2023 LMA Mid-Atlantic
Your Honor Award
2023 LMA Mid-Atlantic Your Honor Award
Covington Marketing Team received the 2023 LMA MidAtlantic Your Honor Award (YHA) for Marketing Technology. The award program recognizes creativity, execution, achievement, and overall excellence in legal marketing.
Covington Marketing Leadership Team
The Covington team was recognized for CovConnect, a one-stop platform providing information to support the unique culture of collaboration within the firm and to better connect lawyers to clients by understanding each client’s unique needs and interests.
Goals:
CovConnect was designed to:
Create and execute better business plans for practice and industry groups and individual senior lawyers
Make it easy and comprehensive to connect the dots among these plans
Measure progress against goals
Empower lawyers to find opportunities connect more meaningfully with clients
Gain insights into key industry trends and identify targets
Leverage various tools, from content marketing to CRM, to efficiently reach those targets
Before CovConnect obtaining a comprehensive understanding of client and prospective client relationships required manually compiling information from 13 different sources. One of the biggest challenges was consolidating the data from various sources and making it easily accessible and digestible. CovConnect began with a deep dive into understanding existing systems to identify gaps in business planning and business development processes.
Implementation:
Recognizing the complexity of the project, and the aggressive twelve-week timeline for initial migration to Salesforce, the project was divided into multiple workstreams to ensure effective management and execution:
Migration From InterAction: To facilitate the migration from InterAction, we enlisted the assistance of a consultant with in-depth knowledge of the platform. This expert guided the team in extracting and transforming company, contact, and opportunity data into Salesforce's data structures. This process presented a unique challenge because some of Salesforce's data structures were still under construction. The migration provided an opportunity to clean up data from decades-old system, merge companies and eliminate dormant and duplicate contacts.
Building the Salesforce Instance: Covington chose Upper Sigma to jumpstart the implementation efforts. This selection not only accelerated the project, but also provided access to a trusted expert who complemented the team's internal Salesforce Administrator’s skills.
Integration with 3E Accounting System: Integrating Salesforce with the accounting system was a crucial step. This integration facilitated the seamless transfer of client, matter and timekeeper data from 3E to Salesforce ensuring the accuracy and accessibility of this critical information.
Other Integrations: Website bios (Sitecore), Chambers submissions, pitch information, Enterprise Relationship Management (ERM) (SigParser), as well as client interests from website analytics (such as digital content engagement from Sitecore), social media activities, blogs (Lexblog), and marketing automation system (Pardot) integrations further enhanced client profiles.
Rollout of Marketing Automation Platform: A new marketing automation platform (Pardot) was selected as its advanced features such as web tracking, lead scoring, and engagement tools offered significant upgrade from the previous platform.
Rollout of Dashboards: Once all of the data was available in a single platform, the team developed robust and easy to use dashboards. The dashboards set this project apart from others. Many firms have CRM and ERM systems, but very few are able to bring this information into one easy-to-use tool. Dashboards help the BD team and lawyers to identify clients’ potential needs, allowing them to engage one-on-one with the most promising targets on the topics each has shown interest in. The dashboards provide lawyers and BD professionals with a holistic view of the firm's relationship with each client. The dashboards are interactive, so users can drill down to gain more information.
User Adoption: Lastly, we knew that the successful implementation of these powerful tools hinged on user adoption. To create internal buzz and encourage lawyers to embrace these new capabilities, we provided comprehensive training and support.
Agile methodology was used to manage all of the workstreams. Daily standup meetings were conducted with each consultant involved in the project, promoting real-time collaboration and issue resolution. Joint standup sessions were also held, allowing consultants to collaborate with one another and ensure seamless coordination between the many workstreams.
Results:
Two years after deploying CovConnect, Covington improved client engagement, streamlined business development, and facilitated comprehensive business planning. More than 700 senior lawyers and BD team members have been onboarded onto the platform, and many use it daily.
The platform was refined following an initial rollout to the business development and marketing team, adding more features and functionality that would appeal to a broader group of senior lawyers. Covington then focused on providing dashboards for practice group leaders to facilitate cross-selling and to client relationship managers to provide insights that would help them better serve their clients. After overwhelmingly positive feedback, the team introduced the dashboards at Covington’s senior lawyers retreat earlier this year.
The lawyers have embraced the platform, using it to identify which other groups are targeting the same company, to see which group’s targets have had touches (and which have not), to find client targets easily in a geographic area, and for direct outreach or building lists for invitations or content targeting. They continue to request new dashboards and find innovative ways to use data.
