Improved marketing of your law firm’s expertise and services to current and prospective clients is an ongoing necessity—but it’s also a never-ending challenge. It’s probable that within the heads of your attorneys and staff is a considerable amount of knowledge and expertise not being optimized or even utilized. So how do you mine that knowledge to enhance what your firm has to offer clients?
New Technology Tools Can Help
Web-based learning can enable you to utilize this untapped in-house knowledge and enable your clients to access your firm’s internal expertise through a tiered system of graduated services. Electronic learning technology tools can improve both client communication and retention by conveying value-added information cost effectively and efficiently, as well as create an additional revenue center.
First Things First
To realize this vision, you need first to address and address several crucial challenges:
Managing and sharing information seamlessly across the firm and using it to continually review and refresh products and services. Your law firm’s information and knowledge are a vital resource—and the ability to turn them into industry insights, products and services is key to successful marketing and client retention.
Targeting efforts on the most profitable segment of clients and providing relevant content that is easily accessible
Offering innovative ways to provide clients with added value while also making it easier to do business with the firm
Actively managing client satisfaction by eliciting and capturing feedback during and after each engagement, and using this information to refine the firm’s approach to sustaining and improving client satisfaction
Advances in information technology, especially collaborative computing and Web-based learning tools, enable you to upgrade and customize content across your firm. This content not only builds on internal company knowledge, it also can be used to turn knowledge into products that can leverage your billable partner hours to maximize your firm’s revenue stream.
Many software programs are available to train law firm personnel on administrative procedures, labor relations, information technology and leadership development. These can create a collaborative work environment and technology platform that enables you to offer courses customized to your firm’s unique culture, expertise and way of doing things—as well as to clients’ individual needs.
The courses you offer employees must be designed to keep on top of ever-changing content from multiple sources. Using third-party simulation tools that integrate seamlessly into proprietary or third-party authoring tools enables easy publishing of courseware from multiple vendors into a learning environment. For example, RoboDemo or any similar third-party software simulation product can be designed as an individual learning object. As such, it can be used by multiple authoring products and integrated into multiple courses with the help of the appropriate authoring tool.
But not every authoring tool is capable of this versatility, nor is every learning management system. That’s why, when evaluating the latest e-learning tools, you should look for those that can easily customize and modify lessons and parts of lessons at will.
Software should be based on the concept of utilizing reusable learning objects to publish the desired section of the course without having to reinvent content for the entire lesson. If you can store content from various sources and vendors in a data repository that is accessible and open, you have the capability of configuring various courses as your needs evolve.
The power of Web-based collaboration enables continuous updating and significant reduction of development time. The speed of deployment is impressive. For example, if your law firm deals with sexual harassment issues, the core sexual harassment course information can be a learning object that can be dropped into several different course modules.
Technology designed around a third-party API (a specific application protocol interface) allows you to receive specific coded information and convert it into usable information in the Learning Management System (LMS), which is based on common standards such as SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) and AICC (Aviation Industry CBT). It then sets parameters on how software communicates. The API serves as a translator between a third-party product, the authoring tool and the LMS.
The better a company understands the significance of a well-developed API based on common standards such as SCORM and AICC, as well as the more information a company is able to capture with its technologies, the more effectively information can be used by the user and administrator. Most technology companies working in the field of learning and education only skim the surface of these application potentials, due to a lack of technical understanding or not understanding their customers’ needs.
Different law firms have clients with differing intellectual applications. Innovations in Web-based learning can be used to enable senior partners to contribute their specialized expertise and then create modules for the education and counsel of clients. These electronic materials and tools can transform a one-off service into a reusable product that can be customized with a minimal amount of additional investment.
A Fundamental Innovation
The newest IT tools enable you to upgrade and customize content of your firm’s curriculum. This new philosophy in e-learning provides the user with autonomy to maintain and modify content with the authoring tool, rather than be at the mercy of the software vendor. And ideally, you should have the ability to take content from many different sources and group it for flexibility and even repurpose that content.
Happily, the new authoring tools and instructional designer tools offer the flexibility to modify content on an ongoing basis. The latest ones enable even non-technical people to assimilate third-party content and flexibly add different pieces of course information, as needed— especially content previously created and now required to be included. The advantage is that even a non-technical author can create and transform content.
The new tools also mean that your firm can work with information from a range of sources, including internal ones, and not be tied to a particular source.
Another IT trend is using authoring and simulation tools to create content using interactive templates or scenarios. You can create a simulation software piece and drag-and-drop in as needed.
E-learning tools are going well beyond just taking PowerPoint presentations and turning them into HTML. Software systems now incorporate Macromedia Flash to create truly interactive and visually appealing lessons. Clearly, the more realistic and interactive the content, the greater the likelihood that people will engage with it and retain it.
Flexibility comes from being able to manipulate content. For example, if your firm has a labor relations practice, by taking the knowledge of your attorneys trained in compliance issues and Title VII and making it into coursework for clients that can be easily customized for a company of 500 employees, you are conveying value to your clients in a cost-effective way.
Flexibility takes other forms, as well. What if employees have staggered schedules or are geographically dispersed? Or the employer does business in multiple states and has to deal with various fair employment laws? A larger client may have dozens of employees in different states, each falling under different regulations. Conversely, a small company with a few dozen employees, despite its need, may not be able to invest significant expense and resources. Effective use of e-learning technology can help your law firm develop and deliver quality legal advice to protect even your smallest clients.
The benefits of e-learning are evident in the issues of insider trading and compliance for the financial practice of law. Thanks to extranets, you can leverage in house-expertise in compliance regulations to create lessons and content for clients that they can reference remotely.
Clients can get good, solid legal advice at a number of law firms. What is it worth to them to get extended client services that allow them to proactively dispense preventive advice, rather than just be reactive? Flexible content served up on an extranet could be like a self-serve reference library—a profitable one.
Nowadays, clients are looking to have firms compete for their business and are usually willing to pay for a higher level of expertise and service. Shouldn’t you tool up your firm to provide it?
About our author . . .
Stephan K. Thieringer is CEO of GTF Systems, a Danvers, MA based online learning provider. He can be reached at sthieringer@gtfsystems.com.