How to Go from 40K Known Law Firm Contacts to 250K Using InterAction IQ

Lateral hiring is a tried and true growth strategy for many law firms and with good reason. Each time a lateral is hired, that attorney brings a wealth of new and existing connections which ideally helps the firm grow its business pipeline. The only trouble is this strategy assumes that attorneys who are newly hired as laterals to the firm keep their professional rolodexes up-to-date, so the firm can immediately leverage all of these promising connections, from day one.

We all know how this story goes…

No matter how diligent attorneys are about keeping their contacts up-to-date, the minute they start working with their new firms, they are pulled into a myriad of on-boarding meetings, all while trying to service clients and get acclimated to their new work environment. In other words, something as time consuming as entering or updating their professional rolodexes gets pushed to the bottom of the priority list.

However, by failing to quickly make these connections and adding new contacts to the firm’s CRM database, some firms are actually leaving big money on the table.

In fact, one CRM administrator at an AMLaw 200 said her firm went from 40,000 known contacts to a whopping 250,000 contacts, simply by using the InterAction IQ feature.

By doing this, she said her firm experienced a whopping 5X increase the firm’s knowledge of “who knows whom” and engagement levels. And, the kicker, she said, is the firm’s attorneys didn’t need to lift a finger.

LexisNexis recently debuted a new E-book explaining how law firms using the InterAction CRM database can do the same thing by using the IQ feature to tap into a myriad of new and previously unknown contacts as soon as a new lateral joins the firm. Here’s a quick overview of hlexow it works:

• Alleviates the Need for Manual Entry. As soon as lateral hire emails a previous contact and there is a response, IQ is able to discover the contact, as long as a signature is included in the email. This alleviates the attorney/ lateral hire from having to manually enter old contacts and helps the law firm marketing and leadership team see how the attorney’s on-boarding/BD plans are progressing.

• Discovers New Contacts. IQ helps attorneys who are newly hired to the firm and members of the BD team to discover new connections by instantly uncovering previously unrecognized contacts via the signature capture feature and automatically adding them to the firm’s BD contact database. This also enables firm to make appropriate determinations about where to make introductions.

• Enhances Who Knows Whom. IQ enhances a firm’s who-knows-whom capabilities by automatically adding new relationships to InterAction database based on an attorney or member of the BD team’s configuration settings.

• Ensures New Contacts Aren’t Missed. IQ creates a file of possible new contacts who are not an attorney’s InterAction database, for the BD team’s review, so members of the team can ensure no new contacts are missed, especially during the lateral on-boarding process. This helps the firm discover where the lateral has unique relationships and where there is overlap with the firm’s existing contacts. This also help the lateral put the best plan in place to start making the most of those relationships to help the law firm grow organically, by either introducing their contacts to others services within the firm or expanding the existing services being provided in collaboration with partners who also have relationships with clients where the lateral’s expertise in not already being provided by the firm.

Now, we’re not mathematicians, but we’d say odds are pretty good those additional 210K discovered contacts, turned up a new business opportunity or two for the firm…

 

This post is by Carla Del Bove, who provides support to the business of law software product line based in the LexisNexis Raleigh Technology Center.