Progress is attainable, but the right ingredients need to be present. To start, progress requires a vision. After all, how can one measure progress without knowing what progress looks like? Know where you want to go and what you would like to accomplish – articulate your goals, quantify them, and chart your course. Then, once your vision of progress is clear, you’ll need a system that allows you to monitor key performance indicators so that you can track improvements over time, adapt as necessary, and keep heading in the right direction. Law firms looking to improve their performance can leverage business intelligence and analytics to establish clear goals and monitor their performance over time.
Goal Setting with Business Intelligence and Analytics
The most attainable goals should be clearly defined and measurable. Business intelligence and legal analytics provide law firms with a wide array of general business metrics such as client profitability, and more specific law firm metrics such as total billable hours, that can be used as measuring sticks for progress. For example, a law firm can use BI data to identify the ideal ratio of non-billable hours to billable hours, and then set a goal to maintain that ratio. They can also set specific revenue goals, goals pertaining to expenses, or goals based on any other performance indicator. The information made available through business intelligence also enables firms to set firm-wide goals or goals that are specific to departments, teams, or individual attorneys.
Using Legal Analytics to Track Progress
Feedback is key when working towards any goal. Positive feedback that indicates a step in the right direction fuels motivation and sustains momentum, and negative feedback that shows a step backward helps to identify and overcome otherwise unknown performance issues. Either way, most actionable feedback is instant, accessible, and easy to understand. The Iridium Technology, now part of BigHand business intelligence dashboard seamlessly imports data from commonly-used law firm management software and presents performance metrics to users so that their impact on firm performance is clear at all times. Users can visualize their performance and quickly identify areas of progress or concern.
Success through Clarity: Your BI Solution
Iridium Technology, now part of BigHand’s BI solution creates an opportunity for law firms to define clear goals, monitor current performance and help to identify areas needing improvement. The Iridium Technology, now part of BigHand dashboard then communicates with stakeholders so that they can visualize improvements over time and track their performance against their goals.
