How Does Client Sense Help You Manage Client Relationships

In this article:

• Short answer
• Why it matters
• What this looks like in practice
• How to do it in Client Sense
• Turning the output into action
• Common pitfalls
• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Short answer

For professional firms, as much as 80 percent of revenue comes from existing relationships.  Managing client relationships is crucial but often firms don't have the full picture of the state of the relationship. Client Sense shows firms "who knows who", tracks the rate of communication, reveals relationships that have gone quiet, and can share key information with lawyers before an external meeting.

Why it matters

Client loss is rarely a decision. It is a drift. Contact narrows to one partner, meetings become calls, calls become email, and the relationship is gone before anyone identified the signals. The firm finds out when the work stops arriving, which is months after the point where something could have been done.

Concentration of a relationship in one person is another risk. A client served by one partner is a relationship held by one person, and that is a single point of failure whether the cause is a retirement or a lateral departure. A client served by four partners across three departments is difficult for a competitor to displace and survives a change of personnel.

The obstacle to understanding the full scope of the relationships is that in most firms no individual can see the full picture. Each person sees their own correspondence, but nobody sees the whole, so the answer to a simple question like when did anyone last speak to this client requires asking around and hoping the replies are current. Remote and multi-office working has made this worse by removing the incidental conversations firms used to rely on.

What this looks like in practice

Mullins Lawyers, a Brisbane commercial practice, describe the problem in terms most firms will recognize. Their partners did not have time to update systems after every client interaction, so the record of who dealt with whom was never reliable. Because Client Sense captures correspondence automatically, they were able to see the health of each commercial relationship immediately, including when a client or referrer was last contacted, how often and by whom, with no manual input at all. Read the full account in the Mullins Lawyers case study.

A worked example at your own firm: take your twenty largest clients and answer three questions for each. Who owns this relationship. When did anyone here last speak to them. How many people at the firm know them. Most firms cannot answer the second without asking around, and the third usually produces at least two uncomfortable surprises.

How to do it in Client Sense

Four things make up the routine.

Decide who owns each relationship

Relationship owners are set under Relationship Management, then Settings, then Relationship Managers. Add the person, and their notification preferences are configured in the same place.

Choosing the right owner is a judgment rather than a lookup, but the data narrows it. The engagement view in Client Sense shows who at your firm has the most contact with a client, which is a strong signal and not a decision. Volume can reflect administration rather than relationship, so use the ranking to shortlist and then apply what you know about the account.

See the state of a relationship

Search for the company with Organizations selected, open the Contact Card, then choose Engagement. The view covers emails, meetings, online meetings, phone calls, coffees and events, along with how many people, departments and offices are involved, and fees where a financial system is connected. Your firm can add its own activity types, such as client review meetings.

Read the shape rather than the height. Breadth across departments and offices tells you the relationship belongs to the firm. Narrowing tells you it belongs to one person. Steps are in How to view the level of Engagement your firm is having with Key Individuals and Companies.

Flag the relationships you are watching

Key individuals can be flagged and monitored in the Relationship Management view so that contact is maintained, which turns a periodic review into something the system prompts rather than something someone has to remember. Parameters can be set per contact, because a referrer in an active period and a client on a long-running matter do not need the same interval. See How Does Client Sense Help Your Lawyers Stay in Touch With Key Contacts for more informationmation. 

Brief the lawyer before the meeting

Pre-meeting notifications send a summary before an external meeting: who is attending, their titles and contact details, notes from that lawyer’s last meeting with them, and which colleagues have been in contact since. They arrive as internal email, so there is no app to install. Turn them on under Relationship Management, Settings, Relationship Managers, then set how far ahead the summary should arrive. Full steps are in How to setup and configure pre-meeting email notifications.

Turning the output into action

The difference between firms that manage relationships and firms that report on them is a short routine somebody owns.

• Name the list. Decide which clients are managed this way. Twenty to fifty across the firm is realistic. Two hundred is a list nobody works.
• Give every client a named owner. One person should be assigned responsibility. Shared accountability means nobody acts.
• Review on a fixed cadence. Quarterly, consider including this as an agenda item in an existing client relationship meeting. 
• Sort into three groups. Deepening, steady, and slipping. Only the third needs a decision this quarter, which keeps the review short enough to actually happen.

Common pitfalls

• Take the pattern to the partner, not the management meeting. They usually know why contact dropped, and arriving with a question rather than a conclusion gets a better answer.
• Treating volume as health. The busiest accounts are often the ones in the middle of a difficult matter. Look at breadth and direction rather than quantity.
• Judging a single quarter. A gap after a matter closes is normal. Three consecutive quiet quarters is a pattern.
• Assigning owners without telling them. A name in a document is not an agreement, and the person will not act on something they were never asked to do.
• Confusing coverage with coordination. Four people contacting the same client in a fortnight without knowing about each other looks worse to the client than a quiet month.
• Reviewing only the largest clients. The top accounts are already watched. The movement worth catching is usually just below them

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Who should own a client relationship?

Usually the person with the strongest existing relationship. Treat the ranking in the engagement view as a shortlist rather than an answer, since volume of communication can reflect billing or logistics rather than the relationship itself. 

How often should we review our key clients?

Quarterly suits most firms, tied to a client review cycle you already run. Relationship patterns move slowly, so reviewing monthly tends to surface noise rather than signal.

Do our lawyers have to record anything?

No. The record builds from email and calendar activity that already happens, which is the reason it stays current. Firms that have tried to run this on manual entry find uptake fades once fee earners get busy, and a half-populated record is worse than none because it looks authoritative.

A key client has gone quiet. Is that a problem?

Not necessarily. Contact follows the work, so a gap after a matter closes is expected. It becomes a problem when the gap is long enough that your firm would not be an obvious call, or when the client is active in the market and not with you.

Can we see the whole client team in one view?

Yes. Add the client’s contacts to a Static Favorite (Favourite) List and view engagement across the group, or run a heat map to see which colleagues are connected to which individuals and where the gaps are.

Should partners see this data directly?

Generally it is shared with the people holding the relationships rather than published widely. Engagement data is easy to misread without knowing what was happening on the account, and a partner who feels monitored engages with it differently from one who feels supported.