"Lawforce" and Why CRM Was Never Right for Law Firms

At LMA, I was a panelist at the "Intelligence Face-Off: A Live Debate about the State of CRM." The session was moderated by Vanessa Torres. I was joined by panelists representing the major CRM solutions in legal.

Vanessa's first question for the panel? "Is CRM dead?"

My response: "Was CRM ever alive?"

CRM debuted in legal 33 years ago. Almost every AmLaw 100 firm has one. Almost every CRM seat purchased for attorneys by those law firms goes unused.

33 years. Hundreds of thousands of CRM seats are paid for year after year, decade after decade. Hundreds of thousands of paid-for CRM seats that sit empty. Those seats make money for CRM vendors while simultaneously burning law firm partners' money.

Who uses CRM at most law firms? Marketing professionals and a handful of rainmakers. That's it.

So, what's the problem? Why is CRM such a bad fit for lawyers?

It's because CRM wasn't made for lawyers. It isn't called "Lawforce." It's called "Salesforce." Lawyers didn't go to law school to become salespeople.

CRM was transplanted from the sales world into legal, and the market was confounded when a product that was never intended to be used by lawyers was rejected by lawyers.

When designing a solution, the designer must have a crystal-clear vision of:

• Who the user is

• What problem the product is intended to solve

• How the product solves the problem

While the people who brought CRM to legal could answer the first two, they never had a real-world answer to the third:

How does the product solve the problem?

For decades, the rationalization has been that if a CRM is placed in front of attorneys, it will instantly transform them into salespeople. What happened instead was that attorneys simply didn't use it.

We've been talking about CRM adoption ever since. For decades. Attorneys have been encouraged to adopt. Some firms have refused to reimburse expenses unless their attorneys did.

You know what tech product attorneys adopted without one ounce of encouragement or coercion? The iPhone.

"Lawforce" needs to be like the iPhone.

Lawforce needs to be something that lawyers want to use, something that has perceived value to them. Lawyers may value time more than almost any other professional. If they are going to trade billable hours to use a product, the ROI of that time invested needs to be plainly evident. They need to see it and think, "Yeah, I really need that."

"Yeah, I really need that" is not what lawyers think about CRM.

As I wrote in my Law.com article, "The Intelligence Pipeline: What Comes After CRM for Law Firms," if there is any hope of engaging non-rainmakers with a business development solution, that product must have the following attributes:

• It must be passive. It can't be something that lawyers are required to reach for

• It must be specific to an individual attorney. It can't be vague

• It must be one-click actionable

• It must deliver results. Each attorney must see a return on their investment of time, and the firm must see the collective business development needle move as a direct result. Both the firm and each engaged attorney must see clear causality

If you think this solution is enabled by AI, you would be about 50% right. AI is an essential component, but it is completely dependent on the data from which it draws its conclusions. AI does not know ground truth. It infers it from the quantity and quality of the data it is given. Basic aspects of the solution, such as where people work and the proper names of their companies, are not things AI can do with complete confidence. It is garbage-in, garbage-out on a galactic scale. Its efficacy is determined entirely by the quality of the data at which it is pointed.

Multiple vendors have announced the kinds of intelligence pipeline solutions described in this article. Buyers could be forgiven for being dazzled by the AI part of vendor pitches while being distracted from the essential data question that ultimately determines whether these solutions will actually deliver. My advice is twofold. First, insist that the vendor prove their solution in your firm's own ecosystem with your firm's own data before you commit. Second, while you're waiting for Lawforce, go ahead and cancel your empty CRM seats. It truly is possible to get nothing for less.