With another school year well underway, it seems like a good time to share a few lessons on contact and relationship management. One group of ‘pupils’ for whom this information can be particularly relevant is new attorneys who are joining a firm for the first time and who are eager to get to the head of the class by focusing on marketing and business development early in their careers.

It may seem to many people that contact management skills should come naturally to lawyers, for whom relationships are crucial. But, as CRM Success Consultants, we have trained literally thousands of attorneys on a number of CRM systems and, in doing so, we have found that not all lawyers manage their contacts the same way – or even manage them at all. In fact, today many lawyers don’t organize contacts in a centralized system using a tool like Outlook, but instead keep them in a variety of other places — like their e-mail or their phones.