Digital White Papers

29 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER MARKETING TECHNOLOGY The Evolving Role of Marketing provider is vital to ensure your firm stays white listed and continuously enhances its platform to coincide with the changing market trends. CRM and marketing automation tools continue to be vital. I would add to that list a good experience and expertise platform. As we all know, legal purchasers are geing more and more sophisticated in how they allocate their budgets. Being able to understand at a very granular level the work your firm does, and which lawyers hold the right expertise for a specific niche need, can be the difference between geing work or losing out to a competitor. I would say that in many cases, the most vital systems today are those that were most vital in previous years; however, today they are used in an increasingly sophisticated manner. If we take tools like CRM and experience databases, which have been in place now for decades, they still hold some of the most vital and valuable information available to marketing teams. Continued improvements in this space, for the firms that invest, will yield strong results. An area where many firms are yet to foray into is campaign management and marketing automation. These will become increasingly prevalent over the coming years and will no doubt see increased investment. Delivering information to clients in a sophisticated way is key. Lastly, from an internal operations perspective, advancements in workflow management, particularly for teams that are spread across multiple locations, is critical to the success of the modern, globally scaled legal marketing team. SB TL In evaluating any tool, I tend to focus on two components: 1) ease of use for the team, 2) advanced reporting capability and/or ability to easily export valuable information. If you identify tools that hit those needs, they fundamentally make themselves vital for marketers, BD professionals and other colleagues at the firm. How do you integrate with IT and other related departments? Do you have a separate budget? We work very closely together. My team handles the day-to-day routine support for all our systems, but depends heavily on IT for server issues, upgrades, integration with other systems, etc… In many cases, our developers built the tools we use. For budgeting, IT generally pays for any capital purchases, licensing and support on our primary systems. Marketing pays for smaller tools used only by our department, consulting services, or things like vendor creation of a new template. We work closely with our IS department and I actually report to leaders in both departments. It helps streamline technology processes and keeps everyone on the same page. Marketing technology exists across both marketing and IS budgets depending on the tool, licensing, etc. JW SB JW TOM LAVIN Tom Lavin is Senior Manager for Marketing Operations at White & Case LLP and has over a decade of experience working with professional services firms. Based out of London he manages a team spanning three continents and is focused on delivering & implementing cutting-edge marketing processes and systems.

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