Benefits of leveraging Intapp AI-based technology
Intapp recently hosted a Legal Week session with Jill Nelson, Senior Director of OnePlace Operations & Finance at Intapp, and Sharon Scenna, Senior Solutions Management Director for OnePlace Operation & Finance at Intapp. The session focused on AI and connected firm management platforms, and how this technology can support firms throughout the entire client matter lifecycle. Read our highlights from the event and discover how Intapp technology can help your firm improve its efficiency and profitability.
Benefits of Leveraging AI
Although AI technology is still very new to the legal industry, firms that have invested in AI-based tools are already seeing major improvements in the way their teams function. Nelson and Scenna spoke about the opportunity that AI brings to firms and the potential for connectivity, integration, and advanced technology.
“The opportunity is groundbreaking,” Scenna said. “AI can create efficiencies for law firms and improve their ability to serve clients.”
Scenna shared five basic ways that AI can help firms:
- Efficiency — AI tools help pricing and legal pricing management (LPM) teams be more efficient, as they can quickly find information and data via the platform rather than having to manually search for it. As a result, these teams can also scale and respond to requests faster.
- Accuracy — Pricing and LPM teams that use AI-based software can canvas a larger, firmwide dataset and consider more sources of information. By leveraging the whole firm’s knowledge and analyzing past engagements, teams can develop more accurate budgets. This is particularly crucial for firms who have grown through mergers, combinations, and international expansion.
- Budgeting — Pricing teams can use AI tools to develop matter budgets and workplan templatesfor specific legal services. The AI system helps teams easily identify phases, tasks, key milestones, and efficient staffing models that serve as a basis for budgets, fee arrangements, and matter plans for specific practice areas and legal services.
- Profitability — AI-based tools help firms analyze profitability and identify areas for improvement, such as a practice area’s overall performance and trends. Firms can use AI to better understand metrics for specific legal services, staffing, and capacity, as well as to analyze leverage, effectiveness, cost, and resourcing information around engagements.
- Resource planning — Firms can utilize AI tools to analyze associates’ level of experience and consider career development strategies and staffing needs.
Impact of Intapp AI Technology
Before investing in AI-based tools and platforms, firms must ensure that the products they choose are a good fit for their requirements. To help firms meet their unique needs, Intapp offers a variety of solutions, including the industry’s first connected firm cloud, which spans the end-to-end client engagement lifecycle. This connected firm management tool helps firms break down silos, convert data and information into a competitive advantage, and bring individuals, departments, and processes together.
Additionally, Intapp offers individual products to meet more specific needs of different teams. Intapp Pricing — part of the OnePlace Operations & Finance suite — was carefully designed to help firms scope, price, resource, budget, and monitor engagements with increased flexibility and accuracy. This easy and intuitive solution allows firms to win more business, improve profitability, and meet client requirements.
Intapp Pricing employs intelligence surfaced by Engagement DNA, proprietary technology that automatically sifts, sorts, and categorizes a firm’s previous engagements by their shared characteristics. By identifying families of engagements, Engagement DNA focuses on highly relevant datasets to provide predictive intelligence based on historical data regarding time, billing, budgets, conflicts, and performance.
“You can use Engagement DNA to develop a budget for a specific client opportunity or to come up with best practices within legal services to develop budget and matter plan templates for various types of matters,” explained Scenna.
“It’s really exciting and game-changing,” added Nelson.
Results of Implementing Intapp Pricing and Engagement DNA
Many clients have witnessed the benefits of using Intapp technology, as Nelson explained. “One of our clients, Fredrikson & Byron, recently articulated the experience they had with Intapp Pricing and Engagement DNA,” Nelson said, referring to a recent case study. The case study revealed that Fredrikson & Byron had previously relied on spreadsheets and time-consuming manual processes to gather source material and conduct the analysis required to develop new budgets.
“From a client value point of view, it’s critically important to get pricing right so there are no surprises,” said Christina Brusven, Lawyer and Shareholder at Fredrikson & Byron, in the firm’s Intapp case study. “We were spending an inordinate amount of administrative time making sure that our estimates were well-reasoned and reliable.”
Using this manual system, the pricing team was at a disadvantage. “I could only unburden the lawyers to a point,” said Steve Chambers, Pricing Manager at Fredrikson & Byron, in the case study. “I could gather the information they needed, but the process ultimately required significant review time by the folks who have a direct understanding of the work.”
To solve this problem, the firm implemented Intapp Pricing and Engagement DNA, and saw a dramatic improvement in the firm’s efficiency.
“Using Engagement DNA, I can continuously refresh and improve the quality of the data to make building estimates easier, faster, and more reliable,” said Chambers. “In fact, I’m able to confidently provide an estimate typically within a couple of hours — sometimes within 30 minutes, depending on my workload — and, at most, overnight.”
Read the full Fredrikson & Byron Case Study to learn more about the firm’s implementation of Intapp Pricing and Engagement DNA.
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