3 Reasons Law Firms Should Care About Passive Data Capture

As they say in the legal profession, time is money. While most attorneys are measured by their proverbial “books of business,” the last thing they want to do is spend valuable time updating their client rolodexes.

After all, clients pay top dollar for expert legal counsel, not data entry.

Last week, we shared an anecdote about a database administrator at AmLaw 200 law firm who discovered a staggering 210,000 additional contacts for their firm simply by using the InterAction IQ signature capture feature, which begs the question, how does it work?

The InterAction IQ signature capture feature uses “passive” data capture. In other words, every time an attorney receives a new email IQ automatically mines the firm’s exchange server using passive data collection and compares the email signature to the most recent contact data available in InterAction. In essence, with InterAction’s existing data change management functionality, provided a contact exists in an attorney’s contact collection, the attorney or BD professional doesn’t need to do a thing and those changes are immediately passed onto them which can either be reviewed or automatically made.

Now going back to the firm with 210,000 newly discovered contacts, just think about the time it would take an attorney or member of the BD team to manually enter and update that information. Chances are this is a significant chunk of time that could otherwise be better spent focused on more pressing billable client or BD related-work.

And, if unearthing thousands of potential new connections isn’t enough to motivate law firms to care about using passive data capture via IQ, here’s are 3 other reasons to consider:

• Reduces time spent entering data change requests. In addition to saving law firms time and money, IQ’s signature capture feature alleviates the need for attorneys or members of the BD team to be bogged down by manually updating their data change requests. This not only allows attorneys to focus on serving paying clients, but it also alleviates BD resources to focus on well, building business.

• Ensures Data Quality is High. By using only the freshest data available via signature capture feature, attorneys and members of the BD team can ensure the quality of their data is the highest. In other words, it helps weed out stale data to uncover only most current and accurate information available.

• Reduces Data Stewardship Responsibilities. In addition to alleviating a firm’s overall data stewardship responsibilities, whoever is researching a particular contact can see who is making the recommended change. This eliminates the extra step of having to research who is suggesting the change and enables attorneys to see the actual signature taken from the email so they can confirm the accuracy of the data, if needed.

To learn more about IQ’s signature capture feature and how IQ can inform the law firm BD process, take a read through this new IQ E-book.