Thomson West missing Internet discussion in competive intelligence tools?

Per Jim Middlemiss of Canandian Lawyer Magazine’s Law Times, Thomson West is rolling out a suite of competitive intelligence tools for law firms along with its sister firm Thomson Carswell in Toronto.

Though Thomson has developed a monitoring system that covers trends in litigation, intellectual property, deals, and law firms, I can’t see anywhere in the detailed article a reference to Internet discussion being picked up via RSS feeds. Such RSS feeds would pick up the names of lawyers, law firms, clients, and subjects of litigation and/or transactions. Would cover both your own law firm and competitors.

This in the face of growing demand for competitive intelligence.

…[L]aw firms are turning to CI to get an edge. A recent survey found that 89 per cent of law firms predicted that their demand for market intelligence will increase in the next two years, but only 27 per cent of firms have a distinct budget for CI. About 60 per cent of firms engage in some form of CI research each week.

CI can be used for everything from law firm merger analysis to recruiting, key client planning, and new client development. It can be used to improve client service, respond to RFPs, and help firms make the short list.

‘It’s all about specific clients, about understanding trends in their industry — trends the clients themselves may not be aware of,’ [Doug] Hoover, [director, strategic marketing at Thomson West] explains.

CI currently is most frequently used by firms to engage in competitive analysis, analysis involving a firm’s strengths/weaknesses/opportunities/threats (SWOT), customer segmenting, and assessing customer worth or value to a firm.

What’s driving CI’s growth is the increasing amount of data that’s available and technology tools that can be used to massage it and slice and dice it……“It’s one of the fastest growing areas of interest in law firms,” says [Mark] Rousseau, [general manager of client development at Thomson Carswell].

It will be interesting to see if Thomson responds to this post. Historically, Thomson’s FindLaw has emailed me responding to questions I have raised as to their law firm solutions.

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