Day three at ILTA 2013: Bill Burch on the state of Elite
Day three at ILTA 2013 was filled with informative sessions and productive meetings. Bill Burch, vice president of Global Sales for Thomson Reuters Elite, gave a presentation about the state of Elite, specifically talking about the company direction, product direction and 3E momentum.
Burch started the session by talking about emerging market trends that he is seeing in the legal industry: business development, risk and compliance, financial pressure, and practice management. To react to those trends, Thomson Reuters has been and will continue to focus on mobility, the cloud, experience, intelligence, and workspace.
Specific to Elite, Burch talked about the Thomson Reuters Elite Community, which launched in July and allows customers of the Elite group of products to connect with each other in order to share ideas and ask questions. He also mentioned Workspace, which brings together distinct but related products within an environment where they share a common workflow and a common look and feel, across both web and mobile devices. Similar to Microsoft’s SharePoint, Workspace integrates Elite 3E for financial management and MatterSphere, a Microsoft Office-based matter-management platform, and will also connect directly into a firm’s document-management system.
Burch went on to give a sneak peek into what’s ahead for the mid-market. Elite’s ProLaw product has new dashboard capabilities coming, advanced back office capabilities, Prolaw APIs, and improved performance and quality.
Finally, he launched into Elite’s new Business Development Premier solution, which launched this week. Stating that bad data plagues success, Vinnie Scarinci, director of sales for Thomson Reuters Elite, mentioned some average data efforts for 500-attorney law firms:
-256 contacts per attorney
-128,000 contacts total
-Average number of companies in an attorney’s contact list is 36
-60 percent of contacts never make it into the firm’s CRM tool
-70 percent of data in CRM tools is outdated within 12 months
These statistics were the inspiration behind Business Development Premier, which delivers automation, real-time insights, strategic focus, and tailored user experiences. The alignment with Microsoft on the technology ensures rapid growth on the platform. Workflow and performance are built in, so this allows Thomson Reuters legal knowledge and process and workflow solutions to shine through. Plus, this allows Thomson Reuters to do what it does best, according to Scarinci: provide unsurpassed informational assets.
Finally, Burch closed the discussion by talking about continuing with the 3E customer momentum. “Our forward-thinking development efforts are going into the 3E product line,” he said. Over 100 firms are now signed up for 3E.
