Background

Business intelligence (BI) has come a long way as it has been adopted into mainstream business practices, but only recently has it begun to be incorporated into the professional services industry, specifically legal firms. At its core, BI provides analytics that can improve the way legal firms operate, which ultimately leads to larger margins. Like most business-es, legal firms have preconceived notions on what is working and what is not working. These notions are simply guesses without the data to back them up. As legal firms drive to raise client service levels as well as improving efficiency and maximizing client profitability they turn to innovation and revolutionizing their relationship with data. The high-performance legal operations that firms envision require a data-driven approach to decision-making, increasing demand for a com-plete BI platform and integration of disparate sources.

The Problem

A lack in reporting capabilities is what turns legal firms to innovate and leverage BI tools. For example, in-house legal teams assume greater responsibility for their dockets and remove that authority from their outside counsel, they need to find faster ways to improve data transparency to support decisions. Some of the areas we see legal firms wanting to revolutionize:

Increasing case profitability with optimized resource utilization and improved service levels.

Managing and understanding unbillable hours while improving financial forecasting.

Automating status updates and reporting on open cas-es in regards to timeline, budget, and scope.

Best Practices for Legal Firms when it comes to BI

Centralize data with a single discovery

provider to optimize utilization. Those using a variety of vendors receive random reports and erratic tracking, rather than seamless support.

Customize your data with a dashboard designed specifically to address the questions to which you want answers. An inclusive dataset behind the dash-board will allow for addition or changes to the display as needs change.

Translate your data so it is portable, downloadable and even mobile. While few end-users will access the technolo-gy directly, every member of the legal team will want to review summaries of its contents in PDF or Excel, as well as on a wide variety of devices.

Interact with your data by manipulating its contents for planning and budget-ing.

Integrate your data by importing infor-mation from different systems within your organization. With files typically stored in a myriad of systems, it is im-perative to integrate and access them on a universal scale. [1]

SME Solutions Group, Inc.

Driving Legal Services with Analytics

3 Key Business Dashboards to Track :

Financial Controlling Dash-

board – Your firm’s financial status is summed up in one dashboard including all rele-vant indicators per business unit: available assets, gross and net profit margins, and debt ratios.

Monthly Financials Dash-

board – Key financial indica-tors help you track the actu-als against budget for your income, expenses by catego-ry and overall profitability. It also includes the cash flow projection.

Team Productivity KPIs – This

dashboard provides an over-view of team time tracking and management. It can be filtered by client project, team or team member.

Other Possible Legal Firm

Dashboards to consider: Cost of servicing a client Profitability by practice

area Profitability by partner Billable optimization [2]

[1] How Business Intelligence Contributes To a Better Legal Business Model Sam Chi - http://www.lawpracticetoday.org/article/business-intelligence-better-legal-business-model/ [2] Dashboards Every Law Firm Should Be Tracking https://www.clicdata.com/blog/3-surprising-business-intelligence-dashboards-law-firms/

The Solution

Diving into billable hours, invoices and historical finan-cial information can help you better understand which types of cases are most profitable and which clients are costing you money. Legal firms looking to increase case profitability will benefit from a dashboard that serves as a heart monitor for their financials. Legal firms can also explore opportunities to improve their bottom lines by optimizing resource utilization. Discover trends and patterns with dashboards that overlay project information with resource details. For example, SME Solutions Group employs resource dashboards that help identify the right resource for the right client based on skills and qualifications, balanced with availability. All projects and cases have a few key goals in mind: on-time, within budget, and within scope. Automating status reports can help legal firms take control of these goals. For example, 30 days prior to a statue an email alert is automatically dispersed containing case status information. Or an email alert linking back to a dynam-ic dashboard will be sent out when a project is getting close the number of hours allotted.

Results

Through personalized BI and data analytics, firms can improve resource utilization through greater insight, quickly identify underperforming resources, and assess projects/cases as they approach various deadlines, budgets, and statutes. These insights can improve the bottom lines and client satisfaction for professional services providers.

Next Steps

As a partner with the International Legal Technology Association, SME Solutions Group encourages you to work with Subject Matter Experts and your peers as your pain points are manageable and can be over-come.

www.smesgroup.com

Our deep rooted understanding of business operations gives us

a competitive advantage; this knowledge is passed on to you.

Reach us at info@smesgroup.com or (813) 414-5669.