In the past decade or so, competitive intelligence (CI) has made huge inroads in the legal services industry.
There are a growing number of excellent resources one can employ for conducting competitive intelligence research. Many are already in widespread use today, perhaps most notably, LexisNexis atVantage, Thomson Reuters Monitor Suite and Manzama.
In addition to these, there are many tools that provide free and/or low cost ways to get a leg up on your competitors, or perhaps to gain insight on the challenges a prospective client faces in his or her particular industry. The fact that many of these resources happen to be available at moderate or no cost is something any law firm operating in today’s environment can appreciate.
Following are a few of our recommendations.
Law Firm Lists and Surveys
- Chambers and Partners, a free searchable database of the top lawyers in the United States and nearly 200 other countries, allows firms to easily identify, for instance, which firms are perceived as leading the way in new and emerging practice areas, such as Climate Change and E-Discovery Litigation.
- Nationwide Layoff Watch, part of the Above the Law (ATL) blog, often seems to get the inside scoop before any other source. ATL blog is also a great source of information on the culture of various firms, including the “bad and the ugly.”
- NLJ 350 and AmLaw 100, and the newer AmLaw 200, lists of the largest law firms provide insights on revenue and headcount growth and contraction trends.
- Resources specific to the DC region include the Washington Business Journal’s “Top 100 Law Firms” and Washingtonian’s “Top Lawyers” by practice area lists.
Litigation Insight
- PACER, a low cost source for court dockets, can be very useful for uncovering competitors’ billing practices, such as in bankruptcy proceedings.
- LexisNexis® CourtLink® Strategic Profiles provides insight into a public company's litigation history, attorney experience in a particular practice area, and nature of suit trends.
Social Media Trends and Analysis
- Social Mention, a free social media search engine, provides real time search capabilities, and allows one to drill down to a particular subset of social media, e.g., microblogs or blogs by keyword or phrase.
- Social Searcher offers free and premium social media searching. The premium service offers features such as saving social mentions history, exporting data, API integration, advanced analytics, and immediate email notifications.
- Legal Blawg Archive is a free search engine created by the Law Library of Congress, which began harvesting legal blogs in 2007. In addition to a broad selection of legal topics, blogs can also be retrieved by keywords or browsed by subject, name, or title.
- TVEyes, a subscription-based service, makes TV and radio broadcasts searchable by keyword, phrase or topic, just as you would use a search engine for text. Used by those who need this information in real time, it can also be used to generate reports and emails on a 24/7 basis.
Deals and Transactions
- DealBook, a feature of the New York Times, provides wide-ranging coverage of company mergers, private equity and venture capital.
- Mergers & Acquisitions, a free site and e-newsletter, tracks the middle market and includes breaking news, in-depth commentary and analysis. The People Moves section frequently features news about firms’ growth in particular practice areas.
Parting Thoughts
CI research should never take the form of espionage, and CI professionals should adhere to strict ethical parameters. In fact, the Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) has enshrined this in its Code of Ethics.
As the Chair of the Special Libraries Association (SLA) Competitive Intelligence Division has noted, law firm CI is different (compared to the corporate approach to CI) in that it focuses on not just the business, but also what is happening from a legislative and regulatory standpoint. In light of its unique characteristics, law firm CI arguably does not readily lend itself to outsourcing.
There are many excellent tools for conducting CI research that do not necessarily require breaking the bank. For further reading on CI, we recommend the following articles, for their interesting yet very different perspectives: Gina Passarella, Competitive Intelligence: Spy Games or Market Research (The Legal Intelligencer, May 6, 2014), and Zena Applebaum, CI and Law Firms: An Integral Part of the Legal Business (3 Geeks and a Law Blog, May 6, 2014).
By Louis C. Abramovitz, MSLS, MBA, Wilkinson Barker Knauer Library Manager, for the March/April 2015 issue of the Capital Ideas Newsletter.