Marketing and technology: value at the intersection of communication & collaboration.

Lippe, Paul

When I graduated law school in 1984, no one foresaw that lawyers would someday be spending so much time using email that jokes about "Crack-berry" addiction. In fact, when I was a general counsel in the early '90s, most firms declined our request to start using email, citing a rotating set of reasons from concerns about security to questions like: "What is email?" and "How can we charge for it?"

E-discovery itself is a booming sub-industry. As we approach 2011, it's pretty clear that the dominant mode of communication is shifting from email to social networking or 'Web 2.0 Collaboration,' a mix of profiles, searches, databases, document management, pictures, blogs, wikis, tweets, tags, extranets and who knows what else (some of these are even secure networks that allow a mix of confidential/privileged and non-confidential/non-privileged communication.) If you're a college student, a sales exec, a software engineer or an online media whiz, you've probably already made this shift; if you're a lawyer, it is more likely that you're just beginning.

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But that's not true of all lawyers. InsideCounsel magazine just recognized Cisco Systems' legal department as "Making Connections" because of the way Cisco uses Web 2.0 technology to collaborate internally and with outside firms. www.insidecounsel.com/Issues/2010/September/ Documents/IC10.pdf.

Collaboration is nothing new, and it's not some "Kumbaya" thing--it's how Lennon and McCartney wrote songs, how Hamilton and Madison wrote The Constitution, how the Oxford English Dictionary and Wikipedia (and, unless you're a literalist, the Bible) were created. Collaboration is also how lawyers manage a big financing or synch up their briefs in multi-jurisdictional litigation.

According to Cisco's Legal Department Head of Knowledge Management Risa Schwartz, "Our vision is... to access in radiating circles the institutional knowledge of the legal department, its internal customers, its outside counsel and peer legal departments... It's going to change the way we do business."

So what does this mean for legal marketing? It means that communications, which has always been the bread and butter of legal marketing, is being upgraded from a supporting role to the starring role. Let me suggest that for the next few years, there's only one question legal marketers should worry about: "Will my lawyers and my firm be in clients' radiating circles, whether to deliver work of higher value, or so clients can learn that they deliver work of higher value?" If you're not in the radiating circle, you're not doing the work, you're not getting the work and you're not getting better at the work.

As legal departments have grown, the center of gravity of the profession has moved from law firms to law departments, and companies have begun to apply modern business process disciplines to what has historically been a craftsman model. This once-in-a-lifetime shift has few precedents in other professional markets (the closest analogue is the rise of the HMO as an aggregated buyer of physician services.) The client's world is a network that looks a little like this model, where clients know there are multiple really good lawyers, have lots of internal expertise and tap experts from across their networks, including peers.

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As the legal market evolves from one built around the capability and effort of the outside lawyer to the value received and perceived by the client, the job of marketing--while still rooted in communications--is no longer to simply help lawyers communicate about themselves but to communicate in delivering value. This boils down to four pretty tried-and-true methods:

1 LEARN everything you can about clients. In the old one-way world, maybe some lawyers didn't feel they needed to know that much about the client, because the lawyer was delivering scarce and valued expertise. But in today's world, the lawyer can't really deliver value without insight about the client, and it isn't value unless the client thinks it's value, so you need to know what the client values. Fortunately, clients are sharing lots of information about themselves in different ways: some formal (websites or EDGAR [Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval system]), some informal and some limited access. But clients are selective--they certainly aren't going to post key legal insights on Facebook. So lawyers and marketers have to find and demonstrate through their own engagement that they are worthy of knowledge sharing.

2 PUBLISH everything you can in the places clients are likely to engage with it (i.e., not your firm's website). No one's going to Firm.com to read that the HSR (Hart-Scott-Rodino) limit got raised. No one wants to read your tweet that you got bad service at Taco Bell. But if a lawyer has an insight about an issue or a tactic or a rule, you must find a way to publish it, whether on a profile in a professional network, a blog, the client's extranet or a comment. You don't need to publish a law review article summarizing a case; clients can read the case if they want. You can use a forum or a blog to make three key points and explain why a development matters. In a Web 2.0 world, you can dare to be incomplete. Privileged work product is privileged work product and can't be shared. But most legal content begins in the public domain (laws, regulations and judicial decisions) and ends in the public domain (EDGAR, PACER [Public Access to Court Electronic Records] or other filings). If you don't have anything to say, that may be a wake-up call.

3 OLLABORATE ON WORK. In other professional fields, service providers do much more to define scope and deliverables upfront (fixed fees, budgets, project management, assessment criteria), and seek systematic feedback after the fact (post-mortems, continuous improvement). Innovators like Jeff Carr at FMC Technologies, who more than anyone, set the template for the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC)'s Value Challenge, agree on clear targets for matters with their outside counsel, set budgets with consequences, pay a premium or discount based on outcomes achieved and collect (and share with outside lawyers and peers) their assessment of lawyers' performance. This style of engagement is increasingly the norm, facilitated by Web 2.0 systems linking clients and firms. I have been studying this issue for more than a decade, and I can tell you the leading predictor of quality of results is not the reputation of the firm, the IQ of the lawyer or the amount of effort; the leading predictor of quality of results is how well everyone works together to understand reality, set objectives and coordinate work.

4 COLLABORATE ON STAFFING AND PRICING. As clients deploy collaborative systems, it opens room to rethink how work gets done. Firms can use younger lawyers with good Web 2.0 chops to co-design collaborative systems with clients, even if they don't have subject matter expertise. They can accommodate a parental-leave lawyer with a 30-hour-a-week schedule to work from home as a playbook expert, or leverage the expertise of an antitrust guru to plug into more companies' sales processes. And they can make better than billable hour profits by proposing performance-based fee structures and leading these engagements with clients. In a world where most documents can be found in the cloud, inhouse and firm lawyers will readily find and collaborate on new work product. In a world where information systems facilitate measurement of performance, lawyers who think 'what we do can't be measured' will soon find no one is measuring them because no one is engaging them. Just as no surgeon would say, "I use whiskey as an anesthetic because I can't be bothered to learn anything new," no lawyer should say, "I can't be bothered to learn new tools for collaborating with clients."

The world is changing, and law will normalize to look more and more like other industries. Marketers with insight and gumption will help their firms deliver superior value at the intersection of communication and collaboration.

Paul Lippe is the founder and CEO of the Legal OnRamp, a Silicon Valley-based organization founded to improve legal quality and efficiency through collaboration, automation and process re-engineering. Lippe can be reached at paullippe@legalonramp.com.