Legal Data Analytics Webinar: Takeaway Notes & Video

On February 20, 2020, InvestCEE LegalTech Consultancy hosted a webinar organized by the European Legal Technology Association (ELTA) regarding the use of legal data analytics for improved decision making of corporate legal departments and law firms. The panel of experts included Jodie Baker, founder and CEO of Xakia Technologies and Ádám Szíjártó, legal director of Egis Pharmaceuticals PLC. The discussion focused on identifying and visualizing metrics beyond the billable hour to demonstrate the value of legal work.

The webinar covered legal data analytics from the following main angles:

• • The case for legal data analytics: why it matters for both in-house legal teams and law firms
  • The mechanics of legal data analytics: essential considerations before starting to collect legal data
  • The data: the who, what, when and why of collecting data in legal workstreams
  • Putting it together: creating visual reports to enable better communication with clients (internal and external)
  • Case studies: best practices of in-house legal teams using data analytics

Here is a summary of the three key takeaways of which we took note.

#1 Start capturing relevant data for your legal work

Recent studies (like the GC350: Benchmarking Study for the In-House Community) have again shown that demonstrating the added value of legal work is quite challenging: 44% of legal departments do not have a high profile in their company and 77% of legal departments do not measure the value they deliver to business units. To be able to effectively showcase how lawyers benefit the corporate structure at large, legal teams must be able to track numbers on the volume of their workload, the legal spend, the strategic importance of their workstreams in corporate context, the matter risk they are dealing with, as well as the complexity and monetary significance of tasks they are entrusted with.

#2 Start making sense of the legal data you’ve collected by using some sort of an analytics platform 

While traditional spreadsheets may be a good way to capture data for legal workstreams, Excel charts will not be of much help when it comes to analyzing data in a comparative and complex manner. Having a unified platform like Xakia that deals with the numbers, analytics and visualization helps to better:

• Prioritize legal work
• Allocate resources and manage capacity of the legal team
• Identify work that should be automated, eliminated or otherwise managed
• Plan budget and allocate internal costs
• Manage external law firm costs

#3 Start using a visual reporting format to showcase the value of legal expertise to your clients

To turn legal departments into a valuable strategic asset for business, in-house lawyers need to better communicate with the business units of their organizations. Legal teams also need to identify and reduce time spent on repetitive, less complex work and instead release time for more complex, demanding tasks. Visual reporting on legal data enables: (1) overview of current tasks and projects at any given time, (2) immediate access to workload dynamics, (3) increasingly lean business processes, (4) sharing knowledge about the complexity and strategic value of the legal workstreams, and (5) enhanced, number-driven communication with decision-makers.

For more expert insights and know-how regarding this topic, take a look at the video recording of the ELTA Live Legal Data Analytics Webinar below: