P2P

59 I L T A N E T . O R G A recent survey of more than 300 legal marketers published by BTI Consulting reveals that since May 2020. the typical law firm is winning 26% of their responses to Requests for Proposals (RFPs). This is down from 32% before the pandemic. And BTI, LexisNexis and others are reporting RFP request rates doubling and even tripling in some sectors. With win rates down and proposal and RFP volumes way up, what can business development and marketing teams do to deliver more targeted proposals while leveraging artificial intelligence and other automation tools to streamline the process? The 'status quo' approach of dealing with RFPs on a case- by-case, 'cut and paste' basis presents a definite workflow and productivity challenge for law firm business development professionals in particular. Modern tools are not only accessible, but intuitive and collaborative in nature to foster a new 'faster, better, smarter' approach to RFP and proposal management. With demand for technology innovation and efficiency at an all-time high, we can specifically look to Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to help streamline and automate proposal and RFP management and bridge the gap between increasing RFP requests and decreasing win rates. How can firms leverage AI without holding up other projects or requiring AI experts to help drive the bus? If modern law firm business development teams can't grow headcount, and are limited by remote working realities, they need tools that will pick up the slack and automate processes at the same time. Less artificial, more intelligence. AI is about eliminating mundane tasks, augmenting human touch points, and amplifying human ingenuity. This equally applies to content, documents, and workflows utilized by legal marketers and business developers. The goal is to embed innovations like AI, ML and NLP into everyday tasks around the proposal management and RFP function to the point that they become ubiquitous. As mentioned in a Legaltech News "Predictions in AI" article in January, AI will continue to be embedded into daily work the work of law firm marketing and business development teams being no exception. It will help these teams win deals by learning what content is winning content. When pitching clients, for example, AI will recommend the best content or responses to put forth. Typically an overwhelmingly manual process, AI and ML technology is also being used to drive greater automation of RFP responses, aiding authors to more easily cope with the higher volume of RFP requests and reducing the need to manually tag content so it can be found later. Intelligent proposal management systems use Natural Language Processing (NLP) to answer questions that frequently appear in RFPs. Combined with NLP, "AI is about eliminating mundane tasks, augmenting human touch points, and amplifying human ingenuity."

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