High-end London law firm Farrer & Co has selected Peppermint Technology for client engagement and enterprise relationship management, swapping out its on-premises LexisNexis InterAction system for a native cloud systems built on Microsoft Dynamics 365.
Farrer & Co is famous for its elite clients, which include the Queen of England, but also for acting for large corporations such as News International and charitable institutions such as The Gates Foundation.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider, Farrer & Co IT director and partner Andy Beech said that the selection followed a comprehensive market review. The companies that Farrer & Co looked at included HSO, Intapp, LexisNexis and Peppermint. Assisted by independent consultant Neil Cameron, Farrer & Co conducted a RFP process that looked at the needs of an ERM/CRM system from two different perspectives; the business development team and lawyers themselves.
“The BD team are very excited about the idea of being able to leverage what we have in this platform for their engagement with clients and content, as well as event management,” Beech, pictured above, said.
“From the lawyers’ perspectives, it’s about ease of management, and the efficiency and effectiveness of gathering contact details and maintaining those. At the moment, it’s all manual intervention. Where we are going, it’s going to be automated, and we’ll be doing things like signature scraping and checking the quality of data such as email and postal addresses and phone numbers, which will automatically be updated behind the scene.”
Law firms inevitably rely heavily on the strength of their contact details and Beech said: “How we maintain those is a big deal. One thing that Peppermint is going to do is give us a relationship measurement, so you know when you last had contact with an organisation. It will remind you to get in touch with them. We can also link it to the BD plans and strategy, so if, for example, we’re focused on a particular vertical, we can focus on the owners of contacts in that area and encourage them to reach out.”
Farrer has long had a cloud-first strategy and selected its document management system NetDocuments in 2014. Beech said: “Peppermint fits well with our strategy: it’s no surprise that we’re a Microsoft house and we invest heavily in the Microsoft stack. Peppermint is based on Dynamics and has a close integration with everything we have around the business, so it makes perfect sense. It helps with security and governance and Microsoft is constantly developing new features and functionality, so we don’t need to do an awful lot to start consuming a better product, it just happens.”
Cameron, who is also a lead analyst for this publication and has written reports on both the CRM and PMS market, helped Farrer & Co to develop the RFP and joined the firm as part of the evaluation process. Beech said: “He helped to ensure we hadn’t missed anything important and was a sanity check for us.”