Law.com: Your Firm Doesn't Know What It Knows, and Neither Does Your CRM — Three Questions to Ask Before the Next Investment

The July 17 Law.com column by Jared Coseglia poses the diagnostic that every BD director building a data-driven client development program should be stress-testing before authorizing the next CRM or AI investment: Where does its data come from? How does it stay current without asking attorneys to maintain it? And what happens to the firm's relationship intelligence when a key relationship partner leaves? The piece frames the legal industry as going through the same leadership reckoning playing out across the Fortune 1000 — with pioneers already operating automated, AI-fed relationship intelligence systems; settlers actively building toward that state; and stragglers still deciding whether to move. The structural challenge for law firm CRM is that the data problem precedes and supersedes the technology problem: a firm's institutional knowledge of client relationships, work history, and relationship networks typically lives in partners' heads, email threads, and inconsistently maintained practice management records — and no AI tool can compensate for the absence of structured underlying data. For BD directors, the Coseglia framework provides a defensible governance question for each CRM or AI investment: the three questions he surfaces are the ones that distinguish a CRM investment from a CRM transformation.