Practice Management

 Ann Lee Gibson's new book on Competitive Intelligence for law firms has just come out.  Published by the Ark Group,  Competitive Intelligence: Improving Law Firm Strategy and Decision-Making is a comprehensive guide to using CI to win work and develop strategy.  Dr. Gibson is THE authority on CI in law firms. 

The pre-release promotional email says,

"Competitive Intelligence: Improving Law Firm Strategy and Decision-Making will allow firms and CI departments/teams of all sizes and levels of sophistication to: 



- Understand what CI is, its benefits and limitations;

- Appreciate how law firm CI differs from that in other businesses (and therefore be able to counter skepticism among lawyers about deploying this discipline in the legal context);

- Understand the phases of the CI cycle, avoid the common pitfalls and identify opportunities for improvement;

- Relate the resulting intelligence to strategy and decision-making in the firm ? after all, if you don?t do anything with the information, what?s the point in having it?

- Understand scenario planning, which can help firms to build future plans that are sufficiently flexible to accommodate future unknowns.



Featuring case studies, insight and contributions from a wide range of high-profile firms and respected industry experts, this report covers key topics including:



- An overview of CI as it is applied in current legal profession; 

- The common CI challenges and how to overcome them;

- Ethical considerations that must be satisfied when developing or using CI;

- Developing more useful intelligence for clients (law firm partners);

- Information gathering?the types and sources of information (both primary and secondary) available to CI practitioners;

- Organizing and preparing intelligence to make analysis easier and more revelatory; 

- The reliability of information and ethical considerations related to information collected from social media and human sources; 

- Ensuring analysis is correctly converted into intelligence;

- Effectively disseminating intelligence to decision makers;

- Improving CI processes and their influence on a firm?s decision-making processes;

- The evolution of law firm CI structures, functions, and staffing models;

- Imminent expansion areas for law firm CI;

- Utilizing CI to improve firm-wide and practice/industry group strategies;

- Collaboration between a CI and business intelligence (BI) units; 

- The identification, sources and use of human intelligence; and 

- The ethical techniques firms should use to elicit that intelligence."

For more information on the book, click here.  

To order the book with a $200 discount, call  +1 309 495 2853 and give the code ME-CI3.