Last week, I had the privilege of presenting on “How Intelligence Accelerates New Client Acquisitions for Law Firms” as a part of the Intelligence Collaborative ( #intelcollab), an Aurora WDC project.  The presentation focused on how firms can leverage all of the intelligence floating around in firms to retain existing clients, get more work out of them, target and pitch new clients and embrace big data and all that it has to offer.  As always, the content delivered was only half of the presentation and the real value came from the question and answer period where I was asked and hopefully answered some very salient questions.  One of the questions I was asked was how sole practitioners can employ some of the tactics and strategies discussed in the presentation.  Sole practitioners are uniquely positioned in that they can to be more nimble than their counter parts in large law firms in responding to market conditions and opportunities, but are hindered in that resources, especially time to practice law and develop business at the same time without a full administrative staff can be a significant challenge. 

Yesterday, I saw a demo of a product that can make the life of a sole practitioner, whether as a legal professional, a librarian, an intelligence professional –  competitive, market or business, they are all the same to me, check out the recording of the IntelCollab presentation for a more fulsome explanation –  or other informational services provider that much easier.  The fact that the company is Canadian is just a colourful feather in its cap.  The product is called Spundge (@spundge) and it positions itself as having “Smarter Curation, Awesome Content”, which to me is just a fantastic tag line.  Similar to other aggregators of content I have reviewed here, I would describe Spundge from my vantage point as primarily a social and public media listening tool.   The curator allows you collect media across various platforms, and then for a tiny monthly subscription fee, create newsletters or in “stories” in Spudge language with that content once you have filtered it for your specific needs. The stories can then be syndicated and pushed out to clients as a value added service (using Spundge Pro), a business development tool and/or even to other Spundge subscribers. The product is terrific for the sole or solo practitioner for a variety of reasons including its low subscription fee, easy to navigate, low barrier to use.  Imagine, you are a solo librarian or intelligence professional, supporting a series of sole practitioner lawyers or small offices as a consultant.  You could log into Spundge, create customized notebooks for each of your lawyer clients, and publish a story to each of them with ease on a daily basis. Or if you were a sole practitioner lawyer, you could create a notebook for each client or industry you were covering, scan the headlines without the need for expensive subscriptions since arguably, social media often reports on events before traditional media and be up-to-date on targeted current awareness as it happens. If a new publicly available source needs to be added, you just log into your settings add the RSS feed and away you go.

Oh, and if you had social interests on top of your work interests, you could track those too in private notebooks and read them in all your spare time.