We're All in This Together: Library & Marketing as Partners

An article in this week’s issue (July 20, 2009) of the National Law Journal entitled “Marketing and Research Professionals, Unite!” is creating a lot of buzz in both the Marketing and Research communities. The author, Ms. Wong, is very knowledgeable about the role marketing plays in the business development process. However, she seems a bit unsure about the role of the Library. Marketing/ Business Development and Researchers must indeed unite, but Researchers have a more integral and strategic role to play in the process than only through compiling data for the consumption of others or brainstorming in the way that Ms. Wong described in her article. In order to have a robust and valuable business development process, it is necessary for these groups to truly partner with one another.

The role of the Research group or Library is not limited to gathering data. Researchers can add value in other ways. They are expert at trend analysis, often aware of industry trends as a result of their daily news monitoring or spotting trends in the course of their research. When the research results are reviewed by someone removed from the data collection process, they will often miss trends in the data that the researcher will notice through the research process. Noting these trends is something researchers do daily in the course of their normal process for non-business development applications. Additionally, researchers know that attorneys are used to seeing research presented with the conclusions first. This is directly tied to the fact that the attorneys' time is money and they want to spend as little time as possible determining what is important. The result is that the researcher analyzes and filters the information in order to provide real, actionable intelligence.

It is imperative for both the Marketing/Business Development Department and the Research/Library Department to work together to apply the firm's strategic context to this analysis , creating a frame of reference that makes the end result much more relevant to the attorneys. True partnerships between Marketing/ Business Development and Researchers involve the former group fully understanding and utilizing the in-depth research and analysis abilities of the latter. The best possible work product can only be produced when these two groups collaborate.

- Jan Rivers and Mark Gediman