Management: Curse of the unread

I had a teacher who delighted in reminding us that a camel was a horse that had been designed by a committee. He would do this so often that it became a little tiring, even for 10-year-olds.

I am reminded of him every time I see a collection of legal updates and newsletters - it is like coming across a herd of shaggy camels where you had hoped to find sleek, efficient horses. And that is really the point of the horse-by-committee aphorism - a camel in the desert is a marvellously appropriate thing, but it is going to be hopeless in the 2.30 at Aintree.

Client views on publications are pretty clear - they see them as a disappointing confluence of the late, the untailored and the 'not focused on my business'. They are poorly configured camels, offered to those seeking far more useful horses.

Off the record, most law firm marketers, business developers and fee earners agree that publications fail clients and eat up too much fee earner time and budget (one magic circle firm estimates their publications cost more than £3m a year).

Research confirms client discontent - witness the 2004 Nisus Consulting FTSE 100 study that highlighted the lessons firms can use in identifying the service that clients are really looking for.

The Banking Legal Technology initiative shows that clients are insisting on change - the initiative involved nine investment banks arm-twisting magic circle firms into building and maintaining a publications portal.

Considering the breadth and depth of client dissatisfaction, publications are the '800lb gorilla' in the room that nobody will acknowledge. Several reasons not to change are commonly offered: 'It is too complex, every client wants something different'; 'You cannot tell the practice groups what to do'; 'Why bother, you just have to keep up the activity level to stay front-of-mind with clients' are just some of them.

My personal favourite is the anecdote of a relationship manager who responded to a client request for filtered updates with: "It is not my job to edit your inbox."

This statement makes sense as long as firms do not see publications as part of their service to clients - but there is every indication that clients do see them as part of the complete package.

I have spent the past seven years working with investment banks, particularly investment research divisions, to help them produce more client-focused reports quickly and efficiently. Crucially, they face many of the same content-to-client issues that law firms do. They need to write content that is focused on what clients want to know. They have to cover all of the supporting detail, the content has to be reused efficiently and the process has to be as frictionless and quick as possible.

The personality types writing the content are similar, too: highly motivated, detail-oriented and extremely knowledgeable in a narrow speciality. They are often less concerned with the client's business context than with the minutiae of their own topic. They also tend to believe they already know the best way to do things.

Banks approach improvements to client reports in three ways. Firstly, technology to automate where it is practical. Secondly, encouraging behavioural change to make the technology stick and, finally, using enlightened pragmatism to change what matters most today and to get to refinements tomorrow while recognising that it is a continual process of improvement.

My research with law firms suggests there are a number of lessons that can be learnt from banks as legal clients push for more value-added information services.

Lesson 1: template, structure and tag

Some analysts naturally produce a concise summary of what has happened, what it means for clients and what actions are prudent. Most do not, but recognise that improving the client focus of their reports will help their careers and their bonuses (improving the bank's product runs a poor third).

The solution is a combination of templates and training that prompts and coerces the many to follow the good practice of the few.

These templates structure the message to fit client needs, tag content so that it is ready for re-use, and create the metadata that makes it easier to find the content after publication and distribution.

These are MS Word templates, but not as you know them. They have customised functionality and can produce easily re-usable XML. They need to be developed by specialists and are often based on third-party solutions that build on Word's basic functionality. They cannot be built by web developers, your IT team, or the managing partner's secretary - do not laugh, I have seen it happen.

Lesson 2: headlines and summaries

A clear headline and a concise summary are the most valuable elements of a report. They help clients sift, prioritise and focus on relevant content; they act as crib-sheets for sales; they can be re-used in e-mails, web pages and bespoke updates.

Templates capture headlines and summaries and constrain them so an analyst cannot write beyond a prescribed length, and the report will be rejected by the work-flow system if these elements are not there. Morgan Stanley was one of the first to do this, and many competitors have followed.

Headlines and summaries are so valuable that banks are prepared to deal with the fallout from deploying constraining templates - typically a few weeks of analysts grizzling over restricted creativity and the dumbing down of research.

Strangely, clients do not see it as dumbing down - they like reports that get to the point quickly, and suggest outcomes and actions.

Lesson 3: re-use, tailor, contextualise

Creating and tagging content is the expensive part. Re-using content is cheap and offers huge value-adds for clients. Imagine offering legal clients tailored updates that combine a practice team's content with relevant items from around the firm, and maybe third-party business content, too - and imagine it being automated.

Investment clients love products that compile content from around the bank as they give them valuable context on events in their field - why would legal clients be any different?

Lesson 4: brevity is king

When prompted for comments on legal publications, clients will invariably complain that they are long-winded.

Here is some relevant advice offered to research analysts by a highly respected fund manager: "Take everything you write, halve it, summarise it, then edit the summary."

Lesson 5: make all content searchable

When documents are converted to PDF the content usually becomes invisible to searches. This can be remedied with extraction and indexing software, but most firms do not do this and it makes their websites and intranets poor information resources.

Hedge funds, those uber-consumers of information, use sophisticated search-and-structure software that solves this problem. It can index and search PDFs and a mass of other content from inside and outside the firm and alert staff to new content that is relevant to their interests - pretty useful stuff for an industry based on the knowledge thing.

Firms need to improve publications to meet client needs. If they do not, publications are a risk to retaining and winning business and firms that change ahead of the pack will gain a competitive advantage. The time to evolve your publication camels into client-focused horses is now. Simon Carter is an independent consultant with extensive experience of content-to-client projects.