Eagan's Thomson West touts Network-building Web Tools for Law Firms

Law firms can mine clients through employee e-mail

By Leslie Brooks Suzakamo, Pioneer Press, Feb. 21, 2008

You know the saying: It's not just what you know, it's who you know.

Now, Eagan-based Thomson West is making it easier for law firms to figure out who their own people know and get more business from contacts they already have.

Best known for Westlaw, its online legal research service, Thomson West is making forays into the business of law by offering a social networking tool called ContactNet. Built like a search engine, it can allow senior partners in a firm to do a Google-like search of the e-mail messages, contacts and billable relationships of its employees. The results are ranked with the strongest relationships appearing at the top, just like results in Google and other search tools.

Kilpatrick Stockton, an Atlanta-based firm with more than 500 lawyers scattered across nine offices, put ContactNet to the test recently.

"One morning before work, a lawyer at the firm saw a TV news story about a food company blamed for selling a tainted product. As soon as he got to the office, the lawyer logged into ContactNet to find out whom at the firm knew people inside the food company. By the end of the day, Kilpatrick Stockton's litigation unit had signed up a new client," said David Gregson, the firm's Chief Information Officer.

"You don't know who your partners know and you don't know who the clients know," he said.

ContactNet, a mash-up of social networking and search technologies, is one of a growing array of tools Thomson is selling to help law firms market their services. The search tool was developed by Contact Networks, a 15-person Boston technology firm that Thomson bought for an undisclosed amount in January.

"Contact Networks' flagship tool uses a complex classification system that allows it to sort through documents in a law firm's electronic network. An algorithm figures out which relationships are related to work and which ones aren't," said Wilbur Swan, ContactNetworks' Vice President of Marketing.

The software resembles customer-relationship software that holds the address books of a company's employees, but Swan and Thomson officials claim their product is in its own category of "relationship discovery systems." There are competitors with similar "relationship" tools.

The technology is allowing businesses to tiptoe into delicate territory. Providers like Thomson know they must be mindful of concerns about privacy and client relationships or risk turning off the lawyers they are courting.

"ContactNet allows the law firm to blot out the phone numbers and e-mail addresses of a lawyer's contacts to prevent poaching," Swan said.

"Let's say you have a baby boomer who's been at a firm for 20 years and that firm hires a younger business development person," Swan said. By using the tool before calling, "that person is less likely to step on the toes of the lawyer with the more developed relationship," he said.

"About 40 law firms use ContactNet, and Thomson is touting it to big firms that already use tools like Westlaw," said Tony Abena, Senior Vice President of Strategic Marketing and head of Thomson's Business of Law unit.

That unit accounts for $250 million in revenue, a small percentage of the $3.3 billion in sales Thomson's legal division pulled in last year, but it's got a 12 percent annual growth rate. Other products with names like Peer Monitor and Litigation Monitor help firms keep track of trends in salaries and emerging areas of litigation.

FindLaw, a separate Thomson unit, helps small law firms market themselves on the Web. It hosts 8,000 Web sites and hit the $100 million revenue mark in December. It too is fast growing, building 300 legal Web sites a month, said Chris Kibarian, its president and general manager.

"People use the Internet to find lawyers the way they do to find doctors," he said. "We want to be the 'WebMD' of law," he said.

Leslie Brooks Suzukamo covers telecommunications, technology and energy and can be reached at lsuzukamo@pioneerpress.com or 651-228-5475.