What drives CRM adoption in law firms

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Getting lawyers to adopt new technology is one of the oldest challenges in a law firm. Lawyers are busy, cautious by training, and anything that feels like extra admin is a hard sell.

Fasken's answer was to run a CRM rollout without ever announcing one. Instead of telling lawyers about a new tool, the team focused on how to integrate the platform with lawyers' goals and let the platform prove itself one use case at a time.

We invited Oliviana Mingarelli, Head of Business Development & Marketing at Fasken, and Clint Marcham, Senior Director of Marketing Operations at Fasken, to walk through the firm's CRM rollout with Jason Broomfield, Director of Business Development, North America at Nexl.

Twenty years of feeding the system

Fasken had used a CRM for more than two decades before their rollout of Nexl, which gave the team a clear picture of what lawyers, assistants, and the marketing and BD team would not use.

“Anything that was cumbersome and required a lot of data entry wouldn't get used,” Clint says. “Our old system was very time-consuming. We were just constantly feeding the system. We wanted a CRM system that would actually give us value and save us some time.”

For Oliviana, the way to avoid that outcome was to anchor the technology decision to a business need. At Fasken, that need was a firm strategy built around client success. “We want to make sure that every client interaction our lawyers have resonates for our clients. Any time we have an interaction with our clients, we should learn a little bit more about them and what they want and need.”

Relevance is the goal

Adoption was never the target for Fasken. “Relevancy should be your goal,” Oliviana says. “Part of our strategy was actually to never launch a CRM platform. I remember Clint and I in the early days saying, we're not telling anyone we have a new CRM. That's the fastest way to get them to ignore it.”

Instead, the team's approach was focused on helping lawyers achieve their goals. “What are our lawyers trying to do? How can this tool help them do that? How can we make it relevant to their day-to-day and tie it back to our firm strategy?”

Once people were in the platform, the measure of success was frequency. “We don't just want people to show up once and do the training session because the managing partner forced them to. We want them to go in a second time and a third time,” says Oliviana.

Start small, and keep it simple

Fasken rolled out in stages, beginning with a group they knew would be receptive. “It was probably one of the most progressive groups at the firm,” Clint says. “We knew we had a winning audience, so we tried out a couple of CRM systems with them, and we landed on Nexl.”

Restraint was important in those early months. There was a temptation to show lawyers everything the new platform could do, but the previous system had been the backbone of the firm's marketing technology.

“We wanted to make sure that we didn't lose people by showing all the new functionality at once,” says Oliviana. “So, we focused on the most important thing that someone's going to want to know—seeing who else knows someone.”

“I don't know how many times I chatted to someone in the elevator and said something like, are you still working with this client? I just saw that so-and-so had a meeting with them. Are you on the same file? They'd be like, how did you know that? You've piqued their curiosity, and suddenly they're more inclined to use the tool.”

Oliviana compares their approach to building a French pastry. “I often refer to it with our team as the mille-feuille approach. Mille-feuille is this really delicious pastry made up of a thousand layers. I don't need to tell them I'm serving them dessert. They don't need to know what it looks like in the end. We're just going to layer it on one at a time, and eventually you've got your mille-feuille.”

The first layer was reassurance. Their platform integrates with lawyers' inboxes and reads metadata, but not the content of emails. Oliviana found some lawyers were worried about exposure. “There was definitely some concern in the early days about Big Brother and saying, is this too much? Am I exposing too much information?” Their first training session covered what information would be captured and how to make a contact private. “We talked about that really openly,” she says. “We were able to build trust in the platform once they saw the value of the relationship intelligence and visibility.”

Let the word spread

The pilot group's members sat in several practice and industry groups, so news of the platform traveled on its own. The limited number of pilot licenses meant demand built quickly.

“As the word got out there, I started getting calls, hey, can I use this CRM system?” says Clint. “I've never experienced that in 25 years of using CRM systems at a law firm. Nobody's ever asked me if they could get access to CRM, which was very eye-opening.”

The information visibility also created its own pull. “When one partner starts using the system and is getting value out of it, there's that FOMO, right? Everyone wants to get involved,” says Clint.

As the waiting list grew, the team went back to license holders who were not using the platform. “We have 30 people waiting for licenses. If you're not going to use the platform, that's OK, but I'm going to move your license over,” Oliviana recalls telling them. “Lawyers are competitive by nature, so nothing will get them using it like being told that they might lose it.”

What to do without executive buy-in

Support from the top was an important part of Fasken's process. “Our managing partner at that time really believed in the relationship intelligence that could come out of Nexl,” says Oliviana.

However, Oliviana thinks a rollout can work without leadership support, with a caveat. “It's certainly more difficult if you don't have that executive sponsorship. If you don't have it, I'd keep digging into why. Maybe it's the wrong platform for you,” she says.

Her advice is to find believers. “Are there practice group leaders, or industry group leaders, or other department heads, or even just other partners or associates that see the value? Focus on small numbers and find someone else who's willing to say yes. If you can't find anyone else that thinks it's valuable, then you possibly made a bad decision bringing in that CRM.”

Make adoption everyone's job

One adoption method they used was a five-week gamification program, BizQuest, which Fasken created to build lawyer BD habits. The first edition focused on BD culture, and the second built CRM activity into the challenges. “In the first week we're talking about really basic things like go to LinkedIn and update your biography. Another one would be to log into Nexl and look up a contact you spoke to this week,” Oliviana says. The CRM team had created videos and tools so people could catch up in the program if they hadn't used the platform before.

Beyond that, most of the adoption came from finding a use case that fit a specific group. Where she could, Oliviana tied the platform to revenue. “We'd talk to people and say, you know that if you don't talk to a contact every 90 days, the chance of them buying from you reduces by more than 75%? Oh, by the way, if you right-click on this person's contact information on the plug-in that's in your Outlook, you can set up an automatic stay-in-touch reminder,” she says. “Tie it to revenue and how decisions are made, and then the activity is not cumbersome. It feels like it's helping them out.”

Clint's team leaned on champions. “We had two lawyers that would traditionally have been labeled as skeptics. We got them using Nexl and they gave us amazing feedback,” he says. “They were talking about the platform without us having to prompt them.”

That made a big difference because of who lawyers listen to. “Lawyers would rather hear from their colleagues than the marketing and BD team,” says Clint. The team now keeps a library of those anecdotes and success stories, so when a lawyer raises a need, someone can answer it with a story from a peer.

The marketing and BD team was the other adoption engine. “When you go to the coffee station, when you're in the elevator, just mention Nexl,” says Clint. “It couldn't just be a couple of emails that went out. It needed to be constant reminders, so it becomes part of our culture.” Oliviana was equally clear with her team about where responsibility sat. “Our CRM team is not responsible for the rollout of this system. All of us are responsible.”

How to report on qualitative outcomes

Reporting on cultural shifts is harder than reporting a login count. “A lot of people will say, if I'm not going to report on adoption rates, what am I going to report on? They're not inexpensive tools,” says Oliviana. Her answer is benchmarks. “I started looking at things like engagement rates for some of our strategic accounts. How do I report on that next quarter to show that our engagement rate's going up? Then also layering on some of our financial information and being able to say, with the interactions that we're tracking, the revenue numbers are going up steadily."

Anecdotes are another measure. “Lawyers have been able to contact partners in other offices that they've maybe never spoken to before and start conversations,” Clint says. “Similarly, we've had RFPs that we've been better able to respond to because we understand the relationship network better and can involve the right people.”

Make it part of the culture

For Oliviana, the biggest mistake a firm can make is the one she and Clint decided to avoid on day one. “Do not talk about the fact that you're rolling out a new CRM. It's a bit like Fight Club,” she says. “The minute you start saying, we have another tool, this is what we're doing, you've lost them already.”

Clint agrees. “You've got to home in on the pain points of lawyers, and determine whether your CRM system can be a solution to that or not. Quite often it can be,” he says. “You've just got to keep at it and make it part of the culture. It's got to be something that people turn to and use.”