ROI for CI--one firm's perspective: real results for competitive intelligence.

• Author: Weber, Jill S.
• Position: Return on investment, competitive intelligence

Competitive intelligence continues to grow in strategic importance in the legal industry. My previous firm, Leonard Street and Deinard, was an early CI adopter. A regional firm of 200 attorneys, Leonard Street hired a competitive intelligence professional with accounting industry experience and established a dedicated budget for CI research tools and initiatives.

While we attended numerous conference sessions and read many articles on how to implement CI in a law firm-which products to use, how to disseminate information, where the CI function belongs - our firm also sought insights for how to monitor and measure results from CI initiatives. We wanted to tangibly demonstrate to our attorneys how CI was delivering real results, and bottom-line value, to the firm.

In the early years, our CI "results" focused mainly on quantity: We delivered research on XX companies, supported XX RFPs, etc. In an effort to promote and expand our CI efforts, however, we have established several qualitative and quantitative metrics to help us demonstrate CI success.

* Facilitated Cross-Selling

As part of our firm's Fast Forward business development program, we introduced LexisNexis Publisher as a tool to provide attorneys with daily news feeds for their key clients and prospects. One of our participants, a litigator in our construction practice, read in one of his daily news briefs that a client in another state had won a contract to build an energy plant. The litigator contacted one of our energy lawyers, shared the news article with him and discussed how best to approach the opportunity. He then proactively contacted the client, who said "I didn't realize you had an energy practice."

The client eventually engaged our firm, and the litigator anticipates a six-figure engagement in a new area of practice. He admits that without the news feed he would not have been aware of this opportunity, and, because he was proactive, we were the only firm to be considered for the engagement.

Quantitatively, this success story is easy to measure - a six-figure engagement. Qualitatively, we effectively executed a cross-selling strategy, gained a better awareness of our client's business and positioned the relationship attorney as a business advisor and not just a legal technician. In the long run, we believe the qualitative results will have an even greater quantitative impact than the initial engagement.

* Enhanced RFP Success

Our firm successfully used competitive...