Charles: Welcome to The CMO Series Podcast. I'm Charles Cousins, and today we're looking at a challenge that many law firms face when introducing a new technology. How do you actually make sure the lawyers are going to use it? Today particularly, we're gonna focus on CRM implementations, and a CRM implementation can involve huge investment of time, money, resources.

But simply getting the technology live doesn't make the project a success. The real transformation happens when people change their work, use the technology, and it helps them to do their job better. To explore how firms can achieve that, I'm joined by the wonderful Eileen Kinney-Mallin, who has first-hand experience leading a global CRM implementation within a law firm.

We're going to look at why adoption needs to start early, long before the launch, and how involving lawyers in that process can shape both the technology and its eventual success, and why firms need to think about outcomes rather than just the implementation. So it gives me great pleasure to welcome Eileen.

Charlie: This episode is brought to you by CrossPitch AI, the new cross-selling tool from Passle. Cross-selling should be the easiest way for law firms to grow, but most firms struggle. Why? Lack of awareness, lack of trust, and frankly, fear of selling. The result? Missed revenue. CrossPitch.ai fixes that. It breaks down silos, helps professionals connect, and delivers timely, relevant insights to the right people inside the firm and out. There's no heavy roll-outs. Just switch it on and try it today. Head to crosspitch.ai to book your demo and make cross-selling happen. Now, back to the podcast.

Charles: Eileen, how are you going?

Eileen: Good. Thanks, Charles. I appreciate you having me on your podcast.

Charles: Well, it's great to chat to you. So I guess something we're interested in, just in the field we work in, is how do you get lawyers to actually use a tool? And, today we're gonna cover specifically CRMs, where I know you've got first-hand experience. But actually, you've got quite a distinctive career journey in professional services. So maybe to get us started, if you can give us a sort of a bit of a background on what you've been up to to date and maybe we can then go on to sort of when you realized that implementing a CRM isn't just a case of giving the lawyers a tool and going, but you realized that there was a bit more to that.

Eileen: Mm-hmm. Well, thanks. My career has actually spanned several different industries. So I spent about 10 years in architecture, engineering, and construction, and then another 10 in financial services and investment management, and then the last 12 years have been in the legal industry. And one of the benefits of having that kind of career journey is that I've been able to see first-hand how dramatically marketing and the role of the marketer has evolved. When I started my career, and I'm gonna date myself here, we didn't have email. And we didn't have websites, social media, and a lot of the technology that we take for granted today. It didn't exist. So marketing was much more focused on communications and traditional brand-building. But over time, technology and data completely changed what was possible, and marketing became much more sophisticated and measurable and, importantly, much more closely connected to business development and revenue.

So when I moved into the legal space, that connection became particularly interesting to me because law is such a relationship-driven business. And law firms have an extraordinary amount of relationship intelligence, but historically, much of that intelligence lived with the individual lawyer. It was in their contacts or it was simply in their heads. And the firm, you know, might collectively have an incredible, valuable network of relationships without having any real way to see or leverage it. And-

Charles: Mm ...

Eileen: That's when I really began to appreciate the strategic potential of CRM. Done well, CRM allows you to take individual relationship intelligence and turn it into institutional intelligence. So suddenly you can begin to understand not only who knows whom, but where the strongest relationships exist across the firm. Where there might be opportunities to collaborate, where you might be able to make an introduction, or where there may be an opportunity to expand an existing relationship. And to me, that's when CRM becomes much more than a contact database or a piece of marketing technology. It becomes business intelligence that can help lawyers develop relationships and help the firm make smarter growth decisions. But I also learned something equally important through the process. Selecting and implementing the technology is only part of the challenge.

Charles: Mm.

Eileen: The real value comes when people actually use it and it changes the way they work. And that's why I came to believe that adoption can't be something you think about at the end of a CRM implementation. It has to be part of the strategy from the very beginning.

Charles: Yeah, and I think that's the sort of the age-old problem- faced by marketers that are trying to implement any technology, is that how do you get busy lawyers to actually do it? Right ... so thinking back to your CRM project, what did that actually look like, and where did adoption fit into that? You mentioned, you know, it starts early on. What did that look like?

Eileen: Well, I think firms, I mean, for me to take a step back, I think firms sometimes confuse implementation with transformation, and there's an important distinction between the two that is paramount for a CRM implementation. You can select a platform and you can configure it, migrate your data, integrate systems and roll it out, you know, live, have it go live. But technically you haven't implemented a CRM. That doesn't ... So you haven't transformed anything. Transformation happens when the technology changes the way people work, and ultimately helps the firm operate more effectively. So for me, a successful CRM project starts before you get to the technology, and that's the approach that we took.

It starts with being very clear about the business problems you're trying to solve and the outcomes you want to achieve. Maybe you need better visibility into relationships across the firm, or maybe you want to identify cross-selling opportunities or improve pipeline visibility. Or some firms, you know, you wanna connect your marketing activity to business development opportunities or give the lawyer just better intelligence before they walk into a client meeting.

Charles: Mm.

Eileen: Once you understand those objectives, you can work backward and determine what the technology needs to do to support them, and that's very different from starting with a platform and asking, "What can we do with it?" So, you know, adoption becomes really, really important, and that's really where you need to start. The adoption isn't simply whether someone logged into the CRM and attended your training session. Genuine adoption happens when the system becomes part of how people work. Like when a lawyer checks client intelligence before approaching a prospect, or if you have a practice leader that uses the pipeline data to make decisions, or when your marketing and BD teams can identify opportunities that may have been missed.

So that's where we started. I mean, you can build the most sophisticated CRM in the world, but if people don't use it and they don't see value in it, you've just basically created an expensive database for yourself. So I always come back to the distinction, I think this is really important for people who are starting out, its implementation is getting the technology live. Transformation is getting the firm to work differently because of it, and adoption is the bridge between the two.

Charles: So to drill down on that, how can firms involve lawyers and other stakeholders early on to make sure that that sort of adoption happens? What should they be doing or asking of them?

Eileen: Well, I think that the best thing that you can do and the approach that we took was- The front end of your project, your very first phase should be a planning phase. You need to engage the lawyers, you need to engage finance, you need to engage conflicts, you need to engage stakeholders across the firm, and you need to have open discussions, that you need to get their insight. And it has to go deeper than, "Well, what do you want the CRM to do?" No, you need to ask questions about, you know, what are their pain points, what information do they not have that they feel that if they had it, they could be more successful in their BD efforts. And you really need to start drilling down so that you understand what their needs are.

And then once you do that, it is very insightful. Then you can develop your requirements for your CRM, but you can't do it in a vacuum. Like, if you try to just create a system and say, "Here it is," you know, "Go and use it," people turn away from that. But people will embrace something that they helped create. So if you engage them... And we spent, I'm going to say nine to 10 months, that we met with all of our practice leaders, we engaged our finance department, our conflicts department, we engaged business development and marketing, and these were sessions that we really did drill down. We did use a consultant to help us, you know, to start out. We were very copious with our notes to make sure that we were capturing all the insight that was being shared with us, and then we used that in order to build a system to meet the needs of the firm. And again, when you do that and you embrace the stakeholders and they feel that they've had a part in the decision-making, you're gonna be much more successful.

Charles: So you mentioned there you spent several months speaking to people. But how did that sort of stakeholder input influence what you eventually built and, you know, ultimately help with the adoption?

Eileen: We used everything that we heard and everything that the lawyers were telling us they needed, and we built it into our requirements. So then what that looked like, we did all of those discussions before we engaged any vendor.

Charles: Mm.

Eileen: So it helped us that we had checklists, that we put together a checklist of, here are the things that we need in our CRM system, and then when we sat down with vendors, we shared it with them. And we said, "Here's what we need," and we asked a lot of questions. And I laugh because we really were very thorough with the vendors, that at the end of the process the vendor said, "Gee, like you guys didn't just kick the tires, you kicked the tires off the car," because we kept pulling them back into sessions that we did not wanna get caught in the trap, and a lot of people experience this. You work with a vendor and they tell you they have certain capabilities, and oh, our software and application does this, and then when you try to develop it, it doesn't do everything that you thought it did. Well, we wanted to make sure that we didn't end up with that problem.

So we turned everything that the lawyers gave us into our checklist and we shared it with the vendors, and then that was part of the process of selection. We used all of that data to make sure that we were selecting the right vendor and the right system that could meet our needs.

Charles: I know when we did our sort of preparation for this, one of the examples you gave was you had lawyers asking for relationship scoring and how that ultimately gave greater visibility into who across the firm had the strongest client relationships and encouraged more collaboration. How important is it to give lawyers sort of tangible use cases like that where they can immediately see what's in it for them?

Eileen: It's paramount. You know, a lawyer has to see and embrace really see the value of the system from the start. Like, adoption is number one. Like, we all know that if you have lawyers that come into your new system and they don't have a good experience, or they don't see the value in that application, they're gonna turn away from it. And you really have one shot to capture their attention, and if you don't do that, you're gonna have an uphill climb. But if you start out by having these stakeholder interviews and you really learn what they need. And what we learned, and I think this is customary, what we learned through those sessions is that lawyers wanted to know, you know, who knows this person?

Who's worked with this client? Where are there client relationships that I don't even know about? And that became important, and the relationship scoring was paramount. Like, every lawyer thinks, "Well, I have the best relationship with this client." Well, do you? I mean, what's that based on? And we also heard, the other thing we heard through those sessions is lawyers don't want another administrative burden.

All right? They don't wanna be overtaxed with having to keep contacts up to date, or don't expect me to be going into the system every week and having to manually output or input information. So those conversations that we had really influenced not only the capabilities we prioritized, but how we thought about integrations with other firm systems, automation, and the overall user experience. Because wherever possible, you know, we wanted the technology to capture and surface information through the lawyer's existing workflow. Because if you, again, overburden them and tax them with too many things, like look, they're concerned about servicing their clients. The CRM system needed to make their job easier, not give them another job to do. And if you do that, you will have, you know, a successful outcome.

Charles: Yeah. And I was actually just thinking of another question. I feel like law firms typically fall into two categories: we're in the process of putting in a CRM, or we've got a CRM but it's really hard to get the attorneys to use it.

So flipping it round a little bit, have you got any advice to people that have maybe, they've already done the project, so they can't do what we've talked about in starting involving the lawyers early on, but maybe their, their CRM's already live. Have you got any ideas of what you might say to those folks on how you could drive adoption?

Eileen: Sure, and a lot of people, and I know from going to different round tables and meeting with, you know, peers across the industry, that is a situation a lot of people are in.

Charles: Mm.

Eileen: I think that the best course would be to get a task force together and have meetings with the lawyers, and approach it from the standpoint of why aren't you using the system? What is it that the system isn't providing that you would find very valuable? I think you need to go back and do your due diligence to find out the why behind the lack of usage, and then you need to look at your system and look at it as a re-launch. Like, what can you do to improve upon the structure that you have? And brand the effort as, "We're listening," okay, "We understand what your needs are. We're going back and we're looking at our existing system, and that we're gonna do another refresh." Right? And if people know that you are sincerely looking at the system, and that's the time when you have these discussions with groups.

And the other piece of advice that I would give is, we all know that sometimes practices have opposing viewpoints, or you can have two partners that wanna do two different things, and obviously you can't do both. It's best to orchestrate conversations where you have those opposing voices in that same round table discussion so that they can understand each other's perspectives. And then marketing, you can bridge the gap and navigate the discussion to come to terms with, "Well, what can we do?" Like, what would service both practices? And then once you understand their needs and you can put some requirements in place for yourself, then you have to work with your vendor and say, "Look, here's the challenges that we have. What can we do?" And, you know, vendors are constantly working with their product development teams to enhance their applications. Maybe there is a concept that you can introduce, and your vendor may be very willing to work with your product development team to enhance a service. But that would be my advice.

So look at it as a refresh and go back and have those conversations, because they're very powerful. They're very insightful. Sometimes the smallest comments leave the biggest impressions. That you walk away from a discussion that sometimes you even think, "Gee, that's pretty logical," like, why didn't we think of that? But I think that's the way to get people in. And I think that you have to think about who your lawyers are who have that- Capital across the firm that are really ambassadors or could act as an ambassador, make sure you have those people engaged because they can help you with the message that, hey, it's not the same old system, that we do want to do a refresh. But in order for us to do that, we need your input. And just bringing people to the table and having the understanding of what's needed,I think that is what's most valuable and can help get you on track.

Charles: I think for any psychologists out there we call it the IKEA effect. So the idea, IKEA is a big furniture store. If you build the furniture yourself, you assign it more value. So yeah, I can see how involving the attorneys in that building process, all of a sudden they assign it more value and that adoption increases. And finally, you said that success isn't being able to say, "We've implemented a CRM." It's being able to demonstrate how the system has affected the business, evolved the firm's strategy, and, and ultimately contributed to revenue. So once the CRM is live, how should firms go about measuring what they've achieved and how do they measure that adoption and success? What should they be doing?

Eileen: I think you need to measure CRM at several levels, because logins alone don't tell you whether the CRM is successful. I tend to think about it in three stages: usage, behavior, and ultimately business impact. At the first level, you absolutely need to understand whether people are using the system. Like, are lawyers accessing relationship intelligence? Are contacts being added or updated? Is pipeline information being maintained? Is mar- are your marketing and BD teams using the data? Those are important indicators because they tell you whether the CRM is actually becoming part of the firm's day-to-day workflow. But usage alone isn't adoption. The next question is whether the technology is changing behavior.

So you need to look, are lawyers using relationship intelligence before they approach a prospect? Are they collaborating more across practices and offices? Like, are you seeing an impact in that way? Are practice leaders using, like, the pipeline data? You need to look at it from that perspective, but I think that the most important level is the business impact. Like, you need to look at, are we identifying opportunities we might otherwise have missed, or are we expanding relationships with existing clients? I think that is extremely significant. You have a client where you understand, hey, we could be, you know, cross-selling them across practices and you aren't.

Are you seeing an uptick in that? Do you have better visibility into the pipeline and where future revenue may come from? And can we begin, you know, connecting marketing and BD activity? Whether that's like an event or a campaign or another touchpoint, can you connect it to opportunities and new matters and ultimately revenue? So, that progression is important because it moves the conversation from are people using CRM to what is the CRM enabling the firm to accomplish? And over time, I think that's the real measure of success. The goal isn't for you to be able to stand in front of leadership and say, "We successfully implemented a CRM."

The goal is to be able to say, "Here's what we know today that we didn't know before. Here are the opportunities we've uncovered. Here's how we're collaborating differently, and here's how we're making better decisions, and ultimately, here's how we contribute to growth." So, when you can have that conversation, CRM stops being viewed as a marketing technology platform and starts to become part of the firm's business strategy. And I think that really brings us back to where we started. Implementation gets the technology live, adoption changes behavior, but business impact is what ultimately makes the transformation successful.

Charles: Yeah, I like that. I like that. It's not just about usage that isn't enough, it's what does it, what impact does it have on the bottom line of the business?

Eileen: Right.

Charles: So we end all of our podcasts in the same way, and it's asking our guests what is the one takeaway you would offer to folks that are maybe involved in a CRM project, for you specifically to help them encourage better adoption with their attorneys?

Eileen: Be inclusive. Collaborate effectively. Do not set out to build a CRM in a vacuum. If you don't engage your stakeholders and get their voice, they're not going to have a connection to it because they didn't help create it. So communicate, communicate and collaborate.

Charles: Brilliant. I love that. Communicate and collaborate. And I'm afraid that's all we've got time for today, so I just wanted to say a big thanks, Eileen, for coming on, sharing your insights on how to make a CRM implementation as successful as possible and really get those lawyers using it. So thanks again.

Eileen: Well, thanks, Charles. It was nice talking to you.

Charlie: You can follow the Passle CMO Series podcast on your preferred podcast platform. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.