Improve client service with a purpose-built BD solution that automates your firm’s expertise and credentials data
Law firms know all too well that it’s easier and more profitable to get new work from existing clients than to find new clients. One often-overlooked strategy for discovering your existing clients’ additional needs is to conduct client interviews that uncover the problems and challenges your clients are facing. Experience management software for law firms helps you capitalize on this intel to pitch any services related to the client’s needs and educate your clients on your firm’s capabilities.
Below we look in detail at how DealCloud’s experience management function works to support business development.
Review experience data to support business development
Imagine your client, whom you advise on employment law matters, has just told you that they have concerns about health data privacy compliance for a new digital health app they’re planning to launch. That’s not your practice area, but you seem to recall one of your partners talking about advising a digital health company.
Unfortunately, that partner is busy with a trial this week and won’t be able to verify your recollection. How can you quickly find out whether your firm has the right experience to serve your client?
In situations like these and others, your firm needs experience management software that has captured all your firm’s experience and enables you to search for particular firm capabilities.
Rather than relying on individuals’ institutional memory, which can be faulty, capturing experience data in a searchable database ensures that work experience isn’t ever forgotten.
Automatically capture experience data with AI
DealCloud experience management software for law firms has AI that converts client and matter information into a single searchable database of all your firm’s matters, credentials, and experience — coded by sector, geography, practice area, connections, and other key attributes. By automatically gathering experience data, DealCloud saves your lawyers from tedious data entry. DealCloud’s AI also automatically creates summaries of each experience and metrics that show experience levels.
DealCloud’s AI can automatically ingest and update this data because DealCloud integrates with other key firm systems, including systems relating to finance, intake, conflicts, customer relationship management (CRM), human resources, and legacy document management systems (such as iManage and NetDocuments), as well as external data sources (such as Equilar, Dun & Bradstreet, S&P Global Market Intelligence, and BoardEx).
If your firm further integrates DealCloud with QorusDocs, you can also harness your captured experience data to quickly generate well-designed pitches and proposals and simplify awards submissions.
Meet general counsel’s expectations (and win new business)
In addition to helping with pitches and proposals, experience management software for law firms enables you to satisfy a common expectation of general counsel: that your firm provide monthly status reports on client matters.
General counsel panel discussions at recent legal industry conferences have revealed that many general counsel want these monthly status reports from their outside counsel on all matters being handled by that firm, their current status, the number of hours devoted to matters, and other information. General counsel also wish to know who is on their outside counsel legal teams — including the associates — and to get to know them.
Your law firm can more easily meet these expectations with experience management software that automatically captures the latest updates on matters, as well as the credentials and experience of your team members.
By meeting this expectation of general counsel, you not only increase their satisfaction (and therefore their openness to using your firm for other matters); you also directly communicate to general counsel your team members’ related experience. When general counsel learns of the full capabilities of the lawyers assisting them, they may naturally ask for your firm’s help in other areas. Thus, meeting this client expectation is an easy way to generate new business that comes to you without any pitching.
In fact, this approach to indirectly educating your clients on your capabilities solves two challenges with cross-selling:
- Partners are often reluctant to cross-sell for a number of reasons
- General counsel and clients often don’t want to be directly cross-sold
If you would also like strategies for overcoming some of the internal and external resistance to cross-selling, check out our guide to cross-selling.
Discover how experience management software for law firms can power your business development efforts
If you’d like to see firsthand how DealCloud automatically captures your firm’s experience to support business development efforts, please contact us to schedule a demo, and to learn more about best practices and technology for cross-selling, download our recent ebook.