Michael Mellor | How Better Data Can Help Law Firms Win More Work

Elise Holtzman: Hi everyone, it's Elise Holtzman here, a former practicing lawyer and the host of The Lawyer’s Edge Podcast. Welcome back for another episode. Imagine the following scenario. A partner at a law firm has the opportunity to bring in a new client, whether through a formal pitch or a few conversations. The partner needs to demonstrate to that prospect what experience the firm has that aligns with what the client needs. You and I both know that happens every day, but too often that information is not readily available. It's an individual file somewhere, maybe coded incorrectly in the firm systems, or worse, it's locked somewhere in a lawyer's memory. There's an information gap that leads to lost opportunity. Today's guest has spent his career inside law firms studying why that gap exists, including at firms that would seem far too sophisticated to have that problem. We'll talk about what's actually behind it and what a firm can do about it without buying another system nobody ends up using.

Before we dive in, today's episode is brought to you by the coaching team at the Lawyer's Edge, a training and coaching firm which has been focused exclusively on lawyers and law firms since 2008. Each member of the Lawyer's Edge coaching team is a trained, certified and experienced professional coach and either a former practicing attorney or a former law firm marketing and business development professional. Whatever your professional objectives, our coaches can help you achieve your goals more quickly, more easily and with significantly less stress. To get connected with your coach, just email the team at hello@thelawyersedge.com.

I am delighted to welcome my guest today, Michael Mellor, who is the president and founder of 742 Advisors, a boutique consultancy focused on law firm revenue generation, pitch operations and go-to-market strategy. He designs the revenue operating models that help firms win more work with less friction, covering pitch infrastructure, business development operations, experience management systems and governance frameworks. Mike previously served as the chief marketing and business development officer at Prior Cashman, where he rebuilt the firm's entire marketing department and transformed the function, from a cost center into a revenue-generating operation. Before that, he held senior roles at Paul Weiss & Katton and also served on KPMG's big deal team, leading pursuit strategy for the firm's largest opportunities. He's been recognized by LawDragon as a top 100 global leader in legal strategy and consulting and he's received the Legal Marketing Association New York Chapter's Member of the Year Award. Mike holds a master's degree in strategic communications from Columbia, a graduate certificate from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts, a bachelor's degree from the University of Maryland and a certificate in data analytics from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. Wow, that's a lot of education, Mike. He also holds certifications in coaching and change management.

Mike, welcome to The Lawyer's Edge. I am delighted to have you. We are going to talk about some super practical stuff today, which anybody who knows me knows that I like practical implementation, so I'm excited. Let's talk about from the very beginning, what actually happens when a lawyer at a firm gets a shot at a new business and says, okay, I've got to let this prospective client know what I've done and what the firm has done in this area. So they understand that we are the right people to choose. It sounds like there's a scramble for information. What does that scramble usually look like?

Michael Mellor: It can go a couple different ways. If you're lucky, the marketing group in some central location hears about it. In many cases, folks are saying, you know, I know the people who work in fashion. I think I've got a pretty good sense. Let me look at a pitch I did six months ago. Maybe I'll send, you know, ping one person, or perhaps they're sending a pardon the interruption email around to the entire firm. Back of your napkin math goes there. Well, if everyone's making $1,500 an hour and we're sending around pardon the interruption emails three times a day and we do 200 pitches a year, you know, that can certainly add up. You've got a lost revenue there with, you know, getting everybody out of their zone and getting everyone back in their zone. And, you know, the only thing worse than not having done the work is, you know, having done the work, we did this exact same thing four months ago, but Jenny in California is on vacation. And you find out, you know, two weeks after you pitched and lost that, oh, we actually did do that information. You also have clients who you're not even getting the call, because you didn't input any of this stuff onto your bios, or onto your page. Clients are more sophisticated, they're 57% of the way through the buying cycle before they even contact an attorney. So that dynamic has changed as well. People aren't coming in for the dog and pony show where you get to explain yourself. They're looking for an M&A fashion lawyer and you have some laundry list narrative that you work with fashion companies, that you work with these companies. You didn't put that tangible, actual work that they care about and you're not getting that phone call at all. So provided you do get that phone call, yeah, they're either sending around pardon the interruption emails, they're using old documents and trying to, you know, just trying to update them with, you know, what's around. In many cases, they're, you know, contacting marketing who, you know, may have it in a couple of different areas. They might have, you know, different Word documents that are just, you know, in practice groups. And so centralizing that and having a single version of the truth is really mission critical. You know, as we talked about a little bit, it's not just about for pitches, but it is about for wider decisions, you know, go-to-market decisions, recruiting decisions. To know where you've been is mission critical, to know where you should be going and where you authentically sit in the market.

Elise Holtzman: Yeah, so let's talk about that a little bit, because we did start to chat about it before we turned on the recording and I was fascinated by this idea, because while I know what happens, I wasn't really thinking about it the way you are. What you're saying is that law firms are making strategic decisions about what areas to go into, based on incomplete information. So I was leading with, hey, we have incomplete information and sometimes we're not winning the pitch, or we're not getting the prospective client, because the lawyer that's talking to the client, doesn't have the right information. You're saying, That's a big issue. But an even bigger issue is that the law firm is making decisions on where to put money, where to hire people, what markets to go into, what verticals and industries to go into, also on incomplete information.

Michael Mellor: That's absolutely right. You know, you don't think it's a big deal that you don't code something by industry when you open a new matter. You don't think it's a big deal to throw a, you know, hey, I've got a small little lease thing. I'll just put it in an open matter. Well, you know, now it looks like you guys are up 30 percent in litigation, where, in fact, it's just miscoded. People aren't closing matters that the concept of data hygiene, you know, you think isn't a big deal. But then you look at the management committees and they're sitting there and saying, you know, hey, here's our numbers. And they're relying on this as the Bible. They're basically using anecdotal evidence and incorrect and miscoded information to make billion dollar decisions about market expansion, office opens, buying teams, creating industry teams, creating client teams. You know, the list goes on and on. And it's, you know, and you talk to their management committees and they're the first one to admit, hey, you know what, it's not really high on my priority list. I get the matter open. I need to get that bill out to the client. And yet yet at the end game, they're all relying on this.

Elise Holtzman: Yeah, that's kind of terrifying on so many different levels. And what I'm hearing is that it's at the absolute top levels, right? We are coding things wrong. We're saying, oh, we need to hire a litigation associate, because we're up in litigation when, in fact, you're not up in litigation and you don't even really realize it, all the way down to what people are putting in their bios. Right. So talk to me a little bit about things like the simple stuff that we think about on a regular basis, or at least when people start saying, hey, I want to do more with business development or, hey, we want you lawyers to do more with business development. Talk to me a little bit about bios and business plans and the sort of basic on the ground kinds of things that I think lawyers are thinking about, when it comes to how do I face outside the firm in the way that I want to? How do I tell the firm what I'm planning on doing for my business plan? And then how do I broadcast that to the world outside the firm? Where are you seeing gaps?

Michael Mellor: Yeah, you know, I've actually built a framework called AEIOU framework. It's basically you need to audit what you've done. You need to involve experience. You need to be really intentional. You need to originate not just new work, but originate content and valuable assets for that market. And you need to utilize metrics. But many of these and to your point, you're right, I originally thought this was going to be a mid-market issue. If you have a proposal team, if you have a data steward, these types of things wouldn't happen. But all the way up to the MLA-10s, you're seeing major gaps in that. Some folks have the technology and don't use it. Some folks don't have the technology. But the easiest thing that folks can do is get every attorney in your firm to start with an audit. Go back over the last three or four years. Talk to me about the type of work you've done specifically. You know, if you worked with Sony, what's that type of work? Oh, I did five different deals. You know, three of these were M&A, two fundraisers. We, you know, started a JV, you start to get that information together, you know, you may think that you're, you know, I do some M&A work, I do some formation work. When you actually pull it all together, you know, you can start to identify what do I really enjoy doing? What's coming around the pike that I can do more of? What can I scale? What's really profitable? You know, you might realize, hey, you know what, I don't really like doing that work and it's actually not that profitable. You haven't even done the exercise to get it all in one place. If you get all your attorneys to do that, then you can centralize all that information, sort of normalize it, write it all in the same way and then start to code it. Hey, you know what, this is fashion. This has a private equity component. This is an M&A deal. Now you're servicing information to say, hey, you know what, we're really good at the beginning of this lifecycle, we're not so good here. Now you can start to make very strategic decisions around, hey, is this firm that we're looking to acquire, are they filling those gaps that we need? Or are we just adding bodies to add bodies? So, you know, I think that getting that information out, collectivizing it, now you can make more strategic decisions. You can go back, you can map that to the billables, you can then start to identify gaps. Hey, you know what, I see that we've worked on 20 deals for Sony that are over 500K originated. But I'm only seeing three examples of what we've done here, what's this project Sunshine, what's this thing? And they go, oh, right, I didn't write about this and they didn't have this. Well, now you're working with a little bit of information and you can start to get that information out of people's heads, because you have those prompts. If you don't, you're just relying on the hope that people are kind of telling you that information. You're relying on the fact that, you know, you think you know, especially in multi offices, you know, there are pockets of folks doing really creative things that have really never been surfaced and centralized. So it's about creating a single version of the truth, so you can make sound decisions.

Elise Holtzman: I can picture some law firms saying, Mike, listen, you don't get it. Everybody does a business development plan here, right? Everybody does a business plan. They have to tell us what they did the year before. So we have a pretty good sense of what our lawyers are doing. You've often said that the business plans really exist mostly on paper. What do you mean by that?

Michael Mellor: Attorneys are smart people, you know, the smartest people in the world. You know, they're going to figure out ways where they're not going to be pinched in a corner. And so if you're putting down, hey, you know what? I'm going to write three articles. I'm going to contact 25 new people. I'm going to introduce 10 of my clients to the corporate group. I'm going to develop four referral relationships. They're going to be held to that. And I think that, you know, as busy attorneys, you know, their priorities may be different. They might be incentivized, as you said earlier, incentivized to be doing different things, whether that's billing more hours. You're going to get the behaviors that you're incentivizing. And so if you're not holding people's feet to the fire, they're not going to volunteer that information, because at the end of the year, they don't want to have someone point to them and say, you said you were going to reach out to eight referral people, but you only reached out to three. So, in many cases, it's sort of an exercise so I can check the box and go back to doing the things that I'm incentivized to do. So, you know, I think that the firms that are doing it right are being very intentional and thoughtful around, you know, we're going to count the hours that you take to do that business plan. We're going to count those as billable hours. We're going to give you the resources and assistance to kind of help you follow through on that. All of those individual business plans are going to tie up into a wider practice group or industry group plan. You know, the risks are enormous. You know, when folks aren't talking and I saw it firsthand, when you earn the trust of attorneys, so that you're starting to see more of what's going out before it goes out, you might have a film finance group in California and a banking group in New York, both pitching the same RFP. They wouldn't think to talk, but the RFP that goes out has immigration needs. It has, you know, whatever, five or 10 different things. Folks aren't looking up on that broad scale. And, you know, technology can help you there, but, you know, the attorneys, I think in marketing, we're doing a disservice. We're not really helping them to see what's in it for me. And they say, hey, this seems like an extra step for me. But when you can surface that information and say, hey, actually, you shouldn't be pitching this, because Jenny over here, in Seattle, actually has a deeper relationship than this person and you can help them connect dots, they like that output. But getting them to input that information is really where that gap exists. And it's costing millions.

Elise Holtzman: You talk about this idea of integration, right? So that everybody in the firm has access to what everybody else in the firm is doing. The marketing people know what's going on. The left hand knows what the right hand is doing or the left coast knows what the right coast is doing. A lot of firms have already spent real money on a CRM, for example, to try to solve this problem. You know, we've got everybody's activities in this CRM and we're going to know exactly what's going on and we're going to be able to meet this challenge head on. I find, and you've agreed with me offline, that most of these CRMs are sitting there not being used. What goes wrong? What's the problem there?

Michael Mellor: I think that there's a couple of problems. I think it's in how law firms tend to not want to be innovative. I think precedent is, you know, they're driven by precedent, different is bad. And it's only when a competitor gets something, they get Salesforce, they invest in Harvey. Oh, well, we need to do that. You're not identifying what your problem is. What's the problem you're trying to solve? And then working backwards, they're buying technology, because someone else bought technology and this is really great. The culture is not there. The education isn't there. And the rollout isn't there. The human element is missing. You know, I call it buying a Ferrari and keeping it in first gear. You know, is Salesforce the right CRM for every firm? I don't think it's the right CRM for almost any firm, unless you're requiring people to input the lunches that they go to, you know, I've been at firms where they said, hey, you're not going to get reimbursed unless that activity is in our CRM. So that's, you know, an interesting idea that you have. But, you know, in many cases, we want attorneys billing, right? That's the business model that works. So unless you're teaching the admins, incentivizing the admins, right? Are they getting bonuses for more events, you know, more things they're putting in? Hey, they're going to put more information in. But there are technologies these days, you know, I call it maybe CRM Lite, where really what this is, is a relationship tracker and a contact updater so that when you're sending out client alerts, they're getting, you know, you've got the right titles, you could, you know, perhaps target, give me all the general counsels and banking who are in Portland, that type of information. But if you're not going to be, you know, inputting this information as a traditional sales function would and many other industries do, then in many cases, you're just parking money there, buying a Ferrari and keeping it in first gear. You know, there are, you know, a bunch of organizations that are creating that single version of Trooper. All this stuff is tied together, but it really takes a village, you got to start at the top. Otherwise, it's sitting there just, you know, collecting dust, much like the business funds we talked about.

Elise Holtzman: Well, you mentioned some culture issues, right, which is being traditional, not being the first ones on the block to adopt something, asking the question, what are our peer institutions doing, which is my least favorite question in the world and then having a reaction, you know, being reactive and saying, oh, well, the guys down the street have Salesforce, so we have to have it too. I think part of that cultural issue is lawyers not necessarily wanting all of their information where somebody else in the firm can see it. So the way we incentivize people for business development is often through origination credit. And I think that sometimes lawyers get scared off. It's like, well, if all of my information is in this system and everybody has access to it and they can see who I'm having lunch with and who I'm developing a relationship with, maybe that's going to run to my detriment at some point, if somebody else in the firm wants to take over that relationship. What do you see that aligns with that or tell me I'm wrong.

Michael Mellor: No, I think you're right. Knowledge is power. I think that at the end of the year, the attorneys want to be able to have that leverage to say, hey, listen, I made a point last year, I want 1.5 this year, or I'm walking. And they want that ability for someone not to say, well, hey, listen, we've got the client. And it comes down to that existential question, what is a partner? Are you an equity partner? You're an owner of the business. It's a fiduciary responsibility you have, ostensibly, to drive value and connect the dots for your fellow partners and fellow owners of the firm. You know, I feel that, you know, 20 years ago, before marketing existed, we were all in handshake deals and nobody ever left. And it was probably an easier thing to do that. You know and now, I mean, even in the last few weeks, we are seeing some extraordinary free agent moves. And, you know, that is power and leverage. And that's a difficult thing to satisfy. You know in law firms, if Peter Drucker says, culture eats strategy for breakfast. And in some firms, you don't have to be asked. Everyone shares their clients. Incredible penetration across practice groups, which is a great KPI. Obviously, the more practice groups you work through, the stickier those clients are. They're more risk-averse. Should one partner leave? If they're working with four or five different partners, they're much less likely to leave. I think there is that portability kind of they want to keep, because that is leverage. But at the end of the day, you know, those firms need to answer those questions and it has to start from the top. And it comes back to incentivizing that. Are you making it more lucrative for someone to just get a new client in their practice group? Or are you making it more lucrative for them to introduce, get to know the rest of the firm and bring their immigration client into the corporate group?

Elise Holtzman: Right. Is this an each-person-for-herself kind of an environment, or is this a rising-tide-lifts-all-ships environment?

Michael Mellor: You keep seeing firms moving out of that lockstep, modified lockstep and that creates its own set of issues. If you're a lockstep firm, are you going to be keeping your big originators, without paying them a little bit different? These are important questions to have, but the decisions you make around comp, drive the behaviors, whether they're tacit or implied.

Elise Holtzman: Mike, I'm hearing two themes here. One is that law firm culture is important as well as incentives for spending time, money and energy on these initiatives. So many law firms are trying to figure that out and it's not easy. The other theme is gathering and properly using the information. That's where we started on today's call. And I think those work together. If we have the information and we can clearly see where the possibilities lie, we're probably more incentivized to all be rowing in the same direction, which I think is your argument. Some law firms, whether they're using them effectively or not, have the money for knowledge management systems and some don't. If a firm can't justify a big knowledge management system tomorrow, what's the first smallest thing they can actually do to address some of the challenges we've been discussing?

Michael Mellor: It's interesting you say that. I think that a lot of firms, they may not have the budget or they say, hey, you know what? We've been great in the past. And what's the onus for change? We're doing just great. And how do you even know if you're doing well, if you're not tracking these things? But back to your original question, what's a small win? I start these really as bio projects. Right. You know, even if you're thinking you're an individual attorney, how do you know where you're going, if you don't know where you've been? And so just aggregating that information and getting that onto your bio, because of that changing buying cycle that we talked about is just so important. And so if you can do that in a sort of cohesive manner and you're getting your… whether that's 20 attorneys, whether that's 200 attorneys, whether that's 500 attorneys, you get all that information, you can normalize that description and put it in a central place, right? That can now… it can go to your practice group overviews to have a sort of an MVP list of your top 10 M&A deals. And now you've kind of built that in an Excel file. If you've got, you know, 15 matters for each partner, you've now got 400 matters that can easily be sorted in some sort of way, right? I write them all in a consistent way and then we're breaking that down, just by practice group type, by industry type. Now, when you're doing pitches and you're sending somebody a list of eight to 10 deals they've done, it's much easier for the attorneys to add on to it. If you're saying, hey, we don't have any deals, what have we done? Nobody has time for that, right? So you've got a list of now 400. I'm then telling people, hey, go to your old chamber submissions, go to your old pitches. You can pretty quickly aggregate a list of, you know, six, seven, eight hundred deals at literally no cost that just are broken down to, hey, is this a corporate, you know, is it an M&A deal, is it securities, is it litigation, is it labor, is it IP? Sometimes it's, you know, can be, you know, many things. M&A can have a tax component, an IP component, for example. But starting small there, don't let perfect be the enemy of the good and just build that list out by hand. But finding that when you give somebody 10 or 12 deals, they're going to give you 10 more. And if you continue to build a system, where you're embedding that back in after every pitch, you're going to turn around six months later and you're going to have a pretty healthy database. I think from there, I've noticed with the clients I work with, when you get to that point, the light bulbs really start going off with the partners. And essentially, I've essentially been a proof of concepts, where then they're saying, OK, what are these types of technologies? How are we doing this? Now you can start mapping those things back into an Adorin or an Elite or, you know, looking at more sophisticated systems. But don't let perfect be the enemy of good. And, you know, start it as a bioproject.

Elise Holtzman: Yeah. And analog still works, right?

Michael Mellor: It sure does.

Elise Holtzman: It's like, I think about this all the time. Everybody's busy using Apple Pay and credit cards. And there's a generation that's younger than me and my children, hint, hint, who don't carry cash. And I keep saying, cash still works, right? If you run into a situation where you can't use Apple Pay, cash still works. And so I think that's the same idea here is that there's so much technology out there and it can be so overwhelming for firms to know what to invest in and whether it makes sense to invest in. And to your point, the lawyers and the owners of the firm are looking for proof of concept. So if it needs to be done on the back of an envelope, let's start it on the back of an envelope. I really like that.

Michael Mellor: Sure. And you know, and if you want to start in a single practice area, that's a great way too. You get somebody who, you know, the win rates aren't that great. Well, it's because you're not surfacing the right information. So maybe you started with a labor group or maybe you just start with a small group and you can prove your wins pretty quick.

Elise Holtzman: Right. It doesn't have to be everybody. Mike, as we wrap up our time here together today, there's a question that I want to ask you that I ask all of my guests at the end of the show. There's a phenomenon called the curse of knowledge, where experts like you sometimes forget that what is so obvious and natural to them is not at all obvious to others. When it comes to firms understanding and then using their own track records, what's a principle or piece of advice that may seem obvious to you, but you think is really important for others to hear?

Michael Mellor: I think it's that, you know, you think you have an idea of what your colleagues do, but that there are pockets of information out there that you just can't be wise to. You can't know that, you know, Jenny, oh, I know she's our trademark person. Well, she's also really an expert in cannabis law. But, you know, you've never bothered having that conversation, because that's never come up in your world. And so, you know, I think that using that sort of bio exercise, it even helps because, you know, you're looking at attorneys who are looking online and looking at their own websites to look things up. There's missing opportunities everywhere. And I always say, you know, the only thing worse than, you know, not doing the work is having done the work and not putting it anywhere. People aren't mind readers. Potential clients aren't going to call you and say, hey, do you do other stuff that's not in your bio? And so I think that attorneys just expect that, hey, you know what, we're still in the 80s. We're still going to get the phone call. They're going to ask me in for the dog and pony show and I'll wow them. They're making decisions whether you're in the room or not. And so, you know, that is something that, you know, it's just a completely shifted buying cycle. And to memorialize the things you do is something that I think so many attorneys just kind of, you know, just don't think to do.

Elise Holtzman: That's right. And we're not even talking about going out here and doing something new and exciting. We're talking about just making a list of what you've already done and making it accessible, both to humans and the Internet. So I think this is one of those things that is… seems really simple, but so many people aren't doing it. And it's really good advice. So, Mike, thank you so much for being here today. It's a pleasure to have you.

Michael Mellor: Thank you so much. I've always been a big fan of the podcast and I appreciate you having me on.

Elise Holtzman: Thanks so much. I'm going to thank our listeners for tuning in as well. If you've enjoyed today's show, please subscribe, rate, and review us at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app.

In the meantime, be bold, take action, and make things happen. We'll see you next time.