CRM, BI and analytics for law firm

Client Relationship Management (CRM), Business Intilligence (BI) and Analytics for Law Firm

by PracticeLeague

As the business environment becomes increasingly competitive, law firms are being challenged to improve their efficiencies, productivity as well as their profitability. Clients want lower bills and companies are shifting their businesses from external counsel to in house counsel. Economy drives and cost cutting are the order of the day.

Streamlining operations and processes, focusing on competitive advantage and optimizing effort to yield are some of the ways forward for law firms. One of the enablers in this way forward, for law firms is information technology. By automating their firm's processes, law firms can achieve greater task efficiencies, productivity and profitability.

Information technology enables law firms to gain visibility of the business processes. Through information technology law firms can gather and analyze information from the different aspects of the business – from cases and referrals to billing hours. Armed with these analytics or business intelligence (BI), law firms can then take decisions that improve their profitability and productivity.

One area where these kinds of analytics can be applied is the area of customer relationship management (CRM). A CRM system can enable lawyers to store, organize, access information about contacts and clients in a central database. This allows sales, marketing, and support teams to view important sales and customer data together. This allows them to collaborate with each other on generating new business from existing clients, following up with contacts for referrals and leads, cross selling to clients with whom a relationship of trust has already been built, following up with potential clients by sending them prompt follow up calls or emails, or staying in touch with a prospect by sending them periodic newsletter, sector wise industry updates and so on.

Analytics or BI can reveal valuable insight to the law firm about client wise billing hours , resource productivity and help them decide on a case basis which clients and client groups are proving to be lucrative to the firm and which clients are not. Using analytics law firms can also decide on alternative fee structures to suit different client budgets. They could understand much better how lawyers spend their time, what proportion of lawyer activities were low value and what activities were high value.

By investing in PracticeLeague Law Practice Analytics, CRM and Business Intelligence, (BI) software, law firms can scale their operations, improve their productivity and improve customer satisfaction.

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