OPEN TO ALL: THERE'S NO NEED FOR LARGE DATA SETS TO MAKE ANALYTICS WORK FOR YOU

It has been a while since I managed to go to a conference or event without some mention of ‘big data’. Around three years ago I started looking into data analytics in earnest. I knew we held a lot of data and that there was the prospect of adding value to our business and gaining a competitive advantage by analysing it effectively, but I was struggling to know where to start. Our board meetings are often spent looking outside the legal sector to get ideas, so when one of our then non-executive directors mentioned how his own firm Ecovis had used data analytics I was immediately interested. We started speaking to Reuben Barry, data analytics director at Ecovis about what the options could be for us. Speaking to a data scientist like Reuben really opened my eyes. As lawyers we think about our data in a very superficial way, but a data scientist sees it as dots and dashes. A data scientist is not interested in the headline data, but instead what the numbers below can show.

WHERE TO START

Mid-tier law firms are not short of data: from time recording to client information. However, the major stumbling block we all face – and I include myself in this – is knowing where to start. Reuben’s advice was to take small steps and not dive in with a massive data analytics project straight away. His view is that it is possible to analyse your data in a bite-sized way to drive results and, importantly, to deliver value to the firm. He recommends starting with a question or a problem and only after being clear on that, taking time to consider how your data could help to inform your decision-making process. We took this approach and the first question we asked ourselves was: where does our most valuable work come from? To answer this, the first project that Reuben delivered for us was a geographic analysis of our client matters. He prepared a heat map, which we could use to drill down to parish council level. We were able to slice and dice the data in a number of ways; looking at it from an individual, team, office or county perspective. This was helpful to us in two main ways. First, it allowed us to have much more informed discussions about our marketing, looking at where our most profitable work was coming from and making investment decisions accordingly. Another quick win was spotting anomalies that we would not otherwise have had visibility of. The one that sticks in my mind was seeing work coming from all over the country for a particular partner. When we looked closer we saw that the work was a very niche specialism, and not his main area of work. We could see that he was charging a low rate for this work, but our use of the data meant that he was able to charge more, safe in the knowledge that his expertise was in demand from across the country.

COLLECT AND ANALYSE

It would be impossible to run a firm of our size without having several data management systems in place. So you will find that you are already collecting a lot of the data you will need. However, when I first started talking seriously about using data analytics, several colleagues responded with a concern that our data was not good enough. When I spoke to Ecovis about the projects we wanted to use the data to inform – mainly identifying trends – it was clear that the data did not need to be 100 per cent perfect. “Don’t make concerns about your data a barrier,” Reuben said. “Once you are clear on the question you want to ask, you may find that the data you hold is good enough. Sometimes it may be necessary to tidy up the data first or use external data to supplement it, but not always.” Then, when it came to analysing the data, it was crucial that the reports extracted from