AI in 2024: Should We Still Be “Moving Fast and Breaking Things”?
Editor
Where are things headed with AI in the coming year? What trends should legal IT professionals be awa(...)
Document and Email Technology Predictions for 2024
Dave Wilson
As trusted advisors to law firms around the globe, we're often asked about the latest trends in lega(...)
Edge Marketing, Inc. - formerly known as Edge Legal Marketing and Accounting Edge Marketing - is celebrating its 25th anniversary of serving the needs of legal and accounting professionals on a global basis. The agency has elevated hundreds of clients by delivering impactful, exciting results through its public relations, strategy development and implementation, branding and fractional CMO services.
Legal IT Professionals has worked closely with Edge Marketing for many years and asked Lisa Chontos to interview Edge Founder and CEO Amy Juers.
Seven Critical Factors & Four Underlying Principles
For years CRM systems, sales coaches, pipeline reports have annotated contacts/organisations as ‘Suspects’. Suspects being turned into ‘Prospects’ is a ratio often reviewed by the Management team with key metrics around how many suspects become prospects, then are taken through the sales pipeline to being a ‘demonstration’, then ‘proposal’ onto ‘negotiation’ and finally ‘closed – won’.
Sales is a process. There should be a process to identify the people/organisations that are looking for the type of solution your business delivers, so that time, effort, energy, and cost can be spent in the right areas.
Legal IT professionals have an important seat at the table when it comes to managing a law firm’s portfolio of domain names. In fact, their participation in the process is critical. Domain names are essential to law firms because they, along with the websites and email accounts they enable, represent the firm’s digital identity to the world. However, legal IT is often spread thinly with other diverse responsibilities, including hardware, software, network, training, help desk tech support, partnerships, and more. Their overwhelming workload leaves legal IT little time to focus on domain-related issues. Therefore, the best strategy is for legal IT to focus on the most pressing domain management needs to ensure they are tended to sufficiently.
Since the pandemic, many professional services organisations are (once again) paying attention to knowledge management (KM) as a discipline, especially as in a hybrid work environment, timely access to “knowledge” – in the truest sense of the word – has become essential for productivity. According to a Deloitte study, 75% of surveyed organisations said that creating and preserving knowledge across evolving workforces is important to their success over the next 12 to 18 months.
When I first entered the legal world in 2006, there was a distinct lack of technology available. People were starting to send emails and use Microsoft Word, but much of my time was spent leafing through mountains of paper infested with different Post-it notes. Over a decade later, in early 2020, I was introduced to legal technology, and I could immediately see its potential impact. Fast forward to 2022, and law firms and corporate legal departments are beginning to recognize the value of technology. Indeed, research is beginning to show that it is no longer sustainable to offer legal services without utilizing technology, particularly when an automated, simplified and ultimately more efficient way of doing things is available.[1]
Businesses are increasingly looking for technology and software providers. Most companies use many SaaS (Software as a Service) tools to streamline and improve their processes but sometimes suffer to find the right solution. In an environment where technological tools are increasingly abundant in all sectors, it is essential to go one step further and seek human quality behind the technology to find the right partner.
The last two years have seen the world transformed, and the enterprise business world is no exception. In March 2020, the vast majority of companies shifted to remote work almost overnight, business travel came to an abrupt halt, and digital transformation shot up. Since then, new priorities have emerged within organizations.
Every department has felt the shockwaves from these changes, and enterprise legal teams are no exception. Taken as a whole, they are still finding their footing again in the post-Covid, digitally-transformed “normal,” with all of its implications on governance, risk management and compliance.
It’s no secret among law firms that technology leaders tend to perform better. In 2020, 47% of tech leading firms reported increased profitability in the last 12 months, compared to 28% of transitioning firms, and just 13% of the trailing firms1.
So what should you take into consideration when making your next tech investment? How do you decide on what software is best for your firm when purchasing a new time recording and capture solution? There’s a lot to consider and as it will directly affect your firm’s revenue, it’s crucial to get right the first time.
The question of who should have access to the valuable bank of commercial and client data law firms are sitting on is an interesting one.
Technology is continuing to break down departmental silos, allowing data to flow freely between individuals and teams – enabling firms to remove excessive admin and duplication, and gain new insights into commercial opportunities.
Greater visibility means that fee-earners are able to see whether they’re on target, right down to a monthly, weekly or daily level, and drive cross-selling and up-selling.
To compete in today’s world, law firms must provide exceptional and prompt client service delivery—which requires that comprehensive case, subject matter and other relevant information be available at their fingertips.
However, searching across disparate systems for subject matter expertise, related content, and case research tops the list of wasted, unbilled work. Unbillable work not only affects partners’ and the firm’s profitability; it also affects your ability to keep up with growing competition from other firms or alternative legal service providers.
What is the future of contracting? Only two things are certain: dramatic change and artificial intelligence (AI). On November 9th, Evisort hosted our first-ever virtual conference, “The Future of Contracting.” The conference explored the evolution of contract management, success stories from legal teams that have implemented innovative contract management solutions, and best practices to help attendees stay ahead of the curve.
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