LMA Directories Fringe Interviews – Neudesic Firm Directory

A quick Q+A with Mike Manning from Neudesic, makers of The Firm Directory, an internal directory-style product for law firms that I first wrote about in 2014.

LP: Can you introduce yourself?

MM: My name is Mike Manning and I am the senior product marketing manager at Neudesic for The Firm Directory, an experience management and social collaboration product for law firms and in-house counsel teams. We have roughly 20% of the AmLaw 100 and we are known within legal as the premier experience management solution.

Here at the LMA conference we are demonstrating how we can help law firms improve the process of responding to RFPs and pitch decks. So, if a law firm needs to know who are the individuals within the firm that have expertise in a given matter, client, location or bar admission, they can utilize The Firm Directory to locate the profiles of those lawyers, and export that knowledge into a pitch deck or an RFP response.

We have made a number of improvements around our integrations including identity providers and SharePoint, we’ve added natural language search capabilities, mobile enhancements, and other user experience improvements.

LP: Most people who read this would think of legal directories as an external product. You are an internal product. Can you explain how a marketing manager or a PR manager in a law firm would use your product? What would be the benefit to them?

MM: One of the things we learned very early on with marketing and business development folks is that they’re passionate about their attorney bios, so our product can serve as a tool to push to their attorney bios or pull from the bios. And that may be internally focused bios or the external ones.

The benefits of an internal directory is that often times what marketing people put out externally on bios doesn’t reflect the full extent of the lawyers’ expertise, which can be more revealing internally.

You also develop teams over time which come together around certain practices or legal products, or there may be someone who may otherwise be overlooked but they have specific experience – say they have worked with a particular client. So, our product helps to create linkages to knowledge that you may not otherwise know exists.

LP: Before I was freelance, I worked in-house in a couple of large law firms. And you would see emails flying around saying “does anyone know about the Mexican bankruptcy code?”, “does anyone speak Latvian?”, things like that. For a big firm that has offices in lots of places, would your system enable a lawyer within a firm to not have to send that email, to be able to find that lawyer who speaks Latvian or whatever?

MM: That’s correct. One benefit is that once you have found that person or that group of people with this attribute or knowledge, since our product is built on a social collaboration platform, you can create “knowledge communities” – focused on that specific area of knowledge. You can then pose questions, see previous answers, conduct polling, share files, all revolving around that particular area of knowledge.

LP: Finally, how can people reach you if they want to know more?

MM: They can visit our website, contact me directly (mike.manning@neudesic.com), and I would be happy to share more information.

Pictured: Neudesic team at the Legal Marketing Association annual conference, Las Vegas, 2017