The Future Of Legal Business Development: An Interview With Bloomberg Law's Melanie Heller

If you are familiar with the pages of Above the Law, you know how important business development is for lawyers. Unfortunately, not everyone knows how to do that — there is no class you can ace in law school to give you a leg up in that arena. The good news is that technology is filling in the gap to make it easier for lawyers to develop their business, but there are still a lot of options and information out there, and it isn’t always easy to parse through the data.

Next week the Legal Marketing Association Annual Conference (LMA) will get underway in Austin, Texas. In advance of this major conference in the world of legal marketing and business development, we decided to get some advance insight by interviewing Melanie Heller, Vice President and General Manager of Bloomberg Law. Bloomberg Law co-sponsored a survey with the Legal Marketing Association and gathered opinions of attorneys and legal marketing professionals on the current and future state of the industry. The findings of the survey are set to be released at LMA next week.

Heller heads Bloomberg BNA’s flagship legal and business intelligence product. And she has Biglaw chops; before joining Bloomberg, she was a Legal Director at Proskauer and a corporate lawyer at Clifford Chance and Weil, Gotshal and Manges.

KR: What were the motivations behind the decision to conduct this study?

MH: We have seen many changes occur in the legal industry over the past few years. In particular, attorneys feel increasingly pressured to develop business, and they are looking to undertake more business development activities themselves. They are looking to technology to help them do this.

At Bloomberg Law, we have spent a lot of time thinking about how to best support these efforts. People need not just the right data and intelligence, but also an understanding of how they can use this information to make a difference – this is where the biggest value-add potential lies.

At the same time, there is a whole network of things that have to happen at a firm in order for business development to be effective. It’s important to know the ins and outs of this process and who is doing what activities to understand how it works within a law firm. We wanted to conduct this study to identify and share best practices, where they exist, and identify areas where there is still room for improvement. We are looking to start a conversation that will contribute to making everyone’s business development efforts stronger.

KR: What was the goal of the study?

MH: There is a lot of pressure on attorneys to figure out how to build business, and we know, from our discussions with them, that they don’t feel like the technology solutions out there solve all of their problems. There is a large role that actionable intelligence can fill.

We are currently working on an enhanced solution to address the market’s changing needs. This survey will help us better understand and stay on top of the trends and ensure we are on the path to building the right solution for today’s — and tomorrow’s — market. We want to continue to understand, shed light on and help solve the problem by building products that will address real needs, and support the complex roles people are being asked to fill.  Nancy Furman Paul, our Commercial Product Manager for Business Solutions, will present the results of the survey at next week’s LMA Conference. We then plan to benchmark it and use it to measure progress and changes going forward.

KR: Why is marketing/business development so important for lawyers?

Today, clients expect their attorneys to be more knowledgeable than ever about the intricacies of their world. They expect their lawyers to understand their business and their competition’s business, and have deep industry knowledge — not just an understanding of how to practice law. And because there’s so much information at all of our fingertips, there is now an expectation that we all know everything there is to know all the time.

When clients calls their lawyers, they expect the lawyer to know things like all recent news on the company, all recent litigation, how the stock price is doing, and how the client’s legal issues fit into this business landscape. Tools like Bloomberg Law open up whole new sets of data and make them accessible to people. One of the most important business development skills a lawyer can have is simply understanding how to interact with technology and how to deliver and use data. Business development is so important for lawyers because it means knowing your clients, keeping up with their industries and being poised to add value at a moment’s notice. And that’s how new business is often won and how client relationships are cemented.

KR: What are some of the challenges lawyers face in effectively developing business and marketing their firm?

MH: I think the biggest problem for lawyers is that they were never taught how to do business development, but are suddenly being asked to do it as a major part of their job. And we have seen that even when lawyers have access to the right technology, the right data, the right intelligence, they don’t always know how to best use it. Plus, they, like all of us, are constantly pressed for time. That’s why we are working right now to build a business development solution that takes all of the high value data we already offer and makes it more customizable and user-friendly — and fully integrates it into an attorney’s daily workflow. We believe that by providing attorneys with the right data and actionable intelligence, we will be able to help them immediately strengthen their business development efforts.

KR: Are attorneys doing the work of business development? Are they resistant to the process?

MH: The earlier lawyers start thinking about business development in their careers, the better they are at it and the more comfortable they are with it. It’s never too early to start.

Beyond just building and nurturing relationships, attorneys are often asked these days to create individual business plans that include discussion of how they expect to systematically build their businesses over the coming years. This requires attorneys to display deep industry and competitive knowledge, identify future trends, and be able to target potential new clients. And they need to know how to utilize the resources available to them and leverage the expertise of the business development and marketing staff at their firms. However, business development technology solutions have not traditionally been built to sit on attorneys’ desktops. I wouldn’t say that attorneys are resistant, per se, but rather that they need better and easier solutions.

KR: What tools are most effective or most used by lawyers in developing business?

MH: The tools that are most effective for lawyers are ones that are intuitive and that they can use on their own. It is essential that the tools easily integrate into a lawyer’s daily workflow — it should be so integrated that it is not burdensome but rather becomes second nature. As we continue to enhance our business development tools on Bloomberg Law, that is what we are keeping top of mind.