Digital White Papers

MT19

publication of the International Legal Technology Association

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I L T A W H I T E P A P E R | M A R K E T I N G T E C H N O L O G Y 19 back in the long run and create new data silos that eventually atrophy and get abandoned. Second, the ability to easily configure a platform to meet evolving firm and individual practice requirements means the firm doesn't need to continually go back to the vendor or hire third parties to track updated metrics and report on new insights. Teams can adopt an agile approach to improving support for their lawyers and enhancing client service. Third, it's imperative for firms to do their homework when it comes to selecting a new solution. It's not uncommon to be stung by an optimistic vendor. It's essential to check extensive references and put software through a rigorous evaluation process to ensure all requirements are met and the software includes all the features as advertised. part of the evaluation team that brought in Foundation at my former firm. At Blank Rome, I'm now an integral member of a team that is constantly evolving and improving a successful implementation overseen by Brad Miller, Director of Technolo Innovation and Research. What follows are the learnings and best practices I've gathered from both firms: Choosing the Right Platform Blank Rome was an early adopter of Foundation. They bought into the message of an integrated database to manage experience and expertise but approached this current implementation with a lot more caution, working closely with the vendor to ensure that vision was matched with working software. Blank Rome needed a better way to profile their data, adding context to make it easily repurposed for a range of uses, as well as simplifying the task of finding relevant data based on a variety of criteria. Moreover, their boilerplate content had proliferated across their website and proposals resulting in inconsistent and potentially out of date messaging. Having a place to store both boilerplate and dynamic content was a key consideration. At my former firm, the first order of business was proposal generation. We were interested in the ability to consolidate existing data in the platform that we had confidence in, so that we could automate our proposal generation and Chambers submissions to give our BD team a quick win. Even though my former firm's implementation started with proposals, we didn't want to end up with another silo. During our evaluation we put significant emphasis on how we could grow into a system - enriching, expanding on, and continually improving on the initial data to meet our needs over time. I can see how this approach has played out at Blank Rome where they've periodically added new incoming sources of data to the platform, providing additional insights about our experiences, people, and clients, with the internal team configuring the fields to capture the new information. A few key takeaways from both firms include looking strategically beyond immediate needs to ensure the chosen platform includes the capability to handle upcoming priorities. While point solutions can be tempting, limited capabilities tend to hold the team E X P E R I E N C E M A N A G E M E N T : A T A L E O F T W O F I R M S While point solutions can be tempting, limited capabilities tend to hold the team back in the long run and create new data silos that eventually atrophy and get abandoned.

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