Competitive Intelligence: Improving Law Firm Strategy and Decision Making

Number of Pages: 123

Like it or not , more and more law firms are using competitive intelligence (CI) as a critical tool to improve performance, drive revenue and gain advantage over your firm. So what can CI do for you?

Managing Partner's report on Competitive Intelligence: Improving Law Firm Strategy and Decision-Making is written specifically to help you formalise your approach to competitive intelligence (CI) in the legal sector.

It examines in-depth how to gather valuable information and turn it into actionable intelligence in the legal environment while avoiding the legal and ethical pitfalls.

From understanding the basics of CI to assessing the value of a variety of information sources and looking at the best applications for each, this critical report acts as a comprehensive guide to implementing a successful CI strategy at your firm.

The report analyses Porter’s Five Forces model, explores the impact of legal and ethical regulations and details the steps that can be taken to ensure sound practices are followed.Topics covered:

• An overview of CI as it is applied in current legal profession;
• The common CI challenges and how to overcome them;
• Ethical considerations that must be satisfied when developing or using CI;
• Developing more useful intelligence for clients (law firm partners);
• Information gathering—the types and sources of information available to CI practitioners;
• Organizing and preparing intelligence to make analysis easier and more revelatory;
• The reliability of information and ethical considerations related to information collected from social media and human sources;
• Ensuring analysis is correctly converted into intelligence;
• Effectively disseminating intelligence to decision makers;
• Improving CI processes and their influence on a firm’s decision-making processes;
• The evolution of law firm CI structures, functions, and staffing models;
• Imminent expansion areas for law firm CI;
• Utilizing CI to improve firm-wide and practice/industry group strategies;
• Collaboration between CI and business intelligence (BI) units;
• Identifying sources and uses of human intelligence; and
• The ethical techniques firms should use to elicit intelligence.

Real-life, practical case studies, insights and contributions from a wide range of high-profile firms and respected industry experts including leading strategy consultant Andrew Hedley are featured throughout the report.

You will also find a vital introduction to scenario planning and how to use this popular CI tool to build the dynamic, flexible plans now required in a rapidly changing global environment.

Whether your firm already has informal CI in-house capabilities and wants to upgrade them, wishes to engage the services of external CI consultants or hopes to learn how to utilise its existing CI resources to become more competitive, this report is essential reading for you.