 By Rosemary Frenza, an Illinois attorney and freelance writer. She can be reached at rosemary.frenza@gmail.com. This article was originally published on the LawMarketing Portal, www.LawMarketing.com.
If you’ve ever done business with Duane Morris, LLP, one of the 100 largest law firms in the United States, you may recently have received an email like this one:
“Dear [Insert Your Name Here],
On behalf of everyone at Duane Morris, LLP, we are contacting you to ensure that we have your accurate contact information.
Please review the information on the right for accuracy and completeness. If accurate and complete, please click on ‘Confirm.’ Otherwise, please update by clicking ‘Edit.’
We appreciate your assistance and look forward to a strong and lasting relationship.” Thanks to this clever automated contact management tool, which Duane Morris began using in August, the firm has significantly increased its number of up-to-date client contact files – so far achieving a 30% and rising response rate – while saving both money and employee time and reaching a widening audience with its weekly email alerts.
The decision
In 2002, Duane Morris began using LexisNexis InterAction, a type of CRM software, as part of a complete desktop overhaul. InterAction is equipped with different functions, or “modules”, to assist law firms and other “relationship based” organizations in developing and maintaining contacts. One such function that comes with the software is the Contact Verifier Module, which sends out emails, like the one above, to the firm’s contacts. Still, the firm did not begin using the Contact Verifier immediately.
 “We really had no automated method” for updating contact information, explains Patricia Purdy, Senior Direct Marketing and CRM Manager at Duane Morris. Rather, the firm’s employees were in the habit of manually updating a contact file when they received notification of an address change from a contact.
Earlier this year, partly in response to inquiries from some of Duane Morris’ partners who had received similar emails from other firms, Purdy and her staff decided to begin using the Contact Verifier Module. Reaction was mixed. The partners who had requested the system were obviously pleased, while others were hesitant. Nonetheless, the project was piloted over an eight-week period, and has been a success thus far.
Money saved
By using the Contact Verifier Module as opposed to a manual updating system, Duane Morris has already saved considerable funds. While the lack of a previous, concerted contact updating system makes exact figures elusive, Purdy estimates that InterAction has saved the firm the salaries of at least four full-time employees. If Duane Morris were simply sending out its own contact updating emails, Purdy explains, the firm’s staff would be required to review each response, then manually input it into the client contact database. With InterAction, however, Purdy says, “someone just briefly reviews a response for formatting” - to make sure that a suite number or an email address has been placed in the appropriate box, for example – and then InterAction automatically updates the file.
 Technical difficulties
In order to make the adoption of the Contact Verifier Module run smoothly, the firm has centrally managed its use from Duane Morris’ main office in Philadelphia, explains Merrie Priest, Network Administrator. So far, the firm has sent emails to about 12,520 contacts out of a list of 138,000. They send about 600 emails per day.
“The difference between what we do and what I’ve heard that other law firms do is that we don’t limit it to our existing marketing contact lists,” Purdy says. Rather, “we send an email to every contact who has a business email address,” in an attempt not just to maintain the existing contact database but to provide the firm’s attorneys and assistants with current data for their contacts. This, in turn, enables Duane Morris to reach many more people than ever before with new firm information and updates.
The network team did encounter one initial glitch when testing the system. The Contact Verifier Module was configured to use a group access that is not used at Duane Morris. It took about two months to figure out the exact problem, Priest says, but once the team realized what was happening, it was fairly quickly and easily corrected.
No other problems have arisen thus far. Because Duane Morris sends the updating emails alphabetically by last name rather than by firm name, different firms tend not to be bombarded with numerous emails at once; thus, Duane Morris’ emails are rarely stopped by overzealous spam filters. Priest further explains that the software is remarkably easy to use, because the program is very basic and emails can be sent automatically at all hours of the day and night.
A happy public
The response that Duane Morris has received from its contacts has generally been quite positive, according to Patricia Purdy. Initially, some people were hesitant to reply to the emails because of concerns over authenticity, perhaps because email scammers sometimes try to elicit personal information from consumers by posing as banks and other institutions.
“That’s why we make sure that a real person’s name is on each email, not just our firm name,” Purdy explains, and indeed, each email is replete with the name and complete contact information of a Duane Morris marketing team member, so that nervous recipients can call and verify that the email is for real. This approach seems to be effective, because the rate of responses per number of emails sent is steadily increasing.
The bottom line
The decision to use the InterAction Contact Verifier Module has been a positive one for Duane Morris, with few glitches, time and money saved, and a positive public response. The impressive 30% and rising response rate has made it clear to the marketing team that the new system can have wide-reaching results.
“It would be a rare week when we didn’t send out an email alert,” according to Patricia Purdy. Now, thanks to its clever use of InterAction’s Contact Verifier Module, Duane Morris’ alerts will reach a much wider audience. |
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