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Why We Chose Microsoft CRM4Legal

By John Guyer

John Guyer of Hinckley, Allen & Snyder talks about Microsoft and Client Profiles, and how this great pairing of companies helped place his firm on a path towards the holy grail of law firm business development – mining relationships.

• Firm: Hinckley, Allen & Snyder LLP
• Providence-Based Regional Firm
• 3 Offices
• 165 Lawyers
• 350 Total Staff
• Previous Technology: Custom SQL marketing database
• CRM4Legal Project: Firm-Wide Rollout
• Business Driver: Technology to support the growing need to identify relationships (and potential business conflicts) associated with rapid firm growth. The need for a firm-wide database of contacts, companies, and related parties to act as the “relationship portal” and to integrate with the firm’s other applications.

There are a lot of applications out there that claim to do CRM. We went down this road very purposefully and we felt very good about it from the very beginning and we feel great about it today. One of the things I look for as much as possible in a piece of software is a nice homogenous solution. What I mean by homogenous is this: I don’t know if you’ve been around long enough to remember the “old days” of technology where a variety of things were used that didn’t work very well together. It was a very “heterogeneous” environment. Microsoft, in those years, was very much a rising star, and as more and more people adopted Microsoft technologies, we had fewer and fewer problems of integration between various key products. Microsoft CRM has benefitted from this development in that, with Microsoft CRM, you have a very homogenous solution that allows you to integrate with the variety of things you have.

Integration with Your Enterprise
I’m relatively new to the legal industry in that I’ve been involved in this particular vertical for about seven years, but I’ve been in software for a long time. I remember to this day, one of my first impressions in legal software was the maintenance release on the service release of a product and it floored me. And it wasn’t unique to one particular product. You see this regularly in the legal space. The software is poorly written, the integration is poorly done, and the more you introduce from the various vendors, the more unstable your environment gets and the higher your maintenance costs go. With Microsoft CRM, we’ve stabilized our environment and reduced our support costs dramatically by focusing on solutions that work together with minimal hooks as possible. By this I mean products that simplify the integration points. This is a strategy that Microsoft uses internally as well where they simplify the amount of integration points to as few a number of standardized conduits as possible. You get that same benefit from MS CRM — it’s a great way to go because it really reduces that complexity.

Simply put, Microsoft has made our world easier by getting as much of the world as possible to use their products. With Microsoft, I don’t have to worry about running an alternative product and hearing the words, “yeah, but it doesn’t work with Microsoft Word” or, “why aren’t we using Office?”. We recently acquired a firm that was using alternative technology and it was interesting talking to their IT staff about some of those same conversations, and those were the types of things they were hearing. If you standardized on technologies that the market is predominantly using you will be better off. Microsoft CRM integrates with Office, it integrates with Outlook, it integrates with Word, and that is a fantastic way to go.

An Aerodynamic Solution
I also like to refer to CRM4Legal as an “aerodynamic solution”. I’m sure many of you had the experience where you are trying to persuade users to comply in some particular way. Getting compliance or motivating people to do something is probably the number one issue we have in any organization. There are various ways to do this. One is, you can force them to do it — a decree from on high that includes specific disciplinary action that is executed if that decree is not followed. At the other end of the spectrum — making it so easy for them to do the right thing, that they don’t want to do the wrong thing. Microsoft built their CRM product based on this end of the spectrum by building it around the way most people work. We looked at alternatives and they all involved forcing people to manage their contacts in a different way than in the way they had been managing them. The problem is, when you force people to a new paradigm and you don’t have a really, really good reason for doing it that benefits THEM and is easier, they won’t do it. By going with Microsoft CRM, we have the opportunity to provide a solution that allows them to function basically the way they always have, and we get the benefit of having a CRM system that functions within our environment. That’s the right way to do it.

I refer to it as “hydro engineering” as in water always takes the path of least resistance. You know what? So do attorneys. They always take that path when trying to get the job done, and they should. They’re billing at high rates on behalf of their clients and we need to be sure we are taking care of the attorneys so they can take care of the firm’s clients.

So to quickly recap, 1) you get a homogenous solution which makes it very easy — you don’t have to worry about them catching up with new versions of Windows — they’re going to get there as quickly or before anyone else. 2) You get integration with your main products, and 3) you get a solution that works the way your users work. All of that made it a simple choice for us, and it didn’t hurt that the pricing was very competitive.

Lastly, it is provided by two fine, stable and innovative companies in Microsoft and Client Profiles, the latter having an enormous depth of experience in the legal industry, which is a huge plus for any law firm interested in CRM.

Integration with SharePoint — HAS Portal Strategy
Now I’d like to write a little bit about some additional advantages we found, specifically with Microsoft CRM’s integration with Sharepoint. An extremely important product for our firm, Sharepoint is critical to our workflow and part of our key strategy going forward. We view Sharepoint as that place where all of the important data and all of the collaboration will take place. So obviously our portal is Sharepoint-based, and from that we are constructing matter sites for each matter that exists within our firm. With each of those matters you want to have a variety of key information — who the matter is for, who is working on the matter, etc. You need to know who the contacts are for a particular matter. Of course, a big piece of that key information is the “who”. Who do we have working on that particular matter, and who does the client have? In addition, it might be nice to know opposing council. For example, if you are in a situation where you are representing both sides, they’ve signed off on conflicts and you’re providing appropriate walls, you could provide limited amount of information — such as who within the firm represents the opposing party that should not be included. In a situation such as this, Sharepoint becomes an increasingly important strategic platform for us and having a product that works with Sharepoint was absolutely key in our selection.

Other Core Application Integration
We also have some other core application integrations we are excited about as well, both within Sharepoint but also in Microsoft CRM. All of these are tying together — document management system is tying in, financial management system is tying in. We have also recently brought in OCS and Enterprise Search, consistent with our goal to enable our attorneys to get more done with all of our existing applications. It’s important to understand that all of the things “out-of-the-box”, or pretty close to it, work together at a very high level. The things you can make happen at that point begins to take on almost an element of magic for the attorneys because they’re able to get the information they need, some of which they didn’t know existed, or they’re able to get the information that previously may have necessitated a request to Accounting, for instance. Now, all of this information we are providing for them very quickly and easily helps our attorneys become more efficient on behalf of our clients.

Why CRM4Legal? — Legal Vertical Strategy
Why would we look at a legal-specific implementation of Microsoft CRM? The answer is very simple. Out-of-the-box Microsoft CRM is difficult to adapt to the legal world. While the base application has all of the key components that make it an excellent product, it doesn’t handle some the very legal-specific conundrums we run into, and our attorneys are faced with, every day. CRM4Legal by Client Profiles provides a legal adaptation of the software that allows the legal marketing group, attorneys and their assistants, administrators and anyone within the organization to work with a CRM solution that is specifically tailored to legal. CRM4Legal allows legal organizations to maximize their investment in CRM because Client Profiles has taken a good product and made it that much more useful for the legal space.

CP Knows Legal
I’ve had the opportunity to work with Client Profiles for many years and they know legal. When we originally contacted Microsoft to look for a legal-specific version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, they immediately referred me to Client Profiles and I couldn’t have been happier. Legal is a business they have been in for years and they are great at what they do. Across the board — from those running the company, to development, implementations and consulting — they know what they are doing and how to get the job done, a contrast from many other legal technology companies.

CP CRM Best Practices
Even more important for our CRM initiative was our confidence in Client Profiles’ know-how in the area of CRM in the legal space and their breadth of knowledge when it comes to CRM best practices. They know what information is best implemented and they know how to implement CRM in a way that maximizes your investment in the platform so you can service your clients better. Ultimately, this is all about the big “R” in CRM — the Relationships. With CRM4Legal, you’re getting a product that will help you mine relationships at a deeper level. But you’re also getting a relationship with an excellent pairing of companies — Microsoft and Client Profiles — that will help you get through the implementation to ensure that your investment is a sound one.

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Learn more about how Client Profiles Case and Financial Management solutions can provide real value to your practice. Schedule a demo at www.ClientProfiles.com/demo.asp.

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