Smart data, intelligently delivered.

How Corporate Legal is rethinking data and boosting legal performance.

Data proliferation. Legal analytics.

Data-driven everything.Corporate Legal faces growing business challenges. On one hand, these’s so much more data, in more formats, from more sources. This adds complexity to how You analyze data and handle compliance and security risks. On the other hand, there’s pressure to do more with less, requiring better tracking and transparency into expenses. This comes as departments are managing new and different sources of legal services, which adds even more complexity.

This heightened demand for information requires data, and lots of it. The need to access and analyze rapidly increasing volumes of data isn’t new. It has always Been at the heart of how law is practiced. But with so much data now available, the risk of making decisions based on incomplete information continues to rise.

In many ways, an inability to harness data for decision making can quickly become a legal liability. What’s the risk? Should you litigate? Can you improve your business performance? Is it worth it? Corporate Legal needs to reconsider what data can do for their business — and how legal analytics hold the key to achieving much-needed collaboration, clarity, and compliance in a more cost-focused world.

Effective data use will make the difference.

According to Gartner, “Legal departments that use analytics to inform their decision making exhibit higher work quality, reduced litigation cost, and lower spending.”1 Yet, most of today’s Corporate Legal departments still employ myriad manual processes and disparate data solutions. Few use legal analytics and most utilize only a fraction of their data.

What makes data “smart”?

Data becomes smart when it’s transformed into the insights required to propel a business forward. For Corporate Legal, this means quick access to everything from high-level summaries to granular details on open matters; even financial reporting, like aging reports on open invoices. When your data is smart, it supports and informs your decisions. It gives your team more control over cases and costs. This is what we call “Smart data.”

Rather than the bits and bytes trapped in different applications and documents, smart data provides a single reference point, making it easy to analyze and share information securely— across the entire legal team, in-house staff, business-unit reps, and outside counsel. The result: Greater transparency, efficiency, and insight.

“Intelligent delivery” makes smart data actionable.

Creating smart data is only half the battle. You also must make the smart data available to everyone on the team, where they are, when they need it, in the optimal format for their individual Needs.

Intelligent delivery makes smart data comprehensive, accurate, and actionable. It’s time for a mind shift: You shouldn’t have to change the way you work in order to create and use your smart data. Although you may already rely on a legal information management solution, it may not accommodate the ways your
department needs to work.

Truly intelligent delivery enables any user to determine what smart data they need and how they will receive it — all within access parameters you specify. In other words, intelligent delivery serves up timely information related to all matters in one place, so teams can quickly compare matter, spend, and law-firm data through a single, easily-consumable view.

Embrace the future.

Research from Gartner shows that nearly 50% of legal departments intend to use analytics for process improvement, and more than a third for legal analysis.4
Drive your team forward by implementing the processes and technologies that enable smart data, intelligently delivered. Develop a comprehensive, practical long-term plan beginning with your end goals in mind. Align your technology and process choices around your objectives. Ensure that your providers offer the Flexibility you need to support your business as it changes and grows. These strategies will lay the foundation for process improvements, powerful legal analysis, and maturing your legal department across the full range of CLOC competencies.