THE AUTHOR:
Cécile Roche, Consultant and head of MCBD Services
Law professionals use a great variety of marketing strategies to keep and develop a strong client portfolio to generate a continuous flow of mandates and revenues.
Professional events, newsletters, Christmas cards: all these strategies require rigorous and efficient management of contacts’ details. This is where the meticulously elaborated strategies tend to go pear-shaped.
Keeping track of one’s contacts’ professional details is time-consuming and requires very regular input. Procrastination is very tempting. However, if you give in to this temptation for a few weeks, your contact list will soon be obsolete.
Attracting new clients is a must if you want to develop your business. This is particularly true for dispute resolution firms that usually have an opportunistic business model. If you don’t have a system for regularly populating your contact list with fresh blood, your list will likely remain static and not be of much use.
What’s at stake?
Let’s take the example of professional events that you organize, which are one of the highest expenses in a business development budget in the legal sector. The investment in time and money will be worth it, as long as it helps you reach your target clients, grow your network, build your profile, increase your reputation, and gain visibility within your target audience.
An outdated and static contact list will have a series of adverse effects:
One of Your Key Clients May Never Get Your Invitation
In addition to losing a chance of developing your relationship with them, your client may even hear about the event separately, on LinkedIn for instance, and get offended that they didn’t get an invitation. This may cause a quiproquo that may impact your client’s loyalty and ultimately strain your relationship.
Your Professional Emails May End Up Not Getting Delivered Anymore
When you send an email to an invalid email address, this causes a hard bounce. The more outdated your contact list is, the more hard bounces you will get, and the more this will affect the deliverability of all your emails in the future. This may lead to your domain name being blacklisted and your emails (even your professional ones) never getting delivered. This strict approach to contact data management isn’t just a trend. By way of illustration, Gmail has recently toughened its policy in this regard. As of 1 February 2024, all senders using an email marketing tool to send emails to Gmail addresses need to have a spam rate lower than 0.3% as well as comply with other stricter authentication requirements.
You May Miss a Chance of Getting Mandates from New Clients
Professional events, social media, and news reports provide you with opportunities to connect with prospects and get new mandates. Often though, the step of enriching your contact list with potential targets isn’t followed through. Information sources multiply and contacts’ details are spread out.
You May End Up Infringing Data Privacy and Protection Laws
In Europe, the GDPR (article 5) requires that personal data be kept for a limited period of time depending on the type of data and the purposes for which they are processed. In practical terms, you can’t keep your former clients’ personal data forever in the hope that they will send you new mandates.
In addition to this, you must include a link allowing your contacts to facilitate their right to object to receiving your newsletters, email invitations, etc.., in all your email campaigns.
In this regard, the French Bar Council (Conseil National des Barreaux – CNB) released in May 2023 the second edition of its practical guide on data protection, which provides specific guidance to the lawyers practicing in France, including members of foreign Bars (which will be the case for many international arbitration practitioners).
How to Manage Your Contact List Efficiently?
Designate a “Contact List Master”
The first step is to designate a person who will be responsible for managing your contact list. If several people are responsible, then nobody will take charge of it. This person will need to be meticulous and rigorous. Your “contact list master” will also need to be incentivized for this role. It’s unlikely to work if they do this “on the side” without clear objectives. Finally, this person will need to have access to all the sources, e.g. mailboxes, website back office, email marketing tool, etc. Adding a layer to the system will not only make tasks more difficult to accomplish but also significantly reduce efficiency.
Keep It Simple, Maintain Just One Consolidated List or Database
The second step is to consolidate all existing lists into one. Let’s take the example of a partner at a law firm. Maintaining one contact list per partner is common and may seem to be a good idea at first. This way, each partner handles their own contact list, ensuring they are kept up to date. After all, who knows their contacts better than the partners themselves? However, partners will receive contacts’ details through numerous sources, such as business cards, emails, LinkedIn, etc. And we all know how the more sources of information there are, the more likely the contacts’ details will be lost or mismanaged.
By not sharing their contacts’ details, partners also deprive themselves of an opportunity to cross-sell their services with other partners at the firm and develop their firm’s business and brand collectively. Finally, maintaining several lists duplicates the work mechanically and introduces a higher risk of errors.
Do Some Spring Cleaning
Before you start populating your list with new contacts, you will need to clean it. Start by removing any duplicates to quickly reduce the size of your list. If you have consolidated several lists into one, then you will likely have quite a few of those. Then, remove contacts who have opted out from your list. This is usually done automatically by email marketing tools but if your lists are spread out in different sources then you will need to check that the contacts who have opted out in one source don’t end up coming back in your consolidated list through the back door.
Do not neglect any hard bounces. These contacts’ details will either have to be removed or updated but they can’t be kept as they are in your list. Email marketing tools usually identify these for you and even remove them if you’ve set this up in your account settings. Beware of removals though, with a helping hand (and the help of technology), you should be able to update your older contacts’ details and use this opportunity to get in touch again.
Continue by removing unnecessary data. As previously pointed out, the GDPR requires that you only keep the data that is necessary to be kept for the purposes for which the data has been processed. As regards marketing and business development purposes, you don’t need much information, and certainly no sensitive data.
Finally, remove any former clients with whom you have not been in contact for a long time. Under the GDPR, it’s up to you to decide how long you want to keep his data, but it certainly can’t be kept nor used indefinitely.
Update Your List
The next step will be to update the contact details you want to keep in your list. In my experience, 30% of the content of a contact list becomes obsolete after 12 months, so this job can’t be left unattended for too long. One day or another (and generally when Christmas cards are on the agenda), it will have to be done. Best not to leave this until the last-minute tough. Going forward, it’s a good idea to include a formal updating step in your agenda (and use technology to help).
Have a System for Populating Your List With New Clients and Prospects
Your contact list must evolve as your client portfolio grows and your business development activities develop. Client onboarding is the ideal time for this type of exercise and ought to include a formal GDPR-compliant opt-in step. When managing your clients’ details, transparency is the watchword. Social and networking events, and targeted business trips aimed at developing alliances and partnerships with other business partners also offer great opportunities that should not be left to sink like a soufflé. You’ll be expected to follow up. Whatever the source of your contacts’ details, there must be a system for these to end up in your contact list. Here again, it’s a good idea to include a formal process for each type of interaction.
Use Technology and External Help
No need to break your back on this and do this manually or, on the other side of the spectrum, get a full-service AI-powered CRM system. Many tools and service providers can help you get the previous steps done faster without having to invest much time or money, such as Dropcontact, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Nomination, or Anaba. Technology is your best friend, especially when it comes to managing your contacts’ details.
What makes the success of a law firm isn’t just the satisfaction and engagement of its teams, clients, and social media audience; its brand, press coverage, rankings, and reputation; or even its tools and internal processes …, it’s a combination of all these things, including the careful management of contacts’ details. One part of the equation, yet often neglected, while a little effort in this sphere will have powerful effects on the development of your legal business. No more excuses: stop procrastinating!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Cécile Roche is a consultant in marketing, communication and business development (MCBD) for the legal industry. After studying law in France and in England, Cécile worked for over ten years in the International Arbitration practice of a Magic Circle law firm in Paris. In 2016, Cécile was awarded an MBA and embraced a career in legal MCBD. She worked at leading business law firms in Paris and Monaco for the next six years. In 2022, she founded MCBD Services, a legal marketing company based in France, where she works as a consultant, putting her skills and experience to the service of French and foreign lawyers working in global markets.
