Best CI Resource is You

In a recent conversation with a Business Development Director at an AmLaw 100 firm, who is supported by several legal CI professionals, I asked what I later realized might have been misconstrued as a trick question. When the topic of products and services for legal CI came up (CapitalIQ, Thomson, etc.), I asked whether my colleague preferred any of these products or services over their competitors, or did he think any of these was essential to doing good CI? I was thinking of collection management and wondering if I was overlooking a great resource...

The answer I received, and I think a great message for the legal CI community, was that the best CI resource is the researcher/analyst. The value of expensive databases and tools is not fully realized without intuition and insight from your research and CI staff. As a librarian who has moved into CI, it was important for me to be reminded of this. Resources and tools do matter, not to say that they don't, but the purpose of CI is to develop the synergy of questions and answers into actionable intelligence for firm management. There are many ways to make CI valuable to firm leaders, but one thing is constant: The sum of CI research and writing is truly greater than its parts, because of the analyst's contributions. Divining the hidden meanings of the research and communicating that effectively is the real value of CI, and that comes from you.