Law firm leaders discuss the benefits of data visibility from BigHand's Business Intelligence dashboards and how they are using that data to improve their firms' financial health. 

Neil Demuth, Head of Commercial Finance at Burges Salmon: 

Finance economics of the way that a business is performing is critical, understanding the dynamics of how profitable each of your practice areas is. That could be to ensure that you're adopting the correct strategy. Just because the practice area may not be performing in the way that you like. Having visibility of the financial data will then help steer a plan as to how you can incrementally grow that and hopefully improve the financial data that's coming through from the department. 

Ensuring that you get really good financial data and having a team of people that can take the partners with you and what the information is telling them is going to be key as we successfully navigate through the next few years.  

Steve Rowan, Chief Financial Officer at RPC: 

We're using BigHand business intelligence, and we've rolled it out to the whole firm, about three years ago. We wanted to have real time information for our partners, increasing accountability and responsibility. We've worked with our own sort of finance reporting team, and then partners to say, these are the KPIs we want to be able to track. 

It's real time and we want you to take responsibility for it and act on the data that's been given to you - you're owners of the business. So that's what we've done, we've pushed it out and we're seeing much greater involvement or in terms of decisions on the financing of the practice. Also, to basically take away some of the excuses that previously existed about the data is out of date, or it's wrong. 

It's developing a further partnership with our clients so that it isn't so transactional. We know our clients need to make money. We want to make money too. So, it's about working together to get the efficiencies our clients want at the right price.  

How is technology helping? Well, it's giving us that information from which we can have a conversation that through the BigHand BI that we're using, we're able to sort of link in with other collaboration platforms to enable our clients to see what's going on. Which obviously aids trust and can help with conversations.  

Michael Greig, Senior Application Support Analyst at Charles, Russell, Speechlys: 

For our finance teams, data is really important to figure out how we can make our business better and how we can utilize all of our data more than we currently do. So, using both of those products, it helps us to do matter pricing, and evaluate where we are on certain cases.  

Gurveer Virdi, Partner and Finance Director at Leigh Day: 

We've now got dashboards for fee-earners. We've got dashboards for partners. We've got dashboards for lawyers. We've got dashboards for business services. So, we've got access of live information, and if you compare that to management accounts, which are a month out of date, it's transformational. 

Because we're a law firm, primarily we sell our time. They need to know what their time recording is. They need to know what their costs are. They need to know what their billing is and their income and their collections. They need to know what their aged debt is to know what they need to bring in and chase and this is all stuff that the BigHand BI dashboard can bring.