Drowning in Data
The volume of data that legal departments create continues to increase each day. This presents both a challenge and an opportunity. How can legal departments navigate this challenge and use this rich data to better inform matter strategy and support decision-making? Through Business Intelligence.
Applying an analytical perspective to legal matters – aka Business Intelligence – can help legal departments take charge of their data, improve business decision-making and enhance operational efficiency. In this article, I discuss the benefits of Business Intelligence and highlight ways that legal departments can begin to apply an analytical lens to the management of their staff, matters and outside counsel, all while leveraging simple data that is likely already being collected.
Benefits of Business Intelligence
There is no shortage of data available to legal departments. Every employee, every outside counsel and every matter produces incredibly rich data. Successful companies leverage that data to inform strategy and identify areas ripe for process improvement. The benefits of Business Intelligence are numerous. By collecting and bringing to life people, financial and operational data, general counsel can obtain answers to business questions more quickly and better demonstrate the value of the legal department to the rest of the company. By improving data governance, lawyers and staff can cut down on the amount of time they spend doing data entry and, ultimately, produce cleaner, more accurate and complete data. And by applying a data driven mindset to the management of matters and outside counsel, in-house legal departments can better manage risk and spend.
Leverage Existing Data to Answer Critical Business Questions
Legal departments can use latent data to produce powerful answers to critical business questions. Think, for a moment, of the rich analytical insights that can be had from collecting just a few simple metrics for each engagement, such as matter type, matter duration, budget and fee arrangement. With that data alone, a general counsel can begin to understand the scale and nature of their legal spend. To that end, below are three business categories that are highly applicable to in-house legal departments. For each business category, I have (1) outlined the common data points applicable to that business category and (2) offered example business questions related to those data points. The intention is to provide you with examples of how data that is available to most, if not all, legal departments can be leveraged for Business Intelligence.
Business Category 1: People
Data Points | Business Questions |
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Business Category 2: Operational
Data Points | Business Questions |
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Business Category 3: Financial
Data Points | Business Questions |
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Conclusion
Data is an asset, and successfully leveraging it is a powerful differentiator. Legal departments are drowning in data, but instead of seeing this as a challenge, you should view it as an opportunity. Putting latent data to use can enable your legal department to provide better, faster and more cost-effective services to your business. This article provides a small glimpse into how legal departments can leverage data to produce powerful Business Intelligence insights. To learn more, contact our team: legaloperations@shearman.com
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