It’s challenging to manage a law firm’s marketing with a global footprint if your firm is not using a CRM to cultivate your contacts and pursue opportunities. If your office is in Dubai or Toronto, it’s likely you will have professionals focusing on contacts with varying languages. Without a capable legal CRM system in place though you may be missing out on the seamless integration of marketing efforts and client communications across language groups.
The recording of information about clients and prospects is always challenging without a CRM but if you are handling multilingual contacts the difficulty only compounds. An advanced legal CRM will support Unicode. A Unicode-capable legal CRM can easily accommodate 159 languages and character sets including e.g., Arabic, Turkish, Mandarin, French, and Japanese. Unicode is the computing world’s accepted universal standard, so no matter what the operating system or country of the sender or recipient the data will be presented correctly.
A considerable number of law firms get by without the nearly essential tool of CRM, but their numbers are steadily decreasing as firms of all sizes look to improve business development practices to stay competitive. Not having a CRM in place adds burdens to the law firm administration, both for the staff and for the professionals. The ability to send mailings, record client and prospect interaction history and is fundamental to marketing practices whether for businesses or law firms and other professional service firms. A CRM enables that and still can provide further benefit in timesaving for sending out alerts and subscribed mailings. No matter what language or number of languages where your firm practices, a single CRM can handle all of them easily if it supports a Unicode database.
Furthermore, not only is keeping clean data essential and an automating the process with a CRM a great time saver but a CRM is a powerful upgrade that will transform client lists into a dynamic set of data to be used for intelligent and highly specific marketing which can powerfully charge your firm’s outreach and growth.
Attorneys know that the possibility of cross-selling is a strong driver for not only the firm success but reciprocal opportunities for themselves. However, they are often hampered by not knowing the right contact persons at prospect organizations or who in their own firm knows them. With A CRM in place individual scattered knowledge can be centrally focused and direct to opportunity development.
Why Unicode?
Using a Unicode supporting CRM will eliminate the need to translate simple names into and out of various scripts. With it in place you can easily dispense emails without having concerns about distant recipient inboxes garbling the characters into unintelligible strings of characters and numbers. One name and one record per client and contact will exist across the firm. That is because the Unicode script captures all the major languages as are in use in the world today and requires no translation beyond the user input.
Keep marketing consistent
Of course, it’s sensible to direct language groups to their appropriate partners and attorneys but you don’t want to have the practice of the firm almost being separate entities when it comes to marketing and client engagement. Using a CRM to centralize all contact data is a powerful enough upgrade for a monolingual law firm but when you’re practicing internationally the improvement is even more pronounced.
With Unicode, which was developed in 1991, nearly any operating system in use throughout the world can store and retrieve the underlying Unicode code data into native character sets.
How Unicode came to be incorporated into IntelliPad
IntelliPad has been developed with continuous client feedback. The Unicode upgrade of the product was done for a Canadian client firm with a Hong Kong office over a decade ago.
