Driving change in any organisation is always a challenge, especially in global organisations that operates in teams of teams. 

During the afternoon session at the Legal Marketing Association Annual Conference today the panel discussed their technology setup and crucially how they have driven adoption. Here are a few top tips to drive CRM utilisation at your law firm:

• Create touchpoints from around the firm - Jennifer Schreck (Reed Smith) explained how she has involved all internal groups of the firm so everyone is moving in the same direction. This could be the HR department or the Pricing team. Jennifer found that by making sure all groups understood their relevance to the CRM then the lawyers would all be If getting the same message from every point across the firm.
• Drive Revenue Growth - Nanette Matys (Smart & Biggar/Fetherstonhaugh) made the point that everything needs to tie back to revenue growth. Clearly, this is the priority for the lawyers so demonstrating how CRM utilisation and related activities will support revenue growth is key to driving adoption.
• Deliver CRM with additional information - Milosz Skrzypczak (Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt) explained that he delivers additional value with the CRM such as market analysis so lawyers can make informed decisions to drive revenue. Doing this with the CRM demonstrates the value add and will increase adoption.
• Act on your insights - Jennifer also mentioned that it is important to not just produce reports from your CRM but also analyse, pass to the lawyer in a manner they can understand and then for the support team/lawyer to act on these insights. This supports the need for feedback to drive adoption. 

Law firms are not the only industry that struggles with CRM adoption and in all the successful examples of adoption I have seen there has involvement of the entire firm with a clear objective to support revenue growth with the associated feedback to demonstrate this.