How a Global Law Firm Advanced Its CRM Strategy with Scalable Data Feeds

As law firms expand their technological capabilities, data is becoming a true strategic asset. Relationships and institutional knowledge alone are no longer enough to fully understand clients and prospects. For global firms serving high-growth, complex organizations, having complete, reliable, and interconnected data is critical to building a comprehensive view of companies, industries, and professional networks.

To meet this need, this global law firm enhanced its CRM by integrating scalable data feeds, enabling teams to link, analyze, and visualize client and company information within a single environment. This foundation now supports deeper insights, more informed business development, and a more strategic, data-driven approach to managing client relationships.

Building the CRM Data Foundation

The firm’s work with S&P Global Market Intelligence began inside its Salesforce CRM, where the goal was to create a more reliable, scalable foundation for managing client and company data across the organization. A low-code application brought structure to fragmented data through screening, enrichment, and ongoing updates, reducing manual entry and establishing a more reliable system of record. At the core of this foundation was a universal identifier, enabling seamless linking across companies, subsidiaries, contacts, and related entities, and creating a more accurate, connected view of relationships while minimizing duplication.

As the firm’s data strategy evolved, this CRM foundation became a springboard for expansion. With clean, linked data in place, the focus shifted from simply strengthening the CRM to extracting deeper, more actionable insights—extending company intelligence beyond Salesforce into cloud infrastructure and a centralized data lake to support advanced analytics, internal dashboards, and more flexible data modeling.

The firm’s data science team identified key opportunities to further expand and scale this approach:

• Greater ability to customize or manipulate third-party data directly within Salesforce.
• Expanded capacity to build internal dashboards tailored to the firm’s strategic priorities.
• More flexibility beyond a predefined set of datapoints delivered through the plug-in.
• The ability to scale enrichment as their new data lake infrastructure evolved.
• Leveraging Salesforce’s own innovations, including Agentforce, to generate more meaningful insights and actions from underlying data.

The cost of not innovating was significant. By focusing on a more complete data strategy with deeper, customizable intelligence, the firm could better keep pace with the Commercial Enablement technology landscape for a more complete and dynamic understanding of its clients, industries, and professional networks.

The Solution

Building on the CRM foundation, the firm migrated its existing Salesforce records, already enriched and linked to third-party datasets, into a centralized data lake powered by Databricks. This platform provided a flexible and scalable environment for advanced analytics and company intelligence.

As the data lake was developed, the firm adopted direct data feeds that could be integrated into the broader data ecosystem and modeled internally according to its own specifications. S&P Global Market Intelligence worked closely with the data science team to implement a comprehensive suite of data feeds. These feeds provided a multidimensional view of the firm’s client and prospect universe and included:

S&P Global Market Intelligence worked closely with the data science team to implement a comprehensive suite of Data Feeds, including:

• Company Intelligence
• Industry Sector Cross Reference Services
• Financials
• Company Relationships
• Professionals

These datasets extended the intelligence already delivered through the firm’s existing S&P Global Salesforce application, which had established unique identifiers and core company, financial, professional, and relationship data across CRM records.

By transitioning this intelligence from Salesforce into a centralized data lake, the firm preserved data quality, entity linkage, and record management while gaining the flexibility to model, analyze, and visualize information at scale. Together, these feeds expanded visibility into corporate hierarchies, industry classifications, executive leadership, financial performance, and relationship mapping—critical components for advising complex, global organizations.

By ingesting the feeds directly into its data lake environment, the firm gained the ability to: