What is data science?

Data science, similar to data analytics is a method used to obtain, process and analyse sets of raw data to determine whether a business is operating in a way that helps them meet their business goals. Legal analytics helps firms to make predictions and, in turn, helps them to make better decisions based on insights from data, such as calculated risks, past trends and predictive analytics. As machine learning and artificial intelligence grows, more types of data sets can be gathered and examined.

In recent years, data analysis has become increasingly important and data scientists have become some of the most valuable assets to business operations, especially for law firms and businesses within the legal sector.

Data Science for law firms

Legal departments in all practice areas can benefit from the use of data science for law firms. Many law firms are turning to data science to help them increase profits, improve business and client relationships and to achieve long term business growth using big data as guidance.

The ability to make predictions, decision and to react to changing circumstances is vital to the success of a law firm in the current, fast-paced competitive legal industry.

In addition to this, the ability to do this is substantially improved when in-depth data can be retrieved at any desired time, and a case management system report, such as a Proclaim report is a reliable and effective means of achieving this.

A key facet of any successful business is the ability to recall and analyse large volumes of data as and when needed in a meaningful manner. Whilst some case management systems come with out of the box reports, most businesses soon find they need to develop their own bespoke reports to cover their unique business needs.

Law firm data

Most case management systems, such as Proclaim or LEAP, can be developed to allow law firms to analyse data as they hold endless amounts of business data. Business intelligence tools can be utilised to create KPI dashboards and reports to help you understand your data.

Examples of data which can be analysed and reported upon include:

• KPIs
• Fee earner performance
• Client feedback
• Client and matter inception data
• Profit and loss data
• Marketing data
• Amount of work in the pipeline

How law firms can utilise data science

Law firms possess tons of legal data which can be used for process improvement and data analysis. If you utilise a case management system, most of this data will be right at your fingertips, making it easier for you to access, extract and analyse. Some examples of the use of data science within a law firm include:

• Progression Reports – Are tasks being completed on time, are files being progressed as quickly as they should be?
• Age Reports – What is the age of your caseload?
• Fee earner reports– Are fee earners completing their tasks on time- how many billable hours are being completed by fee earners?
• Profitability – Who is generating the most profit overall/per file, per claim type or per department? Which types of cases are generating the highest profits? Which types of cases should firms focus on within their marketing in order to obtain the highest levels of profits?
• WIP – Calculate the total firm WIP for reporting purposes, or in relation to certain case types or file handlers.

How can Legal Practice Support Assist?

Legal Practice Support understand the importance of data science for law firms. Ware a data driven company, with years of experience working within the legal market. We have extensive experience in creating versatile and detailed reports to provide a range of different business functions.

Financial, Management Information, Dashboard, KPI and Trend Reporting are some of the key areas in which we are skilled. In doing so, we have been able to enable many of our clients to obtain and analyse information, which in turn, has aided them experience the growth they desired.

Furthermore, with the correct setup in your case management system, you can ensure that all key data reports are scheduled to run automatically and to be disclosed to predefined contacts or locations at specified times. Thus, ensuring fee earners are never missing the information you need to make key business decisions.

We can also extract your data directly from your case management system (or any other source) to create informatice KPI dashboards to help you understand and visualise your key business information.

Whilst we excel in building advanced case management reports, perhaps more importantly its our ability to spot where your business would benefit from a report that really makes the difference.

We are a team of computer science, data, and legal IT experts, providing support and advice using clear, natural language.

If you would like to discuss how a developer from the LPS team could assist your law firm, please do not hesitate to contact enquiries@legalpracticesupport.co.uk for further information or get in touch with us via Live Chat or the contact form, below.