What sets legal360 apart
Why Legal CRM and Business Development Still Fall Short
28 Jul, 2025
CRM and BD are Still Not Optimal
Whilst firms today are under ever increasing pressure to secure fee income from stronger, wider and deeper client relationships and expand new clients in established sectors, very little has changed in the organisational approach, responsibilities and expectations. Whilst the fee earners really do need to be concentrating on quality service and fee realisation, CRM is the one simple change that could make a BIG difference, helping everyone meet their business development objectives and the firm its revenue targets.
Low expectations of CRM are the biggest barrier. Most firms have been living with InterAction for decades. It is and has always been an inflexible and hard to navigate Rolodex (I know I was a product manager), requiring the fee earners to add contacts and relationships and giving little back. The consensus for replacement seems to be – “we have a CRM no one uses, so why waste time and money on a replacement that won’t get used.”
Even for firms that have replaced InterAction with more modern technology, there are still significant limitations in the functionality required for productive use, adoption and success.
On the other hand, legal360 has combined the longest lineage of continuous legal-specific CRM development (19 years, almost as long as InterAction) but powered continuously by the industry’s most innovative CRM platform, Microsoft Dynamics 365. As a result of these many years, legal360 has the widest available scope of legal functionality and makes it quick, easy and pain free for everyone in a law firm to do what they need to
360 degree view
Foremost, legal360 for Dynamics 365 brings all the information on a client into a single view: Billing, fee health, practice coverage and whitespace, current opportunities and pitches, contacts and relationships, plans, targets and execution - making it faster for partners to find information to respond to clients, or at a practice or firm level, to analyse, make plans and better decisions. legal360 is successful because it’s about giving information and insight specific to a partner via dedicated dashboards, rather than the traditional CRM, a beast to be fed.
Don’t add contacts
legal360 pioneered automated contact capture and update, saving lawyers from having to add contacts to CRM for over a decade.
The processes for this, of course, have been honed over time to retain not only leadership, but legal360 as the only legal CRM software with this fully built-in, rather than having to spend on a third-party solution. Moreover, this ensures a fully complete and accurate up to date database of all the firm's contacts that can be relied upon and ready for the marketing team. Bad contacts are usually the number one reason for CRM adoption failure.
Who’s been talking to my clients?
Understanding who else is engaged with your clients is critical to managing client relationships, avoiding doubling up and stepping on each other’s toes and all too frequent client gaffs, ‘… You didn’t know? We saw Sarah last week, and we are discussing that already! Alongside automatic contact capture, legal360 provides a reliable, automated calculation of colleagues’ client relationships and places that dead centre in the CRM. You can see who’s had the greatest dialogue through Outlook emails and meetings. In addition, Outlook emails and meeting details can be copied to the contact with the press of a button, with Microsoft Copilot providing a convenient summary to save you reading through them.
Who can provide me with an introduction to Acme Ltd?
Effective cross-selling hinges on finding the best-connected colleagues for introductions. legal360’s relationship scoring sits on the Client/organisation record, allowing users to see immediately not only the strongest relationships by job title, but also, as above, who they have contact with and discern those perhaps with the highest meeting scores.
Clear Practice Coverage and White Space
Practice and White Space dashboards allow users to see immediately what practices have been servicing clients and where they have white space just be hovering the mouse over an onscreen chart.
So, much easier than trying to make sense of data and charts coming out of Elite and Aderant. legal360 provides this through our established integration to these industry leading PMSs or to SAP if you have it. Fee income, aged debt WIP by matter and client is all pre-built, as are the easy-to-use dashboards, so you can get immediate insight into the firm's services to a client or where your practice has white space opportunity across the client base.
How long for a Credential Pack?
Immediate proposal ready staff bios and experience, instantly at the press of a button. legal360’s Practice Management Software (PMS) integration also brings across the matter and their timekeepers, so we have a full work history of fee earners, ready to combine, on resume templates, with their personal descriptions, qualifications and skills all held on the employee record. This is a phenomenal time saver to have full resume content in word ready to be edited at the press of a button.
And with Microsoft, we have eased the creation of resume content and by employing Copilot, Microsoft’s AI agent to automatically write a first draft experience record from the matter and timekeeper details held on it.
AI Taxi Report
HSO has worked with Microsoft to ‘legalise’ Copilot application across CRM and our other legal oriented solutions. Copilot now provides an intelligent taxi report, giving a written summary for a client company, interpreting data on matters, contacts, new opportunities, contacts and billing.
HSO is also using Microsoft AI to extend client reports with news on the client from the internet, providing a morning compilation and analysis of web-published articles on the client from the previous day.
We are also using this Microsoft AI for our Client Listening application, whereby high numbers of audio client interviews can be injected and analysed for sentiment and key themes, allowing issues to be quickly identified and common themes of interest across clients to be identified.
One of the most exciting developments is the integration of Microsoft Copilot AI. Copilot acts as a digital assistant within Dynamics 365, summarising client records, surfacing key insights, and even generating content like resumes and matter descriptions. For non-technical users, this means easier access to critical information without needing to navigate complex systems.
Longevity, Experience, Innovation
Whilst law firms' objectives, strategies and activities for business development have really changed in the last 10 years, the need to execute much more effectively has been the reality.
legal360 on Microsoft Dynamics advanced CRM technology gives fee-earners and particularly senior partners and practice leads the information and simple tools they need to cut the time spent on business development management results achieved across the firm. And it is HSO’s considerable lineage in legal and applying this to Microsoft’s high-speed innovations that can help ensure a firm can perform better each year.
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