How Competitive Intelligence Can Support Firm Strategy

Competitive intelligence (CI) professionals and other researchers have historically been tasked with tactical projects such as gathering background and company information on clients or prospects and reviewing peer firms to understand the competitive landscape.

However, as this profession has evolved, law firm leadership has started to turn to this function to assist in strategic projects to provide insights for practice or industry group planning and positioning and help to develop firm strategy.

To understand how CI played a strategic role at their firms, we interviewed Chief Marketing Officer Nancy Kostakos at Cooley, Chief Marketing Officer Jon Mattson at Stinson and Senior Business Development and Marketing Manager Elysia Salgado at BakerHostetler.

Tell Us About Some Key Strategic Projects Where Your CI Team Played a Role

“Our CI team is integral to assisting with the maintenance of our firm’s competitive advantage. It has played a key role in setting forth our agenda to implement items in our firm and Practice Group strategic plans — allowing us to shift gears and prioritize certain components with the information we have sourced,” says Elysia Salgado.

When the firm expanded into a new geographic region, she relied heavily on data provided by the CI team, including where their clients were heavily invested and key in-house leadership were located.

In another example, the CI team assisted one of the practice areas in pursuit of key lateral hires based on their industry specializations to complement the firm’s strengths and gaps.

Salgado shares, “CI has always played an integral role when pitching for new work or responding to requests for proposals (RFPs). CI assists with having the competitive advantage to see who we may be up against, the portfolio of the company or if a request is just a shot in the dark where we may be spinning our wheels and wasting our time — and more. Not to mention, knowing the landscape of the client, current news or litigations, expansion or restructuring and who the key leaders are have also played an active role in preparing us in success to win new and keep existing client work.”

What Elements of CI Are Important To Strategic Planning?

Most marketing leaders advocate the foundations of valuable strategic analysis relies on four principal areas:

1. Our firm
2. Our competitors
3. Our clients
4. Market forces

According to Nancy Kostakos, “I first need to understand volume and value of our experience with particular areas of practices, in particular geographies and across client industries. I then need to understand the profitability of the various types of work. Once I have that, I need to delve into the market and understand investment trends, litigation trends, etc. in markets where we have a presence, and markets where we don’t. What is the opportunity? What is the volume of activity in that market in particular industries, and across particular types of work? Who are the competitors in the market, and how are they ranked relative to us? League tables, number of litigation matters, size of matters, Chambers rankings, size of practice, etc. are all of importance.

That said, attorney insights are also key for these studies. You can pull a bunch of numbers and facts, but often our attorneys in the market have a keener sense of the dynamics, how the market has evolved and which competitors have what strengths. You need to combine that on-the-ground qualitative data with the quantitative. Armed with all of that, I can make strategic recommendations about where to invest, and how to invest.”

What is the Best Way to Present The Data?

As Jon Mattson astutely states, “once you send out a report, it’s stale.” Kostakos concurs that “a dynamic tool is regularly updated, so [she] can see how markets and competitors are evolving. Not just a one-time snapshot, but something that is maintained and kept current…” There are several homegrown tools and off the shelf platforms can assist firms with the process.

Providing an executive summary alongside this data is important to these leaders as well, which is where CI professionals are often well-positioned to assist, Kostakos says: “We often get massive data dumps that haven’t been synthesized or pulled together into a digestible nice presentation, or dashboard. It takes a long time to sift through all that and develop something that is actionable and presentable to partners. Make it more user-friendly so I can easily sort and dig into details without being overwhelmed.”

Most CI professionals can pull the same data, and most firms have similar tools, so data collection is table stakes. Providing a dashboard is nice, connecting the dots is better, but looking in the rearview mirror only gets you so far. “It’s the insights and analysis I’m looking for,” according to Mattson. “Tell me what I’m missing, make recommendations on next steps and I’ll show you a great analyst.”

Learn More About Marketing Management and Leadership with the Third Edition of the LMA Body of Knowledge The content in this feature correlates with the Marketing Management and Leadership domain in the LMA Body of Knowledge (BoK). Dive deeper and access the latest edition of the BoK online. The Third Edition of the LMA BoK showcases enhanced expertise across every domain, introduces new competencies in Client Services, Communications and Technology Management, features more advanced skills across all domains and broadens coverage of competitive and business intelligence skills. Plus, it emphasizes a stronger commitment to nurturing diversity, equity, and inclusion across the entirety of the BoK. Learn more.