Stop sending spreadsheets
Last week, we talked about using directory submissions as a BD exercise, rather than an annual game of hunt the info/lawyer.
This week, we’re going to address one of the biggest problems in BD and CRM, never mind directory submissions.
Getting the information out of people’s heads.
Somewhere inside your firm are brilliant stories about complex matters, delighted clients, ingenious solutions and heroic feats of lawyering. Unfortunately, quite a lot of that information is currently stored in the least accessible database known to humankind.
A lawyer’s brain.
Here are three extraction techniques that are proven and we know to work at scale. Enjoy.
#1. Make it ridiculously easy
If you want better information, reduce the effort required to give it to you.
Sending someone a spreadsheet with 17 columns and asking them to “add some detail” is not making their life easy.
Neither is emailing a Word document containing last year’s matters and asking them to “update it”.
The most efficient and natural method of information exchange is through natural conversation. A ten-minute conversation with someone from BD, for example, would work brilliantly.
The problem with that approach is maths.
Most firms have a relatively small BD team compared to the number of lawyers. Ask BD to have ten-minute conversations with everyone involved in your submissions and you hit capacity VERY quickly.
This is where agents get interesting.
An AI agent can have the same structured conversation with hundreds of lawyers at the same time. It doesn’t sleep, take holiday or disappear into an all-day strategy meeting. It can run multiple conversations simultaneously, ask intelligent follow-up questions and then synthesise everything it hears into structured, usable information.
What happened? Why did it matter? What made it complicated? Who was involved? What did we do differently? What was the outcome?
The team at Legal Engine have built an agent to do exactly this. You can see a short demo here: https://submissions.legalengine.co.uk/
Talking is easy. Filling in forms isn’t. The trick is finding a way to make talking scalable.
Three Things task: Look at your current information request and ask: could the lawyer give us this information more easily by talking?
#2. Don’t ask people what you already know
Imagine someone phoning you and asking:
Who was the client? What was the matter called? When did it start? Who else worked on it?
You’d probably wonder why they hadn’t bothered checking. Yet we routinely do exactly that internally.
Your systems already contain huge amounts of information. Matter names. Client details. Teams. Financial information. Previous descriptions. Pitch content. CRM data.
Use it.
Pre-populate what you (your AI model) can, then use the conversation to capture the things your systems don’t know.
That’s where the value sits. The nuance. The judgement. The story behind the matter.
Three Things task: Separate the information you can get from systems from the information you genuinely need from humans.
#3. Make it a value exchange, not a value extraction
We ask a busy lawyer to give us ten minutes of their time. We extract their knowledge, package it into a submission and then, perhaps six or twelve months later, they discover whether the directory ranked them.
That’s not a particularly compelling answer to “what’s in it for me?”
If we want lawyers to have the next conversation, and the one after that, we need to give them something back now.
That’s where reuse becomes powerful.
A great matter story captured today could immediately strengthen that lawyer’s internal profile, update their credentials, provide content for a pitch, identify relevant experience for their bio or create material they can use in a client conversation.
Capture once. Create value immediately. Reuse repeatedly.
Suddenly, the conversation isn’t something the lawyer is doing for BD. It’s something that helps them build their own practice.
Three Things task: For every piece of information you ask a lawyer to provide, ask: what useful thing can we give them back straight away?
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut elit tellus, luctus nec ullamcorper mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo.
Chat to Tina by voice, when you’re between meetings, on the commute to/from work, or heading into something you’d rather avoid.
Final thought
The directories process has traditionally been very good at value extraction.
Give us your matters. Give us your client contacts. Give us your time. And, if all goes well, there might be a nice ranking waiting for you several months down the line.
Technology gives us an opportunity to turn that into a value exchange.
An agent can capture the factual information, have the conversation, structure the insight and then immediately start turning it into something useful for the person who provided it.
Because if I give you ten minutes and immediately get something valuable back, I’m much more likely to give you another ten minutes next time.
And another.
That’s how we stop directories being an annual information-gathering exercise and start building a continuous bank of useful intelligence that benefits the lawyer, BD and the firm.
Which is a considerably better deal than:
“Please complete columns F to Q by Friday.”
We’re building a team of voice enabled AI assistants to support you with BD activities and allow you to spend more time being human. Interested? We’d love to chat.
