Essential types of analytics and reports for your law firm's success

According to “Big Data: The Management Revolution” by Andrew AcAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, the success of a business depends largely on how it is able to collect, process and interpret data from a multitude of sources. Due to this, organisations are now using technological tools to explore how their data can be used for good. One such essential technological tool in the legal industry is analytics and reports.

Analytics and reports goes beyond the collection of the data itself, involving a broad spectrum of reporting techniques to provide management with valuable information that will assist in making insightful business decisions. In order to provide better legal services to your clients, your firms can leverage the power of data to gain valuable insights. In this blog post, we will explore what are the essential types of Analytics and Reports that you need for your law firm success.

Essential Types of Analytics and Reports for Any Law Firms

Legal analytics and reporting software offers adaptive, real-time reports. Basic data points for legal reporting include productivity, billing, accounting and compensation. Below are three essential types of analytics and reports for any law firm.

• Firm productivity and planning: the biggest asset of a law firm is its lawyers, and monitoring their productivity and efficiency is essential as described in our Resource Capacity Planning: The Modern Solution to Demand and Gap blog post. Hence, billable hours should be tracked proactively by your law firm, and reporting helps you do that intelligently and objectively. In addition to tracking straight billable hours, data analytics and reporting will enable your firm to monitor non-billable hours, timekeeping policies, matter timelines, billing processes, and attorney profitability.
• Billing and accounting: as referenced in our blog on Lawyers’ Best Frienemy: Time Tracking and Billing, these reports essential as they provide a detailed look at your firm’s finances, including cash flow and other assets. Given that the longevity of your firm hinges on its financial position, paying close attention to what these reports tell you about your businessis critical. Law firms must know whether they are cash positive, as well as whether business expenditures are benefitting or hurting their bottom line.
• Custom reporting: Generating custom reports is a powerful skill. Using customised reporting features, your law firm can create financial, calendar, matter, and client reports tailored to its business and key functions. In doing so, you will be able to leverage data to come up with specific and actionable insights.
  
  

Benefits of Essential Types Of Analytics and Reports in a Law Firm

1. Increase Productivity through Resource Allocation and Workload Management

Analytics and reports provide valuable insights into the utilisation and efficiency of resources within a law firm. By analysing data on billable hours, case complexity, and attorney performance, firms can allocate resources more effectively, ensuring that workloads are balanced and distributed efficiently. This data-driven approach improves productivity, reduces bottlenecks, and enhances client satisfaction.

Law firms can evaluate the productivity of their lawyers based on dashboards and reports that analyse time entries, expenses and billings down to case level. Such analytics and reports will undoubtedly aid your firm in promoting efficiency and maximising productivity.

2. Increase Profitability through Effective Billing and Accounting

Through effective Billing and Accounting, your law firm will be able to identify, for example, its highest paying clients and cases, figure out where the money is being made and where it’s being lost, manage staffing and track lawyers’ billable hours, ensure accuracy in origination credit and compensation matters, and use other raw data points to build complex spreadsheets and pivot tables to aid your firm’s decision making.

Leveraging on billing and collection analysis and reporting, your firm can track important value metrics, including bank account journals, accounts payable, accounts receivable, timekeeper and matter budgets, and bank reconciliations. Keeping close weekly, monthly, or yearly tabs on these matters can make or break your firm.

3. Data-driven Decision Making through Custom Reportings

Custom reports allow law firms to make use of the vast amounts of data generated within organisation across different sources to gain valuable insight into how the different aspects of various cases are performing. By utilising such data, your law firm is able to make better decisions, which will ultimately lead to more effective strategies being adopted.

As Tessaract.io tracks live data within the system, customised reports and live analytics can be generated with ease. Instant pivot tables can be generated to allow your law firm to get the right information to base business decisions, without it becoming a time-consuming endeavour. This will further create a sustainable environment in which management can make thoughtful and informed decisions that help the business grow.

Explore Tessaract’s Analytics and Reports Features

A modern system like Tessaract.io brings together key data points in a single platform, allowing your KPIs to be reviewed via essential dashboards and reports. In doing so, you can evaluate your firm's performance to improve productivity across day-to-day operations, as well as track important metrics to optimise efficiency and profitability for the long-term.