How a Global Law Firm Used Business Intelligence to Fix Customer Billing Woes
For global law firm Bryan Cave, business intelligence tools have been the key to maximizing profit while providing new revenue opportunities.
CIO — In 2002, global law firm Bryan Cave faced the million-dollar question: How do you make the most money with your resources while simultaneously delivering the highest customer value?
But making money off these new billing strategies required the complicated balance of staffing and pricing. Projects weighted too heavily with a law partner's time would be expensive (for the law firm) and not optimized for profit. Devoting too little of a partner's time would leave clients feeling undervalued. Optimizing profit and perceived value had to be achieved by spreading partners' time throughout a number of cases and balancing the remaining resources needed for a case with the less-expensive fees of associates and paralegals.
"Clients are most likely to stay with you if you deliver just the right mix," says Bryan Cave CIO John Alber.
Using a BI Tool Instead of Spreadsheets to Calculate Client Bills
The law firm's traditional method of analyzing collected fees and profit used a spreadsheet that was complicated and took too long. Spreadsheets provide a level of detail that can be valuable for analysts, says Alber. But the information in a spreadsheet can be confusing and difficult to work with. Alber says he decided it was better to build an easy-to-understand interface using BI tools, he says. Although the company will not release specific figures, Alber says since the company implemented its first BI tool in 2004, both profitability and hours leveraged (meaning the hours worked by equity partners and all other fee earners at the firm) have increased substantially.
Bryan Cave partners use business intelligence tools from Redwood Analytics as well as tools constructed in-house using Microsoft's OLAP tools (SQL Server, Analysis Services, Reporting Services) to forecast what effect various pricing and staffing decisions will have on a project.
The tools also allow lawyers to track budgets in real time so they can quickly make adjustments. The BI tools even provide a diversity dashboard, which tracks the hourly mix of women and minorities working on the firm's cases, a feature the company will license to Redwood Analytics for sale to other law firms, Alber says. The firm developed this diversity tool to bring transparency to the diversity reporting process required by many clients, says Alber.
