Digital White Papers

15 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER MARKETING AND BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT Are You Experienced? One Firm's Experience Management Journey We selected SharePoint as our workflow tool, and then quickly developed a proof of concept. We refined our process and the data collected many times along the way, adding financial thresholds to capture more relevant maers. We tried to keep the system simple, avoiding long lists of fields to complete. We wanted to reach a realistic balance between good data and the time needed to proactively capture everything; not perfect, but certainly a move in the right direction. All Systems Go Aer several months of design and development, we conducted a successful pilot with the corporate business unit in April 2014. Marketing and leadership found the system immediately useful to access up-to-date maer details. We received positive feedback from associates, who were even willing to advocate to other lawyers about the ease of providing updates. We demonstrated that the information we were collecting was important to the firm not just for marketing, but also for pricing. As an example, with the ability to quickly identify investor-versus-company representations for Series A financings, we could optimize our pricing for similar maers. Buoyed by our initial success, and with strong support from our chairman, we worked with other business units to define fields and refine the process for their needs. Our initial efforts in other business units were not as successful, and the reasons varied by practice type. It is more complex to capture updates for long-term litigation maers than for transactions that close quickly. We did not have the same level of leadership support in all groups, and their marketing teams were not always ready for change. Nobody loved capturing experience in spreadsheets, but neither did they have time to invest in a new system, especially one that did not quite meet all their needs. Aer a year of development and testing, we started a firmwide pilot and closely examined feedback from both associates and marketing. We categorized 15 pages of feedback about the experience capture system into three types: » Things we could change » Things we could only change with significant investment of time or money » Things we could not change due to technical limitations We developed reports and metrics to establish accountability, and we were rewarded with a marked increase in participation.

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