Osborne Clarke rolled out Intapp Open Experience to around a quarter of the business in May, having been instrumental in its development. The new product, which Osborne Clarke’s IT director Nathan Hayes says needs an entirely new legal tech category devoted to it, helps law firms to improve their business development and ability to cross-sell. Not business intake and not CRM, Intapp Open Experience captures information on current matters and projects and makes it searchable, avoiding the need for extensive data entry.
Here’s Nathan with more:
What does Intapp Experience actually do?
“If you have a client matter, partners can very quickly access any experience around it. When it comes to pitches and tenders, marketing teams can quickly find all the details from our records, plus also additional information that doesn’t sit within the practice management system. It is the story behind the matter – the commentary around the matter. If relevant, you can also ask for a translation in to a local language.”
Who does it compete with?
No-one. There are vendors that pull together pitches but here we’re talking about the whole lifecycle.*
When does it kick in at Osborne Clarke?
Intapp captures information on individual matters and projects by integrating data from the firm’s existing systems and makes it searchable, avoiding the need for extensive data entry. We’ve set a trigger so that it kicks in on any matter worth over £25,000 and where it hits over 75% of fees, so that all the information should be available and can be used as part of our sales material. It’s what’s missing to help law firms deliver great client service and that is what Intapp is looking to build out.
We’re looking at working on various other projects with Intapp to fill the gaps we see as glaring holes in the IT services we provide.
Have you rolled it out fully?
First phase was 22 May and we’ve rolled it out to a quarter of the UK business for presentations and pitches and plan to roll the reporting elements of the system to lawyers so they can provide clients with a better understanding of our capabilities and cross-sell. We’ve shown it to the executive board and the feedback has been without exception positive. You have to remember that we have grown really quickly internationally which means communication can be a big issue. Having a mechanism where we can trap in an authoritative way our work and make it easily accessible to communicate that to our clients in a safe way is incredibly valuable. Our marketing team can’t possibly always know what’s going on in the entirety of the rest of the business and we had spreadsheets coming out of our ears that quickly got out of date. But Intapp Experience mines the data that’s there and puts it together in a way that works.
What are the next steps?
We’re at a really interesting stage. Reporting on the data is great and really useful but it will get really interesting when we start looking at matter types for example where we are usually operating across many jurisdictions. Of those, are there opportunities where particular clients are only instructing us in just one or two jurisdictions and why is that. It’s about identifying the outliers and seeing them as opportunities.
*See Foundation Software Group’s profile up yesterday (11 July). The startup – which focusses on pulling together and leveraging a law firm’s experience – was founded in 2014 by Nate Fineberg, former CEO of Interface Software, which created Interaction (acquired by LexisNexis in 2004). Ed