What It Really Means To Know Your Client

Ask general counsel what they want most from their outside law firms, and one of the first responses you’ll get is that firms should know the client’s business. This wouldn’t be breaking news, except that the message often gets lost in translation. Knowing a client’s business doesn’t mean just a cursory idea of what the company does. And GCs are not looking for long memos with generic legal advice that could come from anyone. Today’s businesses demand more. We’re talking about a deep understanding that generates contextual legal advice specifically tailored to the needs of an individual client.

In particular, outside counsel need to be willing to learn the ins and outs of a client’s daily operations — from its products or services, to its management and corporate structure, to the industry and general market conditions in which the client operates, to the players in the industry, whether competitors, distributors, or suppliers. Only then can counsel hope to provide the kind of focused and practical legal advice useful to corporate clients making business decisions. In fact, the ability to deliver meaningful legal advice — that is both grounded in practical business realities and also effectively anticipates issues on the horizon — is one of the most significant ways a law firm can distinguish itself from the ranks of the many, elevating a firm to a company’s trusted, go-to legal advisor.

The key question, then, and what seems to elude many well-intentioned lawyers, is how can they best achieve this? How can attorneys arm themselves with the most accurate and comprehensive business knowledge and integrate it into the legal advice they deliver in a way that differentiates them from other firms vying for a company’s business?

There are two possible answers: you can do more than your competitors or you can do it better than your competitors. With the right tools at your disposal, there is a third option: you can do both.

Having access to optimal resources can be a game changer, because corporate clients value outside firms who can get up to speed on the company’s business on the firm’s own time and the firm’s own dime. Long gone are the days when clients signed off on legal bills without question. Now more than ever, clients are willing to pay only for your legal advice, not for you to learn how the client does business.

All of this makes it critical for outside counsel to figure out the client’s business as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible. That’s where Bloomberg Law comes in. With Bloomberg Law, everything you need to know — comprehensive, targeted, predictive and easily consumable business intelligence about clients and potential clients — is all in one place. The expert information that Bloomberg Law delivers will not only raise your business IQ at your next client meeting, but it will arm you with the corporate information critical to tailoring your legal advice to the practical and anticipated needs of your client.

Bloomberg Law offers detailed Company Profiles at your fingertips — an all-inclusive source providing the most important and valuable information about a company, curated by the business experts at Bloomberg. The Company Profiles encompass the same financial and corporate information that clients themselves are using; this is, without question, the next best alternative to getting the information directly from clients themselves. Each profile contains a comprehensive report on all aspects of a client’s business, including financials, key shareholder information and filings, management profiles, corporate actions, credit ratings, capital structure information, SEC filings, company hierarchy, latest news, stock performance charts, and more.

Company Profiles are one of many valuable technology-driven business and analytic tools available on Bloomberg Law. Other key resources include:

• Company Screener, which allows you to pinpoint companies that are competitors or potential clients, based on specific financial criteria you select;
• Representation Analytics, which graphically show the top law firms representing a particular company and the top companies a particular law firm represents in federal litigation, as well as trends in the types of cases being litigated;
• Bloomberg Briefs, exclusive industry newsletters synthesized for business clients and accessible by lawyers;
• Searchable dockets, as well as highly curated news and alerts that can be targeted to identify possible red flags, such as rumored mergers, bankruptcies, or investigations, before they escalate into full-fledged legal actions; and
• Deal analytics, which aggregate the best available information on public and private transactions worldwide to identify key insights into deals and extrapolate them into broader facts and trends.

The best part is that all of Bloomberg Law’s tools are integrated on a single platform, on which you can also conduct all of your legal research. This inclusive approach allows you to incorporate seamlessly and organically your newly acquired business knowledge with your legal know-how in order to provide the best possible legal advice directed to the specific needs of individual clients.

A lawyer who can provide targeted legal advice is the kind of outside counsel that GCs can trust. Get to know Bloomberg Law, and you’ll understand what it can really mean to know your client.

                                                                                                                                         

As Commercial Product Manager at Bloomberg Law, Nancy Furman Paul develops and oversees business development products and strategy that enable attorneys and legal professionals to build deeper relationships with existing clients and win new business. She is responsible for all news and company and markets intelligence and data on Bloomberg Law.