Meet Gatsby - A New Approach to Client and Prospect Intelligence for Law Firms

Law firms have no shortage of information about their clients and prospects. The harder part is figuring out what matters, getting it to the right people and doing something useful with it.

That comes up every day in law firm business development. A partner has a meeting tomorrow and needs a briefing. A client team wants to know what has changed at an important account. A lawyer is meeting a new executive and wants to understand their background. A promising prospect has gone quiet and the team needs a relevant reason to reconnect.

The information exists, but it may be spread across company websites, news sources, firm systems and individual relationships. Someone still has to find it, organize it and determine what the lawyer actually needs to know.

What Is Gatsby?

Gatsby helps law firms research clients, prospects and key individuals and stay current on the companies and relationships that matter to them.

The product is designed around business development work that already happens inside firms, including meeting preparation, pitch research, client and prospect monitoring, professional profiles and follow-up.

Think about what goes into preparing a lawyer for an important client meeting. Someone may research the company, review recent announcements, look into the people attending, check what has changed since the last meeting and try to identify anything that could be relevant to the conversation.

Gatsby brings that information together in a more focused way so the person preparing the briefing can spend less time gathering research from different places and more time deciding what the lawyer needs to know.

Why Did Gatsby Build a Product Specifically for Law Firms?

Law firm marketing, business development and research teams are often working against the clock. A lawyer may ask for a client briefing the day before a meeting or need background on a prospect before an unexpected conversation.

The research itself can take a significant amount of time. Even after everything has been collected, someone needs to review it, decide what matters and turn it into something a lawyer can quickly use.

There is also the challenge of what happens after the meeting. A conversation may go well, but weeks or months can pass without a natural reason to reconnect. Following the company and the people involved can help the team identify developments that make the next conversation more timely and relevant.

Gatsby was built around both parts of that process: helping teams prepare for important conversations and helping them stay informed afterward.

How Is Gatsby Different From a Traditional Research Platform?

Traditional research platforms can provide a tremendous amount of information. Gatsby is focused on organizing intelligence around a particular company, person, meeting or business development need.

For example, a lawyer preparing for a meeting may want more than a company profile and recent news. They may want to know what has changed at the company, who will be in the room, what those individuals have done previously and whether anything has happened that could affect the conversation.

Gatsby gives the team a starting point that can then be combined with what the firm already knows about the client, prospect or relationship.

That distinction matters because the most useful briefing is rarely the one with the most information. It is the one that helps the lawyer understand the people and company they are about to meet and what may be worth discussing.

What Does Gatsby Intel Do?

Gatsby Intel provides on-demand research about companies, prospects, individuals and priority accounts.

The type of research can vary depending on what the team is preparing for. An introductory meeting may require a concise overview of the company and the people attending. A significant pitch may call for more detailed research into the organization, its leadership, recent activity and other developments that could be relevant to the opportunity.

The research can also help teams identify developments that may warrant attention, possible connections and areas to explore before a conversation.

This gives marketing and BD professionals a head start on the research while still allowing them to shape the final briefing around the lawyer, the relationship and the purpose of the meeting.

How Does Gatsby Aware Help Firms Stay Current on Important Clients and Prospects?

Research often happens when someone asks for it. A meeting gets scheduled, a pitch comes in or a partner asks what is happening with a particular client.

Gatsby Aware is designed to help firms stay current between those moments by monitoring selected clients, prospects and priority accounts and organizing relevant developments into scheduled email briefings.

That could include a client announcing an acquisition, appointing a new executive, entering a new market or making another significant business move. For a private equity client, it could include activity involving the sponsor or one of its portfolio companies.

The value comes from being able to see those developments while they are still timely. A relationship partner may want to reach out. Another practice may have relevant experience. The development may belong on the agenda for the next client team meeting or become part of an upcoming conversation.

Aware gives teams a way to follow important accounts without asking lawyers or BD professionals to manage an expanding collection of individual alerts.

What Is Person Intel?

There are meetings where knowing the company is only part of the preparation. Understanding the people involved can be just as important.

Person Intel provides more detailed professional research on individuals. Depending on the information available, that can include career history, previous employers, board roles, professional organizations, public speaking, published interviews and other relevant professional information.

That can be useful before an executive meeting, pitch, conference or other important conversation. A lawyer may discover that someone worked at a former client, has experience in an industry the lawyer knows well or has spoken publicly about an issue that may come up in the meeting.

The purpose is to give the lawyer useful professional context before the conversation, not a collection of unrelated personal details.

Who Inside a Law Firm Can Use Gatsby?

Gatsby can support several teams because the research they need often overlaps.

Marketing and business development professionals can use it for meeting briefings, pitches, client and prospect monitoring and follow-up. Client teams can use ongoing intelligence to stay current on important accounts. Research and knowledge teams may use it as part of their information-gathering work, while innovation and AI teams may be involved in evaluating how the technology fits into the firm's broader systems and workflows.

Lawyers may ultimately be the people receiving the intelligence even when another team is using Gatsby behind the scenes.

A typical workflow might start with Gatsby gathering and organizing external information. The marketing or BD professional reviews it, adds what the firm knows and tailors it to the situation. The lawyer then receives a briefing that is much closer to what they actually need for the conversation.

Where Do Marketing and Business Development Professionals Fit In?

Marketing and business development teams know things about a client that external research won't tell you. They know which lawyers work with the company, what matters the firm has handled, which practices are involved, who has been trying to build the relationship and what has happened in previous conversations.

Gatsby can help with the research surrounding that knowledge. If it identifies an acquisition, leadership change or other company development, the BD professional can look at who at the firm knows the company, whether there is relevant experience and whether the development is worth raising with the relationship partner.

The same applies to meeting preparation. Gatsby can bring together information about the company and the people attending, while the BD professional adds recent matters, previous meetings, internal relationships and other information the lawyer needs.

Not every development will lead to outreach. An update may belong in the next client team discussion. A new executive may give a partner a reason to reconnect. A potential relationship may need to be checked before anyone acts on it. The people who know the client can make those calls.

Gatsby can make the research part faster so the team has more time to work with the information and decide what to do with it.

How Does Gatsby Handle Sources and Verification?

When research is going into a client briefing, pitch or other important business development activity, the team needs to know where the information came from and be able to check it.

Source visibility gives users a way to review important details and decide how much weight to give them. The sources available may vary depending on the Gatsby product, the firm's arrangement and the particular use case.

This is also something firms can test during an evaluation. They can look at which public, licensed or firm-approved sources are being used, how source information is presented and how easily someone can verify an important detail before it reaches a lawyer.

Firms can also look at what happens when information is incomplete or unclear. Those situations are a useful part of testing an intelligence product because they show where additional research or review may still be needed.

What Should a Gatsby Pilot Look Like?

A Gatsby pilot will be more useful if the firm starts with an actual business development need instead of giving a group of people access to the product and waiting to see what they do with it.

For example, the firm could choose a group of priority clients it wants to monitor, a team with several upcoming client and prospect meetings or lawyers who regularly need detailed research on executives before important conversations.

The participants can then use Gatsby for real work during the pilot. Marketing and BD professionals can evaluate the research and the process of preparing it, while lawyers can provide feedback on whether the final intelligence was useful.

The firm can look at several things during the pilot:

• How much time did the team spend preparing research and briefings?
• Was the information relevant to the meeting, client or prospect?
• Could important information be verified easily?
• Did the lawyers actually use the intelligence they received?
• Did anything lead to a conversation, introduction, follow-up or other business development action?

Those answers provide a much better basis for evaluating Gatsby than the amount of information the product can generate.

Where Are Law Firms Finding the Most Useful Applications?

Meeting preparation is an obvious use case because BD and marketing teams know how much time can go into producing a good briefing, particularly when the request arrives with little notice.

Priority account monitoring is another area where Gatsby can fit into existing workflows. Firms want relationship partners and client teams to know what is happening with important companies without adding more alerts and emails for them to sort through.

Person Intel can also be useful beyond traditional pitch preparation. Firms may use professional background research before executive meetings, conferences, alumni conversations, recruiting discussions and other situations where understanding who someone is professionally can help a lawyer prepare.

Another important part of the evaluation is how Gatsby fits into the way the firm already works. A product can provide useful information and still struggle to gain adoption if people have to create an entirely new process around it. Testing Gatsby with actual meetings, clients and BD responsibilities gives firms a better sense of where it fits.

Where Is Client Intelligence Going Next?

Law firms will continue to have access to more information about their clients and prospects. The bigger opportunity is making that information easier to use as part of everyday business development.

Meeting preparation, client monitoring and follow-up are closely connected. A firm may prepare a briefing before an important meeting, continue following the company afterward and use a later development as a reason for the lawyer to reconnect. Keeping those activities connected can make business development more consistent and make better use of the research the firm is already doing.

Marketing and business development professionals will continue to be important to that process because they understand the relationships, the firm's capabilities and what the lawyers need. Technology can help them spend less time gathering information from different places and more time applying what they know.

For firms evaluating Gatsby, starting with real clients, prospects, meetings and business development work is a practical way to see where it can help. The best test is whether the intelligence makes the team's work easier and gives lawyers information they can actually use.