COUNTRY-BY-COUNTRY INSIGHTS FROM LEADING LAW FIRMS AROUND THE WORLD

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Cast your mind back to 2006. You’d be forgiven for framing it as some quaint alternate reality, tame in comparison to the turbulent times we now live in.

Pottering around a New York high-rise, Donald Trump had no idea what a Twitter was. While out-side of the USA, most of the world didn’t know what a Donald Trump was.

If one were to compile a list of that year’s most shocking events, it would probably include a Frenchman’s headbutt into an Italian’s chest and a PowerPoint presentation by Al Gore.

(Reminder: It was he who rammed home the disastrous effects of global warming to anyone who’d listen. For the most part, they didn’t. So not everything’s changed.)

A VISION OF THE FUTUREIn a secluded(-ish) corner of London, meanwhile, four intrepid associates quietly launched Vuture – a marketing technology platform aimed at pro-fessional services that has, over the past decade, grown to become a leader in marketing automa-

tion and a stalwart of the legal sphere. Vuture now powers many of the world’s top 100

consultancy, accounting and legal firms, enabling users to create and manage every aspect of their marketing communication programmes, digital and print.

CEO David Brady has led the company since its inception and remains at the helm to this day, guiding Vuture clients along their automation jour-ney. With over 25 years’ experience as a marketer, Brady has seen the profession go through major disruption, including the ongoing effects of the two disruptors currently shaking up the legal market-ing landscape: automation and big data.

Fresh off an enthusiastically received presenta-tion on their interconnectivity at this year’s Legal Marketing Association Annual Conference in Las Vegas, David talked about how such technological advancements are impacting law firms.

Automation is a word we’re hearing more of across various industries and sectors. How is marketing automation specifically affecting law firms?Like many industries, legal is now utilising auto-mation to deal with inefficiencies in operations that take a lot of time and are very manual.

In an industry based on relationships, the dan-ger was always that by automating certain pro-cesses, something gets lost. The challenge for the provider of automation services, and for the law firms receiving them, is being able to create and

The Automation GameMeet the man behind the marketing technology that’s turning BIG data into BIGGER money for law firms.

PROFESSIONAL SERVICES MARKETING

Data is like a language: without interpretation, it’s meaningless.

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nurture those relationships at scale without losing intimacy.

Many law firms are fearful that the more they automate, the less able they are to provide a high degree of personalisation as part of their service. As it happens, automation has given firms the abil-ity to communicate with clients, remain front-of-mind and deliver the information that clients want, when they want it and how they want it, adding value to their general package of services. This personalisation is what conveys the feeling of inti-macy and uniqueness that is so coveted.

With more channels than ever through which marketers can communicate with, discover and track clients and prospects, what key advantages do marketers using automation software have?Going back five or ten years, it would have been dif-ficult to predict the type of everyday channels that

are available to marketers today. The problem with this increasing number

of channels is that it’s very difficult to manage them all. It’s almost impossible for even the best-equipped firms to do so in a meaningful way that delivers value to lawyers and partners without in-troducing some form of automation.

Due to its ability to deal with the inefficiencies of manual processes, automation is becoming an essential ingredient for any department handling a typical range of activities like events, campaigns, branding, etc. These departments are also doing a thousand other tasks, often far beyond their re-sources, and in such circumstances automation can be a lifesaver.

Big data, much like automation, is becoming increasingly impossible to ignore. How are the two connected?More channels means more data, which is giving

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some marketers a big headache, particularly when they’ve already got a million other things to do. The internal client, on the other hand, quite rightly wants to know what’s going on and wants to see tangible results.

Where automation and data go together is in taking away manual processes involving the ex-trapolation and distillation of information. The is-sue is that having it is one thing, understanding it is another. Not all data is created equal; it’s only as good as the questions that are being asked of it.

What’s required is some understanding of the automation that can help to make better quality decisions. That means working out what the ques-tions are to start with and then channelling the data in such a way as to make it valuable to the firm. That’s the important bit – finding valuable data that provides valuable insights.

If you put the wrong fuel into a luxury car, it

still won’t go; it’s the same relationship between data and automation in terms of the outcomes and the results that a firm can expect to achieve. Once those insights have been unearthed, the data can be used to change assumptions or processes and build new types of campaigns that help deliver outcomes.

You’ve described data as being capable of uncovering “the story beneath the story” with regards to a customer’s journey unfolding over time and in context. How can law firms benefit from this?Law firms today are consistently under pressure. Changes to company structure, globalisation, mergers and acquisitions, the huge downward pressure on price and the transformation of pric-ing models all require ever-increasing degrees of flexibility from law firms.

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This means that significant competitive advan-tages can be gained from accurately understand-ing the behaviours of clients; something data can help with if you know what the data means.

Firms that are effectively set-up to gather data from clients or prospects engaging with them can create a picture, which in turn can reveal a story. What the firm needs is someone who can interpret that story. It’s like a language: without interpreta-tion, it’s meaningless.

In the next few years, we’ll see an increase in the number of employees whose roles are specifi-cally designed to interpret the data from market-ing and other activities. These data scientists will have the ability and insight to see and understand what’s going on, tell you what it means and advise on what to do next. That level of intelligence will result in an enormous competitive advantage for the firms that get it right and use it wisely.

As automation becomes more prevalent, how do you convince marketers to embrace it and allay any fears they may have about the ‘Rise of the Machines’?It’s difficult to not be exposed to this idea that all jobs are about to be overtaken by computers or robots. There’s a lot of overstated fear around the subject, just as there was a century ago when people were convinced that the mass adoption of motorised vehicles would ruin thousands of lives dependant on the horse and carriage.

It’s progress; that’s the nature of it. Our envi-ronments move on. Roles change. A recent PwC report suggested that while millions of jobs will be replaced by AI and robots over the next 15 years, millions more will be created thanks to technologi-cal innovations.

Automation, which is only a small part of the ad-vancement in technology, will have an impact, but all it will do is make manual processes less manual – primarily affecting sectors such as transport and manufacturing.

Ultimately, anyone with talent as a marketer shouldn’t be worried, as they’ll end up doing high-er value, higher quality work, and that can only be good for them and their careers. It will also give them the ability to deliver measurable results and prove their effectiveness and true value, some-

thing that’s often difficult for legal marketers.

What are the benefits of automation for CMOs and partners, who may not be involved in the minutiae of day-to-day marketing activities?There’ll be an obvious budgetary one as automa-tion drives down costs. There’ll also be significant efficiencies in the amount of budget that’s wasted on bad processes due to the ability to measure outcomes and drive activities based on those out-comes, which is a huge benefit.

The old adage of ‘knowing half of your advertis-ing works, but not which half’ should increasingly become a thing of the past, which is good news for CMOs and great news for partners, on a P&L basis.

Another key advantage is the ability to ascer-

tain previously unavailable intelligence and in-sight on both a global/macro level and in relation to the finer details of how clients and prospects are engaging on an ongoing basis.

You’ve spoken in the past about data having an expiration date, and that data not processed quickly can become useless. How does mar-keting automation prevent this becoming an issue?Data expiration is always going to be a challenge at law firms, where fee earners and partners have more pressing things to do than manage their data and records.

It’s a constant struggle for marketers, who are expected to produce high quality content and

Automation makes fee earners more efficient at building higher quality relationships at scale, with the same intimacy as a handshake.

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engaging campaigns but are also reliant upon the veracity of the data they work with to deliver the results they expect.

The combination of CRM automation with email automation helps with this by limiting the amount of manual processes involved in keeping data up-dated and ensuring client preferences are always current.

How do privacy laws fit into it?New legislation such as next year’s GDPR will make a marketer’s life much easier, providing the moti-vation to clean out databases to ensure they only contain people who are genuinely interested in en-gaging with their firm. It will also guarantee that the firms doing the engaging are only delivering relevant information.

Marketers will have a much more refined audi-ence to work with, making their campaigns more targeted. Adding in automation to take care of the ground work and backend processes leaves marketers free to get on with some of the more re-warding parts of the job.

Vuture’s journey began a little over 10 years ago. Has automation evolved in the way you anticipated? Creating efficiencies was at Vuture’s core when we began.

We started out with the thought that it would be great if the client could create, edit and man-age their full range of campaigns without needing to use agencies, and that thought developed into a suite of marketing products with automation at the centre.

Could we have envisaged the huge rise in artifi-cial intelligence and machine learning that’s taking place now? Probably not, but the idea of increas-ing marketing efficiency was at the heart of what we were doing. We felt that we were giving a view of the future of marketing to our clients, which re-mains a constant for us to this day.

Where do you see automation taking the legal industry in the next few years and beyond?As business models evolve, so will the sophistica-tion of the automated capabilities that legal mar-keters employ. The ultimate beneficiary of that will be the end client.

Through technology, fee earners are becoming increasingly more efficient at building high qual-ity, personalised relationships at scale and offer-ing a service that is cost-effective, extremely value driven and streamlined. n

ABOUT THE CEODavid Brady is the CEO of Vuture – pioneers in ad-vanced marketing technology that helps firms in the professional services industries achieve suc-cess and increase revenue.

Leading Vuture’s strategic centres in London, New York and Sydney, David is focused on creating exceptional client experiences and uniting a global team of talent within a culture based on creativity, daring and collaboration.

In recent years, David has seen a growing num-ber of law firms adopt marketing technology to refine the way in which they communicate with prospects and build intimate, long-lasting client relationships.

With non-adopters facing the very real risk of being left behind, isn’t it time you viewed the fu-ture of legal marketing?

Visit www.vutu.re/explore to find out more.

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DAVID BRADYCEO, VUTURE

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