Nila Hirani at Nikec Solutions on how email can help you manage the risks around leavers, from retaining contacts to reducing the risks of fraud and non-compliance.
Networking and relationships play a huge part in growing business today, making it all the more essential to understand it, manage it and leverage your contacts.
During a recent conversation with a manager in a law firm, I Iearned that he’d spent several days trawling through thousands of emails within a leaver’s archive mailbox. Why? He was trying to build a clear view of the leaver’s ‘top 10 clients’ and of the work undertaken in the past six months, after a handover report which proved to be incomplete – vital information had been omitted.
The harsh reality – and very real commercial risk – is that although firms have handovers to capture knowledge and information, many fee earners are protective of their client lists. This is mainly down to the time and effort they have spent in building relationships – but it may also be for other reasons. A striking survey by Sophos in 2012 highlighted that 50% of employees who had changed or lost their jobs in the previous year had taken confidential company data or information with them. Four in 10 of those who took data planned to use it to help them in their new job.
Capturing and safeguarding intellectual property such as client lists, pricing structures and other market sensitive information is of crucial importance. Firms need to ensure that adequate protection exists by implementing systems and processes. This not only allows them to be proactive, it also empowers them to quickly respond to situations while defending their organisation, employees and clients.
A firm-wide communications overview reduces the risk of losing clients
Given that lawyers will change employers several times during their careers, how can a firm gain an accurate and high-level insight into a leaver’s work with clients?
How do they judge the strength of the relationships a leaver has? Is there anyone else in the firm who can nurture this relationship once the fee earner has left? A handover is designed to extract this information, but it’s rarely sufficient because it relies on the employee to fill in the details. Whether intentionally or not, information can be omitted or misinterpreted.
But there are other options that can be used to complement the process. With approximately 120 emails being sent and received per user, per day (according to technology research firm Radicati), email can provide a vital and insightful place from which essential information can be mined and unlocked, and from which an accurate picture of the relationship and its context can be created.
This can bring to the fore very important ‘latent’ information – a client relationship that appears insignificant in the handover report may actually turn out to be of greater importance when investigated further, for instance.Conducting such investigation is tedious, labour-intensive and time-consuming – a point proved by the law firm manager I met.
Fortunately, there are technologies such as ‘messaging intelligence’ that automate this process. This software churns through vast numbers of inbound/outbound emails, reporting the frequency, location and subject of email exchanges. It then provides a 360-degree graphical representation of the communications had by an individual, or a group of people across the organisation.
Essentially the software generates a powerful visual connections map, unveiling key business relationships, their strengths and associations between internal employees and external clients. It can also transform this into a real-time ‘communications heat map’ (see diagram, right) to display the frequency of communications and how recently these took place. From the pattern and frequency of communications between the fee earner and clients, firms can identify their key clients and their relationship status, and can continue communications with them after the fee earner has left.
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| Messaging intelligence: This ‘communications heat map’ shows a user and her connections. The internal user in blue is surrounded by coloured contacts ranging from bright red (‘hot’ clients that have been contacted recently) to bright blue (where communications are ‘cold’ or older) |
The risk of information loss through fraud, non-compliance and security breaches
Information is not just lost when a fee earner leaves. Indispensable data can just as equally disappear through non-compliance, leaks of corporate information to a competitor, and corporate policy breaches – exposing the firm to further risks.
Modern technologies empower users to share and save large amounts of data effortlessly, but it has also increased the risk of sensitive information being distributed to unauthorised recipients. This risk is further heightened as firms use contractors and temporary staff who may be unaware of the sensitive nature of the data they work with.
How do you ensure intellectual property is not unlawfully distributed, or conflicts of interest are effectively avoided? How do you verify whether employees are adhering to the confidentiality policy?
This is another risk that can be managed by examining the email exchanges of your staff. Of course, only the subject line of the emails, not the content of the actual email itself, is reported, so there is no breach of privacy. An automated investigation can uncover a domain that is of concern – a competitor’s or a specific client’s email address, for example.
Not only does this increase the performance and efficiency of investigations by narrowing the scope of the communications, it also allows for corrective actions to be implemented instantaneously.
In today’s dynamic legal environment, law firms need to protect their main assets – their clients and their reputation – stringently.
In addition to policies and procedures, deploying software such as messaging intelligence will be instrumental in preventing more damaging problems occurring later. This kind of proactivity allows firms to manage risk, protect their reputation and retain control over intellectual property – a priceless prize.
Nila Hirani [
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Nikec Solutions [ www.nikecsolutions.com ]
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