Canadian Lawyer

January 2008

The most widely read magazine for Canadian lawyers

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MARK E TING BY FRIEDRICH BLASE Keeping up with the Joneses Competitive intelligence helps firms better themselves by knowing what others are up to. it into the same sentence. But that is changing fast. The gathering, analyzing, and applying of valuable information about competitors is becoming stan- dard practice among sophisticated law firms worldwide. C What is it good for? Increasing complexity in the pursuit of both clients and talent are draw- ing firms into understanding in more detail what the competition is doing. No firm wants to be outsmarted by its peers when it comes to attracting new sources of work, new partners, or new associates. At the same time, firms are increasingly looking for competitive intelligence to teach them new ways for improving both short- and long-term performance. For example, a firm may realize through such intelligence that it is charging lower rates than its com- petitors; this is a significant argument in defending rate increases to clients as well as sceptical partners. Other firms benefit from adopting policies and procedures successfully implemented in pioneering firms, such as client ser- vice standards or professional develop- ment programs. A firm's performance is always as- sessed in relation to something else. If there is no timely knowledge about the competition's performance, that com- parison must be internal and historic — how did we do this year compared to the last five years? Yet, that approach lets ompetitive intelligence and the legal profession — until recently those two expres- sions would not have made a firm off the hook too easily, since most firms improve over time, especially at the things they manage and measure. For many areas of performance, how- ever, the key comparison is whether the firm has done better than its competi- tors. Only if it outperformed them can staff and owners rest assured that their firm has actually become better. Com- petitive intelligence helps firms both benchmark past performance and set expectations for the future. What sources? Most people regard the legal sector as a relatively obscure market, in which obtaining competitive intelligence can 32 JANU AR Y 2008 www. C ANADIAN Law ye rmag.com seem daunting. This stems from the na- ture of its business and the way it is or- ganized. There is little clarity about and even less comparability of the "prod- ucts." Usually, there is also no price; hourly rates are a poor substitute. And even those can vary greatly from engage- ment to engagement. There are no trade fairs where the industry exhibits its in- novations; and no law firm has to make extensive public filings or be exposed to public scrutiny in any other form. Com- petitive intelligence has therefore tradi- tionally been based on anecdotal evi- dence, a dangerous source, as it tends to be evidence of singular and usually ex- treme cases (why else would it be worth BILL BLASTMAN

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