Legal CRM has reached a point where more investment doesn't automatically mean more value.

Zena Applebaum is joined by Sarah Happy, Director of Marketing Technology at Harbor, and Laura Saklad, Vice President, Legal Industry at Intapp, to look at what firms should measure instead. The conversation focuses on whether CRM helps teams make better growth decisions, trust their data, and act on relationship intelligence faster.

They get into the practical blockers firms still face, including duplicated data entry, disconnected systems, governance rules, ethical walls, and data models that weren't built for how legal relationships work. The episode also looks at where AI and agentic workflows can help, especially when they reduce manual effort and bring useful CRM intelligence into the tools lawyers already use.

What we cover:

• The real reason CRM adoption is dropping in law firms
• Why CRM is a data problem, not a software problem
• What agentic AI changes about how lawyers interact with CRM
• Governance, ethical walls, and the people side of data
• One piece of advice for firms thinking about CRM in 2026 and onwards

Listen to the full episode on

• Spotify
• Apple Podcasts
• YouTube

Key moments:

• 05:50 Hitting an Inflection Point: From Software Problem to Data Problem
• 12:00 Why Lawyers Push Back: Entering Data Six Times in Six Systems
• 15:14 Provenance, Governance, and Keeping the Human in the Loop
• 18:26 Headless CRM in Legal — Hype, Reality, and "Headless Horseman"
• 23:04 Data, Ontology, and Why Legal CRM Is Different