Employing Business Analytics to Achieve Better Sales Results for Your Legal Firm C24 Ltd | 2015

EMPLOYING BUSINESS
ANALYTICS TO ACHIEVE
BETTER SALES RESULTS
FOR YOUR LEGAL FIRM

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.

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Employing Business Analytics to Achieve Better Sales Results for Your Legal Firm C24 Ltd | 2015

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. 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 clients 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 clients
demographics enables the forward-thinking legal organisation to turn this incoming

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Employing Business Analytics to Achieve Better Sales Results for Your Legal Firm C24 Ltd | 2015

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 firms 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 prospects engagement results in better success rates and more client calls.
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

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Employing Business Analytics to Achieve Better Sales Results for Your Legal Firm C24 Ltd | 2015

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 firms 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 customers 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-toaccess source of individualised client information whose sole purpose is to keep the client
informed on 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 spreadsheets 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, spreadsheets, 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.

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Employing Business Analytics to Achieve Better Sales Results for Your Legal Firm C24 Ltd | 2015

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 didnt 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.
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.

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Employing Business Analytics to Achieve Better Sales Results for Your Legal Firm C24 Ltd | 2015

CONCLUSION
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 webfocused 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.

ABOUT C24 LTD

C24 Ltd is one of the UKs leading privately owned specialist managed service and hosting
providers, based in the Midlands, UK. Working with businesses all over the globe, the
company manages, secures and delivers critical business applications to over 100 countries,
with a particular focus on the legal sector. As a strategic Thomson Reuters partner, we
deliver enterprise hosting platforms for Thomson Reuters Elite clients who are looking for
more flexible solutions for their core practice management platforms.

References:
Dun & Bradstreet. (2013) Industry Analysis: Strategic Information [Online] Paul Westcott. Available from: http://www.dnb.co.uk/dnb_files/Reports/ERC/Strategy_Briefing_articles.pdf.
[Accessed 11th March 2015]
RBS. (2014) A perspective on the legal market [Online]. Available from http://www.rbs.com/content/dam/rbs/Documents/News/2014/03/perspective-on-the-legal-market.pdf. [Accessed
11th March 2015]
Attorney at Work (2015) Lawyers on Social Media: 2015 Survey Results [Online] Available from: http://www.attorneyatwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/2015-Lawyers-Use-ofSocial-Media-Survey-Highlights.pdf [Accessed 11th March 2015]
RAIN Group (n.d.) 5 Keys to Maximising Sales with Existing Accounts [Online] Available from: http://www.rainsalestraining.com/sales-resources/sales-white-papers-ebooks/5-keys-tomaximizing-sales-with-existing-accounts/5-keys-to-maximizing-sales-with-existing-accounts/. [Accessed 11th March 2015]

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