Client relationship management (CRM) systems have achieved ubiquity in F1000 firms, but their usefulness, and even their feasibility, in law firms has been, shall we say, less certain. 

[Jargon time-out:  "CRM" systems are designed to capture, in one central and widely available database, all contact information about a client and their interaction with the firm:  Think of a sort of super-Microsoft Outlook "contact" entry which is updated in real time with information about who has spoken to the client about what, who's working on what, the client's particular areas of interest, what email distribution lists they're on, etc.  If, like everyone else in the country, you've phoned your credit card (800) number and dutifully punched in your sixteen-digit account number after the automated prompts, only to end up speaking with a human being who does not have your account information in front of them, you have been party to a dysfunctional CRM system.]

Now, Legal Week has surveyed adoption of and attitudes toward CRM in leading UK firms, with both predictable and somewhat surprising results.  But before assessing the value of a CRM deployment, what are the obstacles to installing or maintaining it in the first place.  They are, to state the obvious, both technical and cultural:

• Data entered into the system must be "clean;" it is not a matter of aggregating everybody's Contacts list and dumping it on to a server.
• Data must be maintained; if it takes associates (never mind partners, who are truly key to the system's success) more than a few minutes a day to tend to the care and feeding of the system, it will atrophy.
• "Confidentiality" of client data is a critical obstacle in many cases:  "You want me to share what with the entire firm about my key clients?!"  There is a technological response to this (levels of permissions for sensitive data) and a cultural response—once the benefits of a robust system are apparent, reluctance to contribute to the system's power will diminish.

Sharing information—and a CRM system is, at bottom, just a species of knowledge management, so it is all about sharing information—is the ur-obstacle.  Sharing what you know about, say, structuring project finance deals may seem to pose a risk of diluting your expertise by spreading it across the firm, but sharing what you know about your key client may seem to pose a risk to your livelihood.

Surprisingly, the survey found that a stunning 59% of respondents were "not at all concerned" that information about client contacts would be abused.  Yet more telling is that a vanishingly small 3% of clients complained of an unwanted contact from a firm.

This last statistic is, to my mind, the ball-game.  97% of clients, in other words, welcomed (or did not have reason to object to) every "touch-point" from their law firm.  What other industry could match that number?

We know from survey after survey after survey that clients' biggest single gripe about their law firms is that the firms do not truly understand the client's business.  If CRM gives you a fighting chance of knowing what's top-of-mind for your client, knowing who down the hall (or around the globe) has spoken to them about that lately, and can lay out the opportunity for you to reach out to them, why on earth would your firm not do it?

Unfortunately, I have my own theory:  Far too many lawyers, even now, are allergic to the reality that they have to fundamentally compete on service, client focus, and demonstrating pointed and astute, distinctive, business-centric expertise.  To those of this mindset, a "CRM system" sounds like a pox created by demented MBA's clueless about the noble profession of the law. 

If serving your clients with perspicacity, timeliness, and total-firm awareness is a noble goal (and it is), CRM's time has come.