A Blog About Law Firms And Their Clients

I am pleased to announce today that Manzama has partnered with the Lex Mundi organization.  For those of you unfamiliar with  Lex Mundi, the organization counts among its member law firms some of the most widely recognized law firms in the world.  We are excited to be able to reach this vast network with the Manzama offering.  The partnership demonstrates that social intelligence and business intelligence as applied to what’s transpiring in the public domain is at a level of importance that is global in significance, e.g., regardless of location, the need to listen and understand what clients are saying and to track conversations is important to a broader based understanding of  lawyer’s or marketing department’s business and practice strategies.

The Lex Mundi network provides clients with access to unparalleled global legal resources with its vast network of 160 premier member firms in more than 100 countries and offices in more than 600 business centers.  By working with a Lex Mundi member firm, you can be quickly connected to in-depth local market knowledge and legal expertise practically anywhere your legal needs arise.

To learn more about our newly formed partnership, please visit us at Lex Mundi’s Americas Regional Marketing Conference in Denver, CO October 5th – 7th.

It must be the season, but in the past ten (10) days I have presented at and attend two supposedly very different marketing and technology conferences (on either side of the United States no less – SF & NY). However, I was surprised at how much they overlapped. While there were certainly sessions unique to each program. Quick side-bar: credit to the organizers of each program – both were well organized, run and were able to include interesting speakers and content.

All-in-all here’s what I heard and learned.

• Use of blogs and firms blogging is reaching a tipping point. While statistics vary, there’s a huge push toward understanding and how to deliver content in meaningful ways. Now that there are lawyers that have been blogging for years, there were many concrete examples of lawyers/firms getting new revenue from blogging. I don’t think anyone left either conference doubting, if done effectively, there’s revenue to be gained. I don’t have the time or inclination to relay the specific tactics, but I encourage folks to visit Adrian Dayton’s blog, www.adriandayton.com to learn more about best practices, etc;
• Business Intelligence – whether backward looking (profitability analysis, analyst reports, etc.) or forward looking (analyzing social media, news, etc.), firms are moving ahead and aggressively, witness Latham Watkin’s recent hire of a “social media manager.”
• Video – take away here is “wow.” I was not expecting to see such concrete examples and high quality delivery from law firms on the use of video as a business development tool. Specifically, I’d highly encourage that readers see Adam Stock’s (Chief Marketing Officer at Allen Matkins) short blurb that summarized his various presentations over the past several weeks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikuF_KsSIfY

Enjoy

This past week my company, Manzama, had the pleasure of hosting a Chief Marketing Officer Dinner in New York City. The group was an intimate one, approximately 15-18 CMOs from some of the largest law firms in New York. And, while I am not at liberty to discuss specific firms or comments, I would like to share some of the big ideas I heard at the table as various questions were posed to the group as a whole:

(a) Profitability – The expectation is that it’s not just the accounting team’s responsibility to understand matter and client profitability metrics. The responsibility is a collective one, especially in light of the fact that marketing/business development are the first line of defense when it comes to interfacing with client teams and concerns;

(b) Business Intelligence – some firms have re-organized to fold library and other traditionally IT functions into the marketing departments – do we see a trend here as more of these folks are asked to perform business intelligence functions that need to closely align with the firm’s marketing strategies;

(c ) Contract lawyers – growing percentage of firms are using contract lawyers in a number of different contexts.

It’s a rare event to get a group like this together to share thoughts over dinner. In the event this blog entry finds them, I wanted to personally thank each and everyone for their time and interest.

Best,

Peter

Last week I reviewed with my team the concept of being a “mesh” company.  I think you’ll hear more and more about this developing trend or philosophy for companies to have mesh-type of cultures.  Specifically, the values that I think are of immediate importance can be summarized as such:

• Mesh Companies “Wow” their customers because they have access to information, and thus can anticipate what we want to do next?  They understand data, thus our behavior.
• Value unused = waste (example of why car sharing by neighbors took off)
• Do we have any opportunities to capitalize on waste – waste of time to find stuff, wasted time preparing for a client meeting?;
• Companies have shared failures, can we benefit from these failures – MySpace, etc.
• Make sharing irresistible.
• “Invite” people to share.
• DEFINE, REFINE & SCALE – a new method to develop.
• Make DATA OPEN – allow for multiple ways to access and absorb

Here’s an excellent discussion as to how Mesh companies are becoming a fabric of forward thinking businesses: http://www.ted.com/talks/lisa_gansky_the_future_of_business_is_the_mesh.html

Hello All,

I am just leaving NY where I had the privilege of moderating a discussion centered around the use of social media, trends and implications for the legal profession.  The group’s participants had a number of things to say on the subject, including, but not limited to:

> Quantifying remains a challenge;

> Interested in finding ways for lawyers to blog or send “insights” clients care about via their blogs vs a stream of concience approach;

> Hiring has begun as firms are staffing with competitive intelligence personell and social media experts, like the aforementioned story below (shared via LinkedIn by my colleague Patrick DiDeminico of Gibbons, PC out of NY).  I suspect this is just the beginning:

http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/help_wanted_latham_seeks_social_media_specialist/

Best,

Peter

The stats are out there — blogging among AMLAW 200 is on the rise.  As one partner in an AMLAW 200 firm indicated that sent along this article “As much as I hate to admit it, this suggests …… use the new social media might just be relevant to buyers of legal services.”

A few days ago, Benzinga.com reported on a survey that asked corporate execs and their in-house counsel about their hiring practices when it came to retaining outside law firms.  The survey was conducted by Greentarget Strategic Communications, ALM Legal Intelligence and Zeughauser Group and underscored a growing trend among a large number of the attorneys who serve in these corporate legal departments, particularly those responsible for vetting and hiring law firms.  Strikingly, one of the factors taken into consideration and a determining one in who gets the company’s business is whether the law firm has a blog.

In addition to the blog factor, the Benziga piece pointed out social platforms, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and even Twitter, as tools that are being utilized in the hiring process.

All this points in one direction – the lines between personal and professional use of traditionally “private” web-based social forums are becoming more indistinct.  Attention firms: on your mark, get set and tweet.

I came across the attached article while traveling this week, it appeared in Bloomberg Business Week.  The movement has been real for some time now — we have seen in it happening from a consumer standpoint now for years (Digg, Amazon, etc).   It’s fascinating, if you think about it, how the world continues to become more global and information driven each day.  Any serious assessment of information requires mining and analytics — it’s fun to be apart of this at its infancy.  Albeit, the starting points are rather rudimentary (aggregate basic information — competitors, clients, etc), but the foundation will enable more sophisticated data mining/analysis in the years to come.

A link to the article can be found here: The Big Business Of Sifting Through Social Media.

Best,

Peter

This past week was a great week for our company.  Note, typically I’d like to refrain from using this forum to promote or business (at least directly:)).  This being said, Friday, October 15th, Manzama was selected as the winner of the Bend Venture Conference, and with it the prize of $200,000 to be invested in our current Series A round.  The good news is we had already achieved our financing goal for our Series A, and the $200,000 put us in an oversubscribed scenario.

However, I think the most important take away (at least for me professionally and personally) was the validation that came with being selected the winner among some very other strong business plans from all over the Northwest.  The format was a ten minute presentation followed with a 10 minute Q & A.  On a practical level, this means that we’ll be in a better position to deliver new features, request and services to our client base.  Here’s a link to the original tweet:

http://twitter.com/bendventure

It’s with great pleasure I’d like to announce my latest venture, Manzama, Inc. It has been almost fifteen years since I founded Legal Anywhere (leading provider of turnkey extranet solution for law firms) in the mid-90s.  After that business was successfully acquired, I always thought the next idea for a company would just surface naturally and quickly, just as the idea for Legal Anywhere had with relative ease and obviousness – time and experience have taught me otherwise.  And, I now recognize the rare series of events and circumstances that must align to not only be inspired with an idea, but in addition to have the necessary conviction that there’s a sustainable business behind that idea.  I feel grateful that I have found this opportunity for a second time.  Likewise, I appreciate those (some of which are included in this email message) for your support to date and hopefully throughout the life of the business and thereafter.

Having spent a good proportion of my career in KM, I think the new KM frontier will be how we manage information in the public domain.  After all, a basic principle of KM is to add structure to unstructured data.  The data sources continue to grow and it’s time for law firm KM professionals to apply their know-how on managing information internally to the public domain.  Here’s the excerpt from the research report that I think does a nice job of summarizing what it is we intend to do for the legal profession:

“Businesses have new opportunities to improve their strategies through Social Intelligence — the concept of informing marketing and business decisions with insights found in social media data.1 Social Intelligence is not possible without a technology platform: As more businesses build out their strategies, listening platforms — technology and analytics infrastructures that mine and analyze social media to deliver insight — become essential tools within the enterprise.2″

Thank you and I hope to connect with many of you in the not too distant future.

Best,

Peter