'Massive opportunity' to automate and predict business development: Mondaq's Richard Anderson
This article was produced in partnership with Mondaq.
Richard Anderson worked in the financial services’ compliance and legal technology space in product management for a decade before taking a senior role in big data at a global advertising agency that, while outside that purview, gave him a fantastic opportunity to further his learning. But when Mondaq offered him a position in late 2020 and the team showed him exactly what they could do, Anderson knew it was time to make the move back.
“They demoed their data to me, and I was sold,” he recalls, noting that with his background working with data, information, and content “it was so obvious” he wanted to be a part of what Mondaq was doing.
Having lived through the evolution of compliance and regulatory teams becoming more invested in data’s potential in the wake of the 2008 market crash, Anderson sees a parallel now in the legal space in terms of acceptance, understanding, excitement, and fear about what data can do and how it can best be leveraged.
“There’s a massive opportunity for law firms, big and small, to utilize data in a big way that’s going to automate — and in the future predict — their business development,” Anderson, now Chief Product Officer at Mondaq, explains. “Realizing that opportunity exists and getting started today is essential not only because they can build revenue from it, but also from a defensive position. Unlocking its value is something everyone should be thinking about.”
Especially when compared with the business-to-consumer (B2C) space, the legal sector has historically been behind the pace in terms of using data for its marketing. While not approaching the level of these B2C players, and quite rightly given the nature of the work legal professionals do, there has been a definite shift towards adopting a similar mindset: there is a lot of data out there, we can get value from it, and we need to do it.
For Anderson, data is simply “more in the zeitgeist” and he notes that every senior-level conversation Mondaq has recently is either data-led, or about wanting to be data-led, which wasn’t the case a few short years ago. The rise of AI, particularly generative (gen) AI, also sharpens people’s minds on data.
Mondaq is seeing the trend on the ground, reflected in an increased appetite for information. Recently, the company partnered with the fast-growing AmLaw 50 firm, Akin, to deliver a webinar on how to use data to power business development and Mondaq is in conversations with many firms to varying degrees about doing something similar to what Akin has embraced on the data front.
“It's a wave that's been building for the last decade, and is now starting to crest,” Anderson says.
Ultimately, data provides a more holistic view of clients and prospects. A firm might have both in a CRM, but if bringing in other data around that — whether it’s the firm’s own, or second- or third-party data — paints a much more complete picture.
In Mondaq’s case, it has usage data related to what content is being read on the site. Bringing that data into the firm’s CRM or other data store provides insight into what a client — or a prospect — is interested in reading. Whether it’s diving into articles on litigation or employment law, it gives a signal as to what they’re concerned about or focusing on at that point in time — and provides valuable direction for the firm about their clients and prospects.
Another benefit of Mondaq is that it takes away “some of the grunt work” between identifying a trend and turning it into a lead. The information allows staff to focus on higher-value activities.
“It creates more efficiency, a better workflow, and ideally much more business for the firm,” Anderson says. “We’ve seen data-centric firms do some impressive things by taking advantage of every avenue available to them and looking at it as a whole.”
And in Anderson’s opinion, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Sooner rather than later, firms will be predicting trends and both client and corporate sentiment around jurisdictions ,practice areas and industries and driving revenue out of it.
“Once a firm gets beyond the merging and automating stage, there’s an exciting layer of predictive, AI-generated workflow which will suggest actions and recommendations based on the data. Firms that start on that journey today will be in a much better position to realize that opportunity when it comes.”
There’s no skirting around the fact that integrating data into a firm’s operations is difficult. Even if the data received is clean, clear, structured, and easy to understand, it still has to be mapped to the firm’s taxonomy — or in other words, “transformed into something that’s useful for you,” Anderson explains.
There’s work behind merging the data into something meaningful that can be acted upon, and this is compounded by the fact that unlike B2C counterparts, law firms are unlikely to have marketing teams staffed with data engineers, scientists, or analysts. But like any skillset, it can be built up and Anderson’s biggest advice is to just start. Don’t be intimidated: all firms have data, and even if it’s in Excel to begin with, take the step of bringing it all together.
“You’ll get value from it, you’ll determine what data you want to drive in, and you’ll understand the skills you need to do it,” he says. “You’ll also build confidence, and it becomes a virtuous cycle. You’ll be surprised at how far you can go even at the most basic level.”
With 1 million registered users and around 20 million readers of Mondaq content each year, and the ability to see what content they’re reading in which practice areas aggregated up to an industry level, Mondaq sits on a gold mine of data. Around four years ago, they decided to open the doors to it.
First, they built out Mondaq Analytics, a platform that can be interrogated and generates useful reports. Second, there are the APIs where the data provided is more flexible and can be integrated into a firm’s data warehouse to automate business development and content marketing workflows and that’s what firms should be working towards.
But how does a firm know if they’re doing it right?
“You know it when you see it, ultimately it’s about having one single source of truth and a complete picture of the client that is going to give you a competitive advantage in the market. Allowing you to build closer relationships with your existing clients and future prospects to effectively build business development” Anderson sums up. “When it’s done well, it really and truly unlocks the value of our data and its unique dataset as well. Mondaq is happy to play a part in that story, as we go through this data transformation.”
