Bridging the Business Intelligence Gap in Legal Operations

Are you getting useful reports from outside counsel on case and budget metrics? This was the question posed by John Tredennick, Catalyst CEO, on opening day of the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC), May 9 in Las Vegas.

Access to meaningful metrics and business intelligence is a key component of enhancing efficiency and driving cost savings in legal departments. For many legal departments, however, there is a wide gap between the metrics they need and the metrics they get.

In fact, a 2016 survey by the consulting firm Altman Weil found that 73% of chief legal officers polled were not getting timely information from their law firms about budgets, case progress, performance or other metrics.

First, bridge four obstacles

In a CLOC session on real-time analytics and business intelligence, Tredennick and co-speaker Thane Vallette, associate general counsel, HP Inc., identified four obstacles that legal operations professionals must bridge to get the data and analytics needed to manage their legal and e-discovery matters more effectively:

1. Data Silos: Information needed to make decisions is stored in multiple systems and applications.
2. Acquiring Data: Each different application requires custom work to export the data needed for dashboard reports.
3. Timing: Getting information from law firms, matter management or billing systems on a continuous basis is nearly impossible, but reasonably current info is required.
4. Normalization: The data provided is often in a variety of formats and users can’t easily filter through a combination of matters, date ranges, timekeepers, etc.

Then, leverage technology to take control

The speakers then discussed steps that legal operation professionals can take to

turn their data into understandable and actionable business intelligence:

1. Control the reporting process. Don’t rely on your outside firms to provide essential metrics. The legal department should have its own system to collect and analyze key metrics—a system that does not depend on data-reporting by outside counsel.
2. Choose the best dashboard, analytics and workflows. For a legal department to implement such a system, it needs technology that can collect data across all active matters and legal teams, both internal and external.
3. Centralize your data. When you manage all legal matters through a core repository, all matter-related data is available to be extracted and analyzed. All your legal teams, both internally and externally, work through the same system.
4. Set up reporting. Identify the reports you want and set up a process to deliver them. In addition to whatever custom data you need, the system should be able to provide reporting on a broad array of e-discovery metrics.
5. Turn data into actionable intelligence. Ideally, this is done through a reporting dashboard that uses visual analytics to provide a quick overview of all the corporation’s legal matters, documents and custodians, with drill-downs into more detailed reports.  

To learn more, download  Five Steps to Better Oversight of E-Discovery Spend.