Businessman Climbing Ladder Credit: GUGAI/Shutterstock.com.
|

The COVID-19 crisis provides law firms with an opportunity to rethink how to produce and deliver deep specialist knowledge within client relationships. Here are three strategies that firms should consider:

Strategy # 1: Create Shared Situation Awareness and Understanding with Clients 

"Shared situational awareness and understanding" are concepts borrowed from the military and intelligence domains. Forces planning and executing missions need a "common operational picture," with information and forecasts about allies and adversaries, neutral elements and the wider environment. Built up through access to raw data and collaborative analysis, situational awareness gets transformed into knowledge through synthesis, experience and collaboration, enabling situational understanding.

Like military intelligence analysts, lawyers advising clients should transform awareness of the COVID-19 situation into shared understanding. Clients need help anticipating the risks they will face in an uncertain future.

Lawyers and research support staff need more effective ways to access and integrate information, forecasts and expertise from inside outside their firm, especially about legal, regulatory, political and economic developments. By collaboratively assessing the situation as it changes, they can help clients understand and anticipate the risks and potential ramifications.

Lawyers and support staff need to jointly assess the situation. Fostering effective cross-departmental collaboration (e.g., between practice groups, marketing, BD and research/knowledge services, and others) is more important than ever now that most people are working from home.

"Partners expect BD people to be highly proactive. Now is the time for research teams to be in practice meetings and become just as proactive in offering intelligence solutions," says Scott Bailey, the director of Research Services at Eversheds Sutherland.

To build effective collaboration, departmental leaders must address issues related to organizational culture, process synchronization, and data management. While this effort requires sophisticated leadership and change management skills, it also requires investment in technology that helps firms leverage their data and knowledge resources more efficiently. This investment essential because better collaboration will enhance a firm's ability to:

  • Spot more and better opportunities, before competitors can;
  • Develop a better understanding of what clients need;
  • Identify relationships and synergies within a firm more quickly;
  • Craft stronger value propositions; and
  • Develop stronger client relationships and cross-sell more services.

Strategy # 2: Build Intelligence Tools and Client Extranets Powered by Knowledge Graphs

When you ask Google certain questions, you get answers in a knowledge panel, as opposed to sites to go look at in search of an answer. This capability is powered by a knowledge graph that stores data and represents knowledge about entities, relations and their abstractions in a machine understandable way.

Law firms should start to build systems with matching engines and knowledge graphs that exploit the semantic linkages between content items. That way they can automatically surface answers and relevant content without users searching for it explicitly.

Client-facing IT systems are overdue for an upgrade. The legal domain lags a decade behind the financial services industry, which has built a domain ontology. Most law firm client extranets run on legacy content management technology that cannot power a modern search experience. Law firms could build client extranets that not only have powerful semantic search but also leverage the connected data in a knowledge graph.

Knowledge graphs will enable law firms to produce more customized and higher-value knowledge. For example, to create client alerts more efficiently, a firm could obviate the need for authors to manually search for past alerts (from their firm and competitors), background reference information about relevant legislation, executive orders and litigation.

"Knowledge graphs can enable law firms to produce higher-value client alerts more efficiently and consider our readers' needs for intelligence," says Scott Leeb, senior director of Knowledge Management at Fragomen, Del Rey, Bernsen & Loewy.

Knowledge graph-powered systems could also help law firms build attorney profiles semi-automatically, making them easier to match to project and matter descriptions based on the semantically-defined, machine-readable linkages between bios, work experience, work products, and thought leadership, industry expertise and much more.

Strategy #3: Write Brief, Unique, and Authentic Thought Leadership 

To produce thought leadership that has superior value for clients, ensure that publications are:

  • Brief: Most clients probably read only a small percentage of long-form publications. Keep memos brief.
  • Client-Centered: Focus on the issues that concern clients most, and consider the different information needs of various roles on the client side.
  • Anticipatory: According to the Washington Post, in January and February the Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) discussed the spread of COVID-19 around the globe, made clear that China was suppressing information about the contagion's transmissibility and lethal toll, and raised the prospect of dire political and economic consequences. Law firms must strive to warn and guide clients about the legal risk environment as early as possible.
  • Interactive: Provide ways for readers of thought leadership publications to probe deeper by linking to additional resources, by enabling commenting functionality and by making it easy to interact with authors.
  • Contextualized: The analysis of legal topics issues needs to be situated in the broader political, business, societal and technological context.
  • Collaborative: Multiple partners from different practices within the firm should band together to write material that explains the significance of a development from the perspectives of their legal practice specializations.
  • Authentic: This content should demonstrate a unique perspective on the issue, and communicate with an engaging style.

The strategies above are part of a comprehensive approach to producing and communicating expert knowledge to clients. High-value client relationships that yield shared situational understanding also depend on trust that a firm will harness and driver the best expertise possible by synthesizing information and fostering collaboration across departments and areas of expertise. When people, data and processes are well integrated, lawyers and clients will be more in sync, and better able to face the next challenge together.

David Kamien is the founder and CEO of Mind-Alliance (www.mind-alliance.com), creating intelligence tools that leverage AI and human collaboration to help law firms, legal departments, and others identify new business opportunities, produce thought leadership, and communicate more effectively with clients. David has spent 25 years advising those in the legal field and beyond on knowledge management, business development, and competitive/market intelligence.