A Blog About Law Firms And Their Clients

Law Marketing Association (LMA Planning Committee)

This week I had the pleasure of sitting down with a diverse group of CMOs across the country and the organizing body (ACI) of the Law Marketing Association’s Annual Conference.  Having been part of many committees over the years (profit, as well as not-for-profit), I was quite impressed with the level of organization, thought and commitment this group brought to the table.  Some of the folks have been involved with LMA for over two decades and still take an interest in seeing the organization do well and prosper.  Last year was a success by many measures – attendance, satisfaction with program content and overall planning.  It will be a difficult year to emulate, but I think this group is up to the task.  As a company, we are certainly planning to re-up our commitment as a sliver sponsor.

In terms of substantive content, I think the program will continue to expand its CMO track; thus you’ll likely see even more value add in terms of content there.  Likewise, some of the subject matter should appeal to not only CMOs, but Marketing Partners, Managing Partners and the like.

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

This past week I gathered with a group of colleagues in San Francisco, represented were a number of CKOs from some of the largest law firms on the west coast.  The group has been meeting and expanding for years.  The fundamental drivers for the group are to discuss a range of issues and challenges that large law firms are facing.  Overall, here’s what I say were the main takeaways from our get together:

(a) Automation — although a lot of discourse tends to focus on AFA (alternative fee arrangements), to actually deliver on flat fee or fixed arrangements, firms need “automation,” that is to say they need to take the low hanging fruit and process and find ways to deliver to the client at lower price points.  I can’t think of a firm in the group that had not begun some sort of an effort here.  Related to this theme — the growing % of AFA arrangements, the group differed from 15 – 35% of work falling in this bucket.  Initial reaction was that even 25% seemed high, but the reality is if we write-off good percentages of non-fixed fee arrangement, are we not in effect doing the same thing?

(b) Sharepoint as CRM — I was surprised to hear this, but it makes sense.  The frustrations with the incumbents continues to fuel the need to consider other options;

(c) Next Big Thing — the group watched Mary Meeker’s presentation from Web 2.0 Oriely Conference, a must see.  It generated a fair amount of conversation as to where the market is trending.  As expected, opinions differed as to how these global trends would impact law firms from “not at all” to “wow” moments.  My personal “Ah-ha” was related to the growth of mobile — as a business leader, I already feel like I am behind, but fortunately some of my colleagues did not share this perspective and suggested law firms (namely lawyers) are just not that interested in accessing applications via their mobile devices.  This said, if I were still CKO at Paul Hastings, I think I’d be scrapping my plans for version 5.5 of the portal and thinking about how I can reach the lawyers with the right services/information via mobile apps, etc.

Best,

Peter

Hello All,

This past week I had the opportunity to attend Marketing Partner’s Forum (gathering of 300-500 CMO/Managing Partner types from law firms of all sizes, although most were in NLJ 250).  The event proved to have some useful content — including sessions by Ann Lee Gibson (Consultant) and Kevin McMurdo (CMO, Perkins Coie) that dealt with Law Firm RFP response strategy, and a hands on workshop (with an element of self-assment).  Likewise, there was a good session on Social Media, where panelist shared some pratical advice/experience they have had in “mining” and assessing information in the public domain.  I was pleased that Manzama was referenced more than once in this session.  Law Marketing Partner Forum Leader, Larry Bodine, took some time to visit our booth, and had the following to share on his blog. 

Overall, there seemed to be a more general sense of optimism from the leaders of the law firms represented, and that was encouraging on a whole — not just for Manzama, but for the fact that innovating and leading are what set our economy apart — it’s not easy to get back on that horse given this last recession, but at the same time we are  society/culture that’s difficult to suppress (on more levels than one).  Looking forward to the remainder of 2011.

Regards,

Peter

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 article is a great read and was passed on by a colleague of mine.  For those that know me, they know I like to challenge the existing structures, institutions and conventional wisdom.  What I find useful with respect the below is that it talks about the challenges to shift a culture from a model of “free form” development to one that commands an attention to detail, as well as which environments are conducive to a good result.  Excerpt and full article below:

“However, if Google wants to succeed in smartphones and business applications then it’s going to have to create dedicated teams/departments within Google that are much more process-oriented and focused on product quality from end-to-end. The never-ending beta is not going to cut it in the smartphone world or the enterprise IT world.”

http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/hiner/?p=1609 (click here for full article)

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

Throughout my career I have always tried to sense — what’s the next big change or wave to occur in technology.  The    “Internet revolution,” and I am choosing my words deliberately, was just that — every aspect of communication was impacted as the framework of the web came together in a commercial sense.  I was fortunate to ride the wave forward and participate in this window of time that allowed for widespread creativity and paradigm shifts (young technology folks were able to avoid the corporate ladder — myself included).   Since then, there have certainly been breakthrough companies/models (Google, Amazon, etc).  However, it has not been until recently that I have sensed another groundswell, which I think many folks sense as well — what I like to call the bottom up revolution or the “voice” of the internet (blogs, twitter, facebook, etc).  It’s exciting to see that big companies and Corporate America alone cannot dictate the results of how businesses are perceived.  It’s not what you say about you, it’s what “Google” says about you.  This is just the beginning folks — your online brand, reputation programs are at their infancy — as the web move to greater interactivity (video, web cams), so will marketing and client/customer interactions.  I’ll leave this post with a look at an interesting article I came across in brandweek, a bit dated, but illustrates the point:

http://www.brandweek.com/bw/content_display/news-and-features/digital/e3i6f1a697eee327ba0e15676d4aea4263c

There’s a groundswell occurring in the legal vertical with respect to developing specific web properties that pertain to legal hot topics, etc.  What’s staggering is the amount of dollars even smaller firms are spending to “own” the internet presence associated with a hot legal topic (example, BP oil spill).  The below was referenced last week in the WSJ.

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

PJO