Legal News

There’s a new article on CIO’s website titled “How a Global Law Firm Used Business Intelligence to Fix Customer Billing Woes” that features how the global law firm Bryan Cave is using their billing data to track projects as part of their diversity efforts.  The article says:

Bryan Cave partners use business intelligence tools from Redwood Analytics as well as tools constructed in-house using Microsoft’s OLAP tools (SQL Server, Analysis Services, Reporting Services) to forecast what effect various pricing and staffing decisions will have on a project.

The tools also allow lawyers to track budgets in real time so they can quickly make adjustments. The BI tools even provide a diversity dashboard, which tracks the hourly mix of women and minorities working on the firm’s cases, a feature the company will license to Redwood Analytics for sale to other law firms, Alber says. The firm developed this diversity tool to bring transparency to the diversity reporting process required by many clients, says Alber.

In an age of transparency for clients, this is a great development.  This way, law firms will have hardcopy proof of their diversity successes/failures.  Also, reporting by the women and minorities that do the work will not only be anecdotal, but there will be hard figures to back their perspectives of whether they are getting equal treatment.