Sticking with it

IN THIS column around a year ago I suggested that law firms would probably need to accept the Web 2.0 world as something they were going to have to face one way or another.

As with the long-awaited, non-traditional new entrants to the profession, even if some firms see social networking as a silly fad, that fact will matter little if the rest of the market disagrees and marches on. Risk management requires the right competitive intelligence as well as ensuring that your own house is in order. You need to have a strong reason (and preferably many) for holding back.

In any case, rare is the growing business that hasn’t got some sort of website today. Is it really so hard to imagine that the same could be said of the Blog or Twitter update in five or ten years’ time? Time-consuming and tricky to pitch they may be, but few would want to miss out on their marketing share of a communication medium that had made its way firmly into
the mainstream.

An increasing number of firms are now prepared to interact directly with their client communities by blogging regularly on key industry developments, while Allen & Overy (notably innovative in this area) even had some of its lawyers twittering updates on London’s G20 crisis meeting in the spring.

I recently revisited this topic in a couple of brief welcome breaks away from the desk, including with the top team at Hubbard One, the Thomson Reuters business that develops a wide range of marketing solutions for law firms. Their recent activity includes the acquisition of XMLAW, whose software suite is based entirely on the Microsoft SharePoint platform that will probably be familiar to most. Essentially, this sets out to manage a firm’s knowledge and data more effectively, providing new opportunities for both internal and external communications. Ultimately this can be used to mine the true depth of all business relationships for maximum commercial advantage. International firm Reed Smith, for instance, was named ‘SharePoint Innovator of the Year’ at this year’s International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) conference in Washington D.C. for its quite cannily named ‘ouRSpace’ portal.

In the past year the CMS network of European firms has also used Hubbard One — and SharePoint — to harmonise its online infrastructure and further integrate some key information-management processes. Each member firm can still control the specifics of its content, but at the same time clients can more easily navigate around the expertise offered by all nine firms as a single entity. CMS now plans to establish some online client service centres as well as new intranets.

Naturally, the experience of the recession is not without its impact on such developments in this space. Preston McKenzie, the company's vice president and general manager, spoke of an intriguing “press” here, with admittedly declining investment and cost pressures colliding with a real surge in fee-earner demand for these new ways of working and online communities.

Another trend sees firms in the mid-tier spying an opportunity to compete more with the very largest players, thereby forcing those leading firms into focusing more on protecting their key clients. Both movements mean better leveraging your technology.

Of course, any move into the Blogosphere must also be adequately managed and balanced by businesses. Some spontaneity is required (if only to generate sufficient interest), but an online free-for-all would probably be foolish.

One thing’s for sure. Being more adventurous online is one area where law firms still really have a chance of standing out. Websites may be standard weaponry, but recent research from marketing company Conscious Solutions suggests users will typically only stay on a law firm website for an average two minutes, regardless of its size or expertise. In a survey of some 80 sites, two-fifths of visitors only stayed long enough to look at a single page.

The popular, if unscientific, term for a website’s appeal is its ‘stickiness’ — that all-important combination of technical and creative factors that keeps the customers coming back for more.

The pace at which the Facebook phenomenon grew shows that building communities and sticking people themselves together is surely a tactic worth considering.

Richard Brent

Editor

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