By Dave Hutchinson, Executive VP Sales and Marketing, Client Profiles
Legal marketing expert Larry Bodine’s excellent blog featured an interesting article today that caught our attention, mainly due to the fact that its underlying message greatly underscored the main reasons why more and more law firms these days are choosing to implement CRM4Legal, developed in conjunction with Microsoft, to help them leverage contacts and manage their business development operations.
The post ‘Spot Survey: Less than Half of Lawyers Use their CRM Systems’ cites a study conducted by Lexis Nexis at the recent ILTA conference in Las Vegas. In the post, Mr. Bodine writes that, according to the survey, “many lawyers find current systems in place are too difficult and time consuming.” A whopping 70% of respondents agree that many lawyers in their firm are reluctant to use their CRM system because they believe doing so is too difficult, while an even higher number, 80%, believe it will take too much of their time.
On a positive note, the vast majority of respondents in the survey - 94% - say that “integrating specialized CRM capabilities directly within the e-mail and contact management application lawyers in their firm use every day – such as Microsoft Outlook – would enable their firm to capture more useful CRM data and leverage that data in a better way.”
Microsoft and Client Profiles have been keenly aware of these problems with legal CRM since 2005. At that time Client Profiles and Microsoft partnered to develop the first law firm CRM product built entirely within Outlook, since that’s where the vast majority of lawyers spend a large part of their day. Considering the fact that the CRM4Legal solution was specifically developed in order to directly confront these issues of user adoption, it’s no surprise that Microsoft CRM is now experiencing a high level of acceptance in the legal industry. This, coupled with the delivery of useful attorney/client information such as integration with the law firm’s financial system, other software solutions such as SharePoint, and relationship intelligence data, makes CRM4Legal an option that is increasing user adoption.
To be frank, companies who developed software that has been at the center of the problem for years are late to the party in touting CRM systems that lawyers will actually use. As the survey demonstrates, many law firms made heavy investments in CRM systems that lawyers found too difficult and time consuming, and were ultimately left with hefty bills and a CRM system that isn’t being used. Microsoft and Client Profiles have been at the forefront of confronting the issue through three generations of the CRM4Legal product. As a result, user adoption among firms running Microsoft CRM is high, and law firms now report greater success integrating CRM into their workflow.
We could not agree more with the 94% of respondents who believe that working within Outlook is the key to CRM success, which is precisely why we teamed up with Microsoft in the first place, back in 2005, to create CRM4Legal. The record is clear -- while other CRM providers were struggling with the problem of user adoption, Client Profiles and Microsoft were setting out to fix it.
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