaluating
typical customers and understanding how you
usually win client projects based on their
demographics and typical engagement strategy.
Here are a few report ideas where legal firms could
use analytics in their business development
activities:
• Sales strategy creation – Analysing your
customers and potential opportunity scenarios.
• Marketing campaigns – Evaluating what issues
are creating the biggest headaches for clients or
why clients usually engage with you and then
creating marketing campaigns around those
challenges.
• Target customers – Creating target client lists to
pursue - based on prospects collected, leads,
previous wins and activity.
• Win/loss analysis – Reviewing what worked well
and what didn’t work well across sales
approaches.
• Efficacy of engagement types – How many
clients engaged with you via different
marketing and sales channels (cold calling,
meetings, events, and social media).
• Client retention – Trends that led up to losing
existing clients.
• Customer-spend – Understand how often a
customer spends and when your teams should
be re-engaging with an existing customer based
on historical spend reports.
• Social media and web traffic – Indications of
when a new prospect is showing interest or
engaging with your brand and next steps to
bring them into your sales engagement process.
• Predictive analytics – Determine the chances of
recovering fees from clients based on locations,
demographics, previous activity or type of
service contracted.
These reports can also be combined together, to
unify both internal data that you collect about your
prospects and customers with external information –
such as social media sentiment and wider industry
changes.
Employing Business Analytics to Achieve Better Sales Results for Your Legal Firm – C24 Ltd | 2015

5. The report previously cited from RBS (2014)
highlights how a large number of firms have
captured market share despite the increased
competition in the industry by developing a more
focused and considered approach to client
management and relationship management. If you
have just a handful of clients then you can easily
track their information, trends and buying signals –
however if you are looking after hundreds or
thousands of clients, spread across different Account
Managers or partners, then how do you ensure that
you deliver a consistent client experience and have
KPIs in place to create better client retention levels?
Analytics enables a consistent approach to customer
management within your organisation by collecting
data which enables firms to create ‘rules’ which sales
teams must adhere to in order to increase the
chances of winning new business or securing
existing clients. An example rule might be that a
client should be contacted at least once a month
even if the firm is not actively working on a case as
this has shown to be a reason why clients move
away from the firm after little contact experienced
in between services.
Whilst the sector may be changing, clients still
expect the same high levels of quality and
interaction from their legal partners, yet the way in
which this interaction and quality is delivered is
transforming. Many legal practices are now
delivering services and information online,
providing updates through web portals or email –
as they attempt to cut down on costs and become
more agile in a volume-focused industry.
This move to providing more transactional services
creates a headache for business development
leaders who now need to manage many more
customers and services than they may have
previously done – rather than working closely with
a few, key clients.
Analytics is crucial to making sense of this new
world and taking the vast amount of information
collected about clients and services and using it to
inform strategy, advise on activity and review
performance in order to make business
improvements. Without effective use of analytics,
firms risk being uninformed about their clients as
their businesses become even more volume in
nature and the modes of interaction change to
being web-focused and social media driven.
Using analytics as actionable intelligence rather
than just a vault of collated information allows
firms to make calculated and reasoned judgements
every time, with the data ready and available to
back these decisions up.
TOTAL BUSINESS
VISIBILITY
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intelligence for your organisation, then please get in
touch to arrange a demo session of your live data.
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CONCLUSION