Advancing reporting to meet client and firm expectations – find out more with LexisNexis
Today in the legal sector, delivering exceptional client service is non-negotiable. Clients now demand transparency, accountability, and value from their law firm partners. This shift has put immense pressure on organisations to up their game when it comes to reporting and analytics.
Gone are the days when a basic invoice would suffice. Clients now expect comprehensive reporting that provides deep insights into the work being done on their behalf. Take the example of a debt collection firm. Its clients may send across thousands of debt cases per week, ranging from small unpaid credit card balances to massive six-figure claims. These clients need visibility into metrics like case volumes, turnaround times, success rates, and recoveries across their entire portfolio. They need this level of reporting to keep their finger on the pulse of their business, whilst also assessing the firm’s effectiveness.
Unfortunately, many law firms today continue with traditional methods of reporting. Their processes are manual – data has to be painstakingly extracted from systems, massaged in spreadsheets, and compiled into static reports. Lawyers or case handlers can spend hours just pulling together basic client reports. Already time-poor, it’s an enormous drain on lawyers’ time and opens the door to errors.
Beyond inefficiency, these outdated reporting processes prevent the firms from leveraging their data. They cannot analyse profitability drivers, identify optimisation opportunities, nurture client relationships through transparency, or differentiate their services.
The thing is, advanced reporting and business intelligence capabilities already exist and are easily deployable – right now! Organisations can easily leverage them by adding robust reporting modules to their case management systems, or by implementing dedicated reporting tools. Either way, the solution of choice in any organisation, needs to consolidate all relevant data into a single source of truth to automate report generation for near real-time insights.
Unlock the benefits of advanced reporting capabilities
The benefits of elevated reporting capabilities are immense, for both law firms and their clients:
Transparency – Providing clients with reporting tailored to their needs, such as matter status, budgets, fees, and more, displays openness on the part of the law firm. It not only strengthens relationships, but helps firms to be compliant with the SRA pricing transparency rules.
Internal reporting – Visibility into critical business metrics and insights like profitability by practice area/project, billable hour utilisation, new matter pipelines, and more, can help drive strategy, business optimisation, and decision-making for both parties.
For example, organisations that undertake fixed fee work, such as debt houses, are in the volume business and typically tend not to record time spent on individual cases, regardless of how long the individual cases take. Reporting can pinpoint which part of the business is profitable, and where, time can be saved and redistributed. Likewise, similar information can inform the client organisations too. Reporting can also help firms to identify where work is originating from and how it is being lost, enabling them to identify markets and target these more efficiently.
Bird’s eye view, in real-time – Clients and law firms can have a real-time view of how transactions are progressing, where the bottlenecks lie, and where corrective action needs to be taken, at the time and for future scenarios. For instance, identifying why a costly senior partner is doing excessive administrative work when support staff should be leveraged can help redistribute that activity to free up the lawyer to focus on other high-value tasks, thereby facilitating real-time workload and resource management – a win for both the client and the law firm. It also provides an oversight for management to be able to know how many files are due to be billed within a timeframe and enables them to plan budgets accordingly.
Data visualisation – Moving beyond static rows and columns, with advanced reporting capabilities, client organisations and law firms can use data visualisation to surface trends and improve decision-making. Easy-to-digest charts and graphs often help to enhance stakeholder alignment, both internal and external.
Automation and accuracy – Reports can be systematically generated from an integrated data source, reducing errors and saving time – doing away with manually pulling data across systems and out-of-date data by producing a near real-time result.
Continuous improvement – A consolidated, single source of truth brings alignment. Interactive dashboards with drillable data empower stakeholders to make informed decisions. Operational improvement and enhancement then becomes routine.
Management information is a by-product
Most organisations today are data-driven enterprises, whether they realise it or not. The organisations investing in harnessing that data through advanced reporting will likely outpace competitors in areas such as client satisfaction, profitability, business development, and talent management. Those still treading water with outdated manual processes will quickly be disrupted.
It’s time to prioritise robust, client-driven reporting. Implementing the right solutions to turn data into actionable, differentiating, revenue-driving insights, for the firm and its clients, is an astute approach helping to drive efficiency and profitability.
