Discover the opportunities that are hiding in your law department data

Tracking spend and matter management metrics is commonplace for corporate law departments, but using their data to generate business intelligence that has the potential to transform their operations is not.

In the 2021 Legal Department Operations (LDO) Index from Thomson Reuters, corporate legal teams said that e-billing, spend, and matter management software is the most highly utilized and most valued technology in their arsenals. It helps them to better understand and leverage their operational and financial data so they can work more efficiently and effectively.

Legal business intelligence technology enables law departments to take this type of performance analysis to the next level — to unearth more actionable business insights by aggregating key performance indicators, metrics, analytics, and peer-to-peer benchmarking data.

However, this is not happening often enough. The LDO Index found that legal business intelligence, analytics, and dashboarding software is the most under-utilized technology in corporate law departments today.

Data visualization can help

Actionable insights jump off the screen when information is effectively presented visually. Trends, outliers, and anomalies in spending, budget, and the allocation of legal work are easy to see. When corporate counsel, in-house lawyers, and legal operations teams quickly grasp how conditions are shifting, they can manage and lead better, seizing opportunities and addressing emerging problems they didn’t see before.

To make this happen, Thomson Reuters has paired two powerful tools:

• Legal Tracker – The world’s most widely used solution for in-house legal matter management, case-tracking, and e-billing; it’s also the largest repository of corporate legal department benchmarking data.
• Microsoft Power BI – The standard-setting business intelligence and data visualization platform.

Together, Legal Tracker and Power BI empower in-house legal teams to identify operational insights hidden within their data and also to compare their outcomes with similar corporate law departments — enabling them to continuously improve performance.

Easy-to-interpret visualized data — accessible on centralized, customizable, interactive dashboards — also helps in-house corporate law departments show their value to essential stakeholders across their company.

Putting it to work, day after day

Here are four use cases for Legal Tracker integrated with Power BI, for different legal factions.

Legal operations professionals

Legal operations teams need to make it easy for general counsel and in-house lawyers to access and assess key performance indicators and understand how departmental metrics compare with industry norms.

Legal Tracker delivers powerful, interactive data visualization capabilities and intuitive dashboards uncover and illustrate trends and compare departmental results with industry benchmarks to inform decisions, facilitate internal reporting, and enable continuous improvement initiatives.

Corporate general counsel

Leaders of corporate law departments need ongoing, up-to-date information in order to analyze spend, budget, invoicing, and law firm utilization — and they don’t have time to hunt down data or pore over spreadsheets.

Legal Tracker delivers an always-on, available-from-anywhere dashboard that gives general counsel the information they need, when they need it, in an easy-to-interpret format.

In-house lawyers

Lawyers need up-to-date information and a view of trends related to the legal matters they’re responsible for.

Legal Tracker and Power BI enable legal teams to build and perfect interactive visualizations and dashboards tailored to the specific needs of general counsel, head of litigation, and each lawyer within a corporate legal department.

Legal operations leaders

Executives responsible for legal operations strategy need visibility into the industry's spending and behaviors in order to identify best practices, assist negotiations with external law firms, and strategically place legal work based on location.

Legal Tracker delivers a vast repository of data reflecting more than $100 billion of spending by corporate legal departments around the world. This information can be used to create peer-to-peer benchmarks filtered by timekeeper, geography, time period, and other criteria.

Taking operational analysis to the next level

On its own, Legal Tracker is a best-of-breed analytics platform that empowers organizations to create, utilize, and socialize a 360-degree view of their corporate law department's performance. It contains the world’s most comprehensive repository of data on law department expenditures, representing $100 billion in spend by more than 1,500 legal departments worldwide.

Legal Tracker features thousands of fields and regularly adds more, so corporate legal teams have a vast dataset to explore. With this wealth of information, legal teams can compare their results with industry norms and benchmarks so they can address weaknesses, seize opportunities, and continuously improve.

Integrating Legal Tracker with Microsoft Power BI delivers intuitive, interactive, customizable dashboard functionality. Power BI’s Advanced Editor functionality lets users slice and dice data and drill into information that’s important to the specific objectives of various stakeholders — and build custom visuals and dashboards to share the information in an intuitive, easy-to-understand format.

In this way, corporate counsel, in-house lawyers, and legal operations teams discover the details and nuances in their data, the outliers and emerging trends. With these insights, they can address burgeoning problems before they escalate and seize opportunities to proactively improve departmental performance.