Peter Drucker spent his life researching, teaching, and writing about leadership and different management styles, but he focused in on how strategy and effectiveness go hand-in-hand. You need more than just a plan, more than simple knowledge, and the ability to implement data points in a way that improves business effectiveness.
“To supply data is not enough. The data have to be integrated with strategy,” Drucker wrote. “Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.” He believed that the less effort an organization needs to put forth to find success, the better. Clearly, he understood that firms like yours need to have access to the right information to make the right strategic decisions, directed by the right leaders. Not exactly easy, no?
For many firms, effortlessly locating the insights they need, all in one place, is nearly impossible. You know the data, the knowledge, and the opportunities are out there, but disparate systems and tools make it difficult to get a clear picture. You need high-level market and competitive intelligence to set a strategic focus. Or you have a solid strategy, but can’t easily maneuver it based on the best insights.
That’s why it’s important to be able to analyze, benchmark, and inform strategy all in one place.
Below are five ways that Thomson Reuters Strategic Insights can solve your firm’s biggest strategic pain points:
1. Evaluate firm performance more effectively
With access to financial and market information in the same place, you can accurately track the right metrics (financial, market opportunity, and brand) over time to assess your firm’s performance versus your peers.
The right data sources can help you understand where the firm is succeeding and where there’s room for improvement. Having everything in one place means you’re not spending hours of time making sense out of various reports.
You are accustomed to having data and utilizing it continuously. The expectation is for constant updates that can provide the latest information that you can pass along to the firm. When looking to inspire the partnership of a strategic direction at your firm, they need to trust you understand how the firm is performing today. Then, the steady flow of benchmarking data can help you set firm goals into the future that other firm leaders can easily understand, and that you can easily translate.
Evaluating firm performance is more than status updates — it’s critical to setting expectations and motivating members of the firm to greater success.
2. Better position your firm to adapt to changing market conditions
Industries change rapidly, and the legal industry is no different. More firms are investing in strategic analysts to help them see what’s coming around the bend. What better way to support that process than give them actionable insights into the current market?
Strategic Insights will allow you and your firm analysts to easily view and share results with data visualizations and interactive dashboards between teams to develop a holistic market view. By knowing where you stand in the market, you can adapt messaging or investments to keep or expand your competitive advantage.
Adapting to changing market conditions means empowering yourself and your firm with knowledge of what lies ahead, and the shifts needed to stay ahead of your competition.
3. Ensure a high degree of rate integrity
A firm’s ability to successfully grow and maintain its rates across all timekeepers allows it to do many things:
- Deeply invest back into the firm
- Increase revenues and profits
- Ultimately drive more demand for its services
Ideally, this process can become cyclical and bring firm success for many years.
With cost concerns at a high point and the competitive landscape constantly evolving, timely, accurate, and customized rate intelligence is critical. Strategic Insights offers unmatched capabilities.
Through Strategic Insights’ monthly data flow, you can get meaningful insight into your firm’s rate and realization performance against narrowly tailored, named peer groups. The data can then be narrowed down to an office, practice, and even a timekeeper level. This type of insight provides the granularity needed to stave off leakage, apprise your lawyers of the competitive power of their rate, and ensure your firm’s financial success.
4. Identify and target new business opportunities
Recognizing the necessary investment priorities by practice, geography, or sector is critical to guiding a firm’s strategic direction.
The most successful firms are always looking for new opportunities and simply having more information isn’t the goal, but utilizing the right data points to make decisions you’re confident will succeed.
With Strategic Insights, you have access to more than 2,400 global client interviews conducted yearly to see where your firm stacks up in the market. The data is updated quarterly with 600 new interviews always giving the latest 12-month view. And you have trusted financial benchmarking data to know where you are today and where there is opportunity in the future. You have a regular heartbeat into the market that allows you to look at trends around work types, demand, and sectors across geographies and firm sizes.
If you notice that regulatory work is increasing, for example, or that your firm is falling behind in a specific geography, that allows you to adapt and thrive.
The right actionable insights can help you trust your acquisition plan and encourage you to create a new practice area in the firm.
5. Empower partners to develop stronger client relationships
Most firms feel like they understand their clients. But what if you could get even better at asking the right questions of your clients?
Your firm can gain a big competitive advantage by simply knowing more about clients in the market, but also by tracking your clients’ strategic priorities. The synergy of pairing your firm’s strategy with the needs of your clients leads to a better cooperative relationship. What serves one also improves the other.
Strategic Insights gives you a chance to view market and competitive intelligence holistically. Instead of assuming you know what’s happening with a client, you can reveal the best areas where you can help. It’s all about adding value and knowing where the gap lies between value added and value experienced by your clients.
Once you have the right data sources, then you can assimilate that data to create a more tailored approach and strategy for matters, proposals, and allocation, which helps deliver a better client experience. Expectations are easier to set, manage, and meet.
As you know, a firm’s success depends on its decision making and inspiring partners to follow leadership’s direction. By utilizing accurate, current data, your firm will have a solid foundation to make informed decisions and develop a successful strategy.
With Strategic Insights, you will have easy access to the most reliable and robust market and competitive intelligence, helping you solve your firm’s biggest strategic pain points and enable the firm to sustain competitiveness in a rapidly changing environment.
Schedule a demo today to see how you can better evaluate firm performance against the market and achieve successful and profitable firm growth.
