The future of law firms. Now.Empowering client-centricity and trust in law firms – through connected data.

As a general trend, clients are increasingly insisting that the law firms delivering their legal expertise provide more engagement and insight, as well as demonstrate how they plan to reduce their environmental impact.

Clients expect to be seen and interacted with holistically, across their business operations and divisions. They want responsive, proactive, insight-driven, rapid, and ultimately client-centric experiences, and they want to work with law firms that can demonstrate a clear climate action plan.

Law firms need to digitise and evolve beyond their traditional business models, while maintaining, deepening, and scaling the insightful expertise and experience-led approach to those seeking their support. This need to change, while retaining core values is exacerbated by other challenges, including a rise in competitors – such as specialised alternative legal service providers (ALSPs) and self-service platforms – and the increasing impact of AI and automation of legal processes. This is against a backdrop where law firms and their partners can be reluctant, even resistant, to the adoption of new technologies.

To respond to changing client needs and reach new and existing clients through highly targeted digital marketing, law firms need to make greater use of their data. This can be achieved by taking steps to address traditional, siloed practice-led structures, and embracing new technologies that drive growth and sustainability opportunities – allowing law firms to benchmark with other leading industries.

Simply put, law firms should be seeking to become more connected, data-driven and innovative: to put their clients first, connect with them more effectively, and deliver even more complete and rapid insight – to maintain their reputation as the true ‘trusted advisors’ for people, businesses and our planet.

Empowering client-centricity and trust in law firms – through connected dataBy becoming ever more data-driven and connected, law firms can achieve new relevance and deeper loyalty as well as higher levels of performance, personalisation, scale and sustainability.

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How can Salesforce enable you to drive change?

Transforming practices through data to increase productivity and growth while deepening trust.

Salesforce provides law firms with the ability to aggregate, access, connect, and apply the power of unified data – enhancing client and employee experiences, engagement, and trust within the critical lawyer-client relationship.

Through our products and services, we can help law firms to transform and evolve their mindset, become more agile, attract new clients, and find and exploit new opportunities to keep them competitive in an aggressive market.

With Salesforce’s ‘Client 360’ approach, we help law firms connect their business and employees across their practices with a complete, holistic view of their clients – enabling them to understand and serve them better, while encouraging trust and loyalty. As a more joined-up, integrated, and collaborative business, this supports the delivery of more connected legal expertise, even across globally distributed offices and locations. This ensures that major clients receive consistent advice, insight and support in a unified manner, even when client needs become more complex.

This unified data also provides a foundation for the use of automation to further drive insight and understanding, as well to implement process automation to cut costs, improve accuracy, and improve compliance.

Embracing technology in this way will help with the acquisition and retention of the next generation of legal talent, whose employee expectations – in terms of user experiences, operational capabilities, and data-driven solutions – are also rising alongside those of clients, and will be critical for further accelerating change in the industry.

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What can Salesforce deliver to enable you to achieve your business goals?

A complete client-centric and data-driven platform, designed to help law firms attract, understand, nurture, and engage clients to evolve experiences, and deepen trust.

Our platform for law firms unifies client data from siloed legal practice areas into a single client view. Client 360 also draws on capabilities from our AI analytics, API integration and data visualisation portfolio, enabling firms to integrate legacy applications and derive deeper levels of insight from aggregated data sources. This also means they’re able to obtain intelligent Next Best Action recommendations so lawyers can focus on the most relevant matters, and identify new opportunities.

Through the Client 360 platform, we can empower law firms to do more and evolve their own capabilities. The platform can be leveraged to develop applications for clients. Law firms can build, deliver and monitor custom apps that can connect directly to Salesforce. In addition, Salesforce’s sustainability solution enables firms and clients to monitor and address their Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) data through analytics and integrated data-driven insights.

Combined, these solutions will enable law firms to take meaningful action and enable them to create deeper and richer levels of client loyalty, achieve business goals and develop trusted partnerships. Law firms can then open up these solutions to their clients to service with legal automation and enhance collaboration.

With the ability to share information and data across practice areas with a shared, single view of the client, this will enable greater collaboration and greater levels of understanding for more informed legal guidance, and to advise on areas of greater complexity and risk.

Tableau CRM provides users with powerful visualisation and analytics tools to allow users to

make the right decision every time. Key practice insights are presented

in easy-to-use dashboards, with AI and machine learning keeping

firms ahead of the game.

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Why are we the partner to help your law firm to become inherently more client-centric?

An increasing number of law firms are turning to Salesforce for support to connect client-relevant data more effectively, drive client-centric engagement and experiences, scale and accelerate the delivery of robust and in-depth advice, to improve competitiveness and growth. We can leverage our learning from our work with clients in a number of complex markets, including financial services, public services, and major consultancy firms, who are facing similar challenges to law firms, to become more connected, more agile and real-time.

We bring the enabling technology and expertise as a partner who can:

Draw on over 22 years of experience transforming our clients around their clients

Having worked with thousands of organisations of all sizes across a wide range of industries, we know how to help law firms become totally focused, and build around their evolving and complex clients.

Offer a truly client-centric platform

Designed to aggregate all client data from across every possible area and bring it together in real-time for evidence-based decision-making and actions.

Strengthen relationships with faster finances

Our finance solution integrates with the Client 360 platform to automate finance processes, provide real-time analysis and audit trails in one place, helping firms deliver results for clients on-time and on-budget.

Drive advanced innovation and capabilities into your firm easily, quickly, and automatically

Supporting you to develop new abilities, create your own applications, and take advantage of the regular innovations – including AI, analytics, and blockchain – we embed into our solution platforms.

Embed you into the client’s needs more than anyone

Providing law firms with client-centric design and delivery, to help the business to be re-engineered around their requirements.

Combine expertise with insight to drive differentiation

Skilled legal professionals are the secret to a firm’s success. To help them get the very best out of the Client 360 platform, Salesforce provides training with learning paths, lessons, level management and certification to augment skills and knowledge.

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The competitive landscape for law firms is changing rapidly, meaning both clients and workforce expectations are changing too. As a result, law firms must be able to deliver on these needs faster, with greater consistency, transparency, and deeper levels of understanding. Profitability hinges on the ability for law firms to be able to develop better client engagements, improve service offerings, drive sustainability and align themselves better with client needs in order to meet and exceed expectations.

Like you, we know that nurturing and improving client relationships is key to success. Getting to know them better and understanding their needs is not only important for providing them with the service they need, but also to anticipate what their needs might be in the future. This isn’t just important at a one-to-one level, but being able to connect legal professionals across the firm, to act as one business and manage the client relationship in a truly holistic way that builds loyalty and trust.

We are a partner that can provide the connectivity, integration and agility law firms need in order to become more client-centric. But more than that, improve understanding, drive operational efficiency, and help future-proof the firm – even help it become a disruptive force within the industry – with access to automations and innovations for continuous growth and improvement.

Visit our website or resource centre to find out more about our solutions and how we’re supporting law firms to be ready for the future.

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https://sfdc.co/law-firms