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What is actionable intelligence? For strategic planners, actionable intelligence means insight into the future business plans of a competitor. Imagine being able to see your competitor’s product road map months or even years before their...
What is actionable intelligence? For strategic planners, actionable intelligence means insight into the future business plans of a competitor. Imagine being able to see your competitor’s product road map months or even years before their product is ready for release. During this period, you have time to properly assess the competitive threat and defend your business kingdom accordingly by widening your competitive moat or erecting higher barriers to entry. However, there’s a big difference between offering buzzwords and offering solutions. Unless you have an insider working for you, how will your law firm get its hands on actionable intelligence?
- Yahoo! HotJobs. Many people visit employment web sites to explore new career opportunities. And, that’s how employers and recruiters would like you to use them. However, savvy strategists have long realized that job listings provide a trove of actionable intelligence regarding a competitor’s future plans. What projects are your competitors staffing for? Which companies are developing products similar to yours? Yahoo! HotJobs knows, and it’ll even compile an RSS feed of the results for you. I guess you do have an insider working for you after all.
- Work.com. Like Yahoo! HotJobs, Work.com also offers an RSS feed of job search listings. However, you have to copy and paste the URL instead of having a handy button to just add the feed to My Yahoo. You can experiment with targeting a specific company, combining a company name with a job title, or even focusing on a unique set of keywords specifically relevant to your own products.
Industries
If your practice is focused on serving a particular industry, staying up-to-date on industry trends and challenges could not be simpler.
- Yahoo! – Industry Center. For background research, Yahoo covers industry news, statistics and profiles, as well as top performing companies within the industry. Yahoo also provides an earnings calendar to track upcoming events.
- bizjournals.com – Industries & Communities. bizjournals.com aggregates news articles by industry from different local business journals. They even offer a My Industries custom page where they will display news headlines from industries you have selected.
- MSN Money – News by Industry. MSN offers a basic news feed of industry news.
RSS Feeds
- BNET – White Papers RSS Feeds by Job Function and Industry. BNET offers white papers that span a broad range of job functions and industries. This is another great resource that you can feed into My Yahoo. You have to register in order to read the white papers though.
- Moreover Technologies – Free RSS News Feeds Listing. Moreover offers news feeds by industry.
- bizjournals.com – RSS Feeds. bizjournals.com also offers RSS feeds of local news and industry news. They’ve conveniently included an Add to My Yahoo link to simplify the process of adding content to your My Yahoo page.
On this page, I’m tracking jobs that include the keyword section 508, commercial real estate development white papers, consumer non-durable news, Atlanta local business news, and accounting and consulting headlines. You can customize your My Yahoo page to match your industry, location, and competitors too.
Most Favored Nation
When you are preparing to structure a major transaction, you would really like to know what terms your negotiating partner has offered other parties before. This time, you can’t count on the HR Director to post actionable intelligence online to tip you off. You need a different insider.
- SEC – EDGAR Company Search. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission offers real-time filings by company name, ticker symbol, location, and SIC Code.
- Onecle- Sample Contracts and Business Forms. Onecle has compiled a database of material contracts extracted from SEC filings. This collection is both searchable and browsable, and includes employment agreements, services agreements, license agreements, manufacturing agreements, severance agreements and more. This is the insider source for corporate contracts and other actionable intelligence.
- PwC – EdgarScan PricewaterhouseCoopers offers a different twist on SEC filings. Their focus is on financial data, which they’ve extracted and may be displayed as an MS Excel spreadsheet or as a chart.
- SEC Info. SEC Info offer yet another spin on SEC filings. This site includes both SEC EDGAR and CSA SEDAR securities filings, and also includes SEC-deleted filings. Why would a company request that the SEC delete a filing? Because there was either an error in the filing or the company inadvertently disclosed something that it now wishes to redact. So, even when the SEC deleted a copy of a filing from its own site, you may be able to find an archival copy on SEC Info.
RSS Feeds
- EDGAR Index – Free RSS Feed Filing Alerts. EDGAR Index offers filing alerts for IPOs, quarterly reports, annual reports and insider trading.
Well, this concludes today’s edition of the Justia Free Sixty: 60 Essential Free Actionable Intelligence Resources for Your Law Firm. I hope the web sites that I shared with you will prove useful in your practice. Stay tuned because I have 36 more law firm actionable intelligence tips on the way.
