It took legal professionals a while to embrace customer relationship management (CRM) technology, but the advent of products tailored to the specific needs of the industry has made it easier than ever for attorneys to trust the tech with their most sensitive asset.

This is especially true in large firms, which have no practical hope of managing their internal and external relationships competitively without a CRM system. Anyone who has ever received one of those desperate, spam-like, all-points-bulletin, who-knows-somebody-who-knows-somebody e-mails understands the problem: When you count your colleagues in triple digits, you can't just yell across the cubicles.

But in general, CRM systems still lack the ability to calculate the "strength" of a relationship -- to distinguish between, say, a long-term client and somebody who dropped a business card into a fishbowl at a conference two years ago. This is a critical gap in functionality, says Geoffrey Hyatt, CEO and founder of Contact Networks, and one felt acutely in large service-oriented organizations. "There's a difference between customers and clients," he says. "Client relationships are not binary, on-off interactions. They're all about degrees."

Hyatt founded his Boston-based enterprise-relationship-management (ERM) software company five years ago to fill this gap, and to solve what he calls "the paradox of large firms."

"As firms grow, they develop more and more relationships, which strengthen their competitive advantage," he says. "But the more relationships they have, the harder it is for anyone inside the firm to have a clear picture of those relationships. Without technology, it's simply impossible."

Philadelphia-based Duane Morris has had real-world experience with Hyatt's paradox. With more than 1,300 lawyers and staff across 20 offices, Duane Morris is among the 100 largest law firms in the country. The firm also has relationships with independent affiliates that employ about 100 professionals in other disciplines.

"New lateral partners join the firm all the time," says Pat Purdy, the firm's senior marketing director and CRM manager. "We're always looking for the synergy between their practices and ours. But when you've got almost 700 attorneys, you can't really expect to get much out of water-cooler conversations."

About a year ago, the firm began investigating ERM solutions to provide this missing refinement of the basic CRM functionality. It eventually settled on a product developed by Hyatt's company called ContactNet, which the firm is now integrating with InterAction, which is widely deployed among law firms, from LexisNexis Interface Software. Duane Morris has been using InterAction for about 4 1/2 years.

ContactNet 5.0 is designed to harvest data from address books, CRM systems, calendars and e-mail servers, and to use that data to rank relationships, much as Google calculates the relevance of Web sites to a search request. The software employs a ranking algorithm based on 37 variables, including such factors as frequency of communication and "recency," which utilizes a decay curve that gives less weight to older messages.

This approach allows ContactNet to uncover relationships that the attorneys might not even recognize. By analyzing activities, such as e-mail traffic, the product is able to divine unnoted-but-important emerging relationships, and calculate and update the strength of those relationships dynamically. This capability was especially important to Duane Morris.

"It's not that anyone around here is hiding anything," explains Purdy. "We have an ingrained culture of sharing information. But attorneys live and die by the billable hour, and we can't expect them to take their valuable time to do data entry. A lot of important relationships just don't make it into the address books."

Hyatt's company specializes in professional services firms, and so is acutely aware that Duane Morris's openness isn't universal. "Every lawyer has a unique attitude toward sharing control and privacy," Hyatt says. "You have to recognize that they own their relationships and they share them on their terms. So we had to build our application to be very configurable."

ContactNet may actually be seen in a wider context as a tool for digging into that growing pile of unstructured data that lies ripe and untouched in most enterprises. Today, most of the information generated by companies -- around 80 percent of it, according to industry watchers like Toby Bell, director in Gartner's Knowledge Workplace -- won't fit into the neat-and-tidy cells of a traditional relational database, even if those companies had the time and money to slice and dice it. E-mails, text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, audio files and images of all kinds must now, and probably forever, reside outside the relational database. But getting that information under control is no longer optional. Making it useful could influence an organization's place in the market.

In other words, what tools like ContactNet do is to squeeze a particular kind of meaning out of a hunk of that 80 percent. Given the size of the overall challenge, ERM should be on everyone's radar. The CRM vendors have certainly noticed it. Sources in two of the bigger providers, who asked not to be named, say that their companies are adding this type of capability. Hyatt himself expects to see it become a standard functionality in all professional services firms within the next five years.

Purdy says that Duane Morris is currently nearing the end of the process of integrating ContactNet with its InterAction CRM implementation, and she expects to wrap it up in July. That integration is a key factor, she says.

"This wouldn't work if we had to move to another interface," she says. "This way, there's not only nothing for our attorneys to do, there's nothing new for them to get used to. We'll be capturing information from a variety of sources, including our Exchange Server and our CRM system, but there's no work required by them at all."

Purdy has some advice to other firms looking to enhance their existing CRM capabilities with ERM applications: "No matter what the size of the organization, CRM should first be seen as part of an overall business strategy, with a clear model of where the business wants to get to," she says. "Our goal, for example, was to strengthen our relationships with our existing clients, and to boost our business development efforts. Integrating ContactNet with InterAction ties right in to those strategic goals."

John K. Waters is a freelance journalist and author based in Silicon Valley. He serves as senior correspondent for Application Development Trends magazine. His books include "The Everything Computer Book," "John Chambers and the Cisco Way" and "Blobitecture: Waveform Architecture and Digital Design."

Law.com's ongoing IN FOCUS article series highlights opinion and analysis from our site's contributors and writers across the ALM network of publications.

Reprinted with permission from law.com, © ALM Media Properties LLC. All rights reserved.