Taking a Balanced Approach to IT.

• Author: Bonner, Paul
• Position: EDITOR'S NOTE

We've all heard the promise that marketing technology has the power to make our professional lives better. With the right technology, they say, time-consuming tasks will be transformed into a couple pushes of a button (or even eliminated altogether), data from disparate sources will be blended into insightful business intelligence, proposal generators will produce tailored marketing materials delivered by marketing automation systems and virtual reality will make webinars and business travel a thing of the past.

Yet, despite all such promised benefits of technology, far too few of us in the legal marketing community have experienced this value firsthand. And those who have are still far from reaching true nirvana. Many, if not most, firms either simply lack any real legal marketing technology or have a variety of tools that resemble the Island of Misfit Toys.

I am confident that this state of affairs is not due to the legal marketers who came before us simply being lazy or acting with nefarious intentions. Quite the contrary, actually: As in most cases, they did the best job they could to overcome budget concerns, secure partner buy-in, meet deadlines and refute the insistence from IT that they could "build it."

When compiling this edition of Strategies, my talented co-editors, Rachel Lufkin and Heather Ritzer, and I kept all of these things in mind. Our hope is that what we present to you on the pages that follow strikes the right balance...