It was a hugely entertaining and final session of the first day at the Marketing Partner Forum in Miami with the session:  Match Game: Designing a Bespoke Martech Strategy

It was a take on the 1970s gameshow Match Game (Blankety Blank for our UK readers) with the panelists being:

• Alina Gorokhovsky, Chief Marketing Officer, Wiley Rein LLP
• Jessica Grayson, Chief Business Development Officer, Phillips Nizer LLP
• Adrian Lurssen, Co-Founder, JD Supra, LLC

It was brilliantly hosted by the energetic Chris Fritsch, Business Development Consultant & Founder, CLIENTSFirst Consulting.  Chris even came complete with the telescoping microphone.

There were some brilliant questions and answers throughout but the one that I found most interesting, having helped launch a software company that works with many law firms was:

"What is the hardest thing at a law firm?"

The answer that came from Adrian Lurssen of JD Supra really struck home:

Technology: Deployment, adoption and ongoing engagement.

This is something that I have been looking at and trying to understand and build my knowledge on over the last 5 years.  It is so so important because you can build the greatest piece of software in the world but if no one uses it then it is no good at all.

To drive adoption and ongoing engagement we realised that feedback is the most important thing.  Indeed, "Feedback is the breakfast of champions" as Ken Blanchard once said!  With the lawyers we work, when they write an insight we help them to understand the impact of that insight.  Who is engaging with it, who is reading it, who is sharing it.  This typically does not have to be thousands of people.  It might just be 3 people - but if it is the General Counsels of your 3 biggest clients then there is a much higher chance the lawyer is going to write another expert insight next week because they see the business value.

A few years ago, we were also very lucky to meet Dr Claire El Mouden, an evolutionary biologist from the University of Oxford with a huge amount of knowledge in behavioural science.  Claire helped us to understand how to use gamification to help us motivate very busy lawyers to adopt our software and use it in the long term.  The gamification could be as simple setting up a competition over the deployment stage.  Put them into two teams and pitch them against each other, competing for a trophy and bottle of Champagne.  The competition is based on points being scored for creating expert insights, the number of social shares they receive, the number of client engagements they get etc. and the results fed back on a weekly basis. The competitive nature of the lawyers mean that the results are phenomenal and behaviours change dramatically.

So before deploying any new software at a law firm (or any firm) make sure that the lawyers are very clear why they should use this, what's in it for the firm and very importantly, what's in it for them!  If they can see the value and understand how it will help them build their own business and their profile - then throw in a bit of fun gamification - then you might just be surprised at what your lawyers can achieve.