Top 100 law firm Ward Hadaway is a major player in the north of England with over 90 partners across three offices in Newcastle, Leeds and Manchester. As part of a strategic review of the firm’s technology stack, BigHand Business Intelligence was chosen to replace the previous B.I. tool and provide a comprehensive view of financial data across all levels of the business, to drive efficiencies and profit margins.
Jonathan Smith, Director of IT explains, “We chose to swap our previous tool for BigHand Business Intelligence after we saw how quick and easy it would be to implement, without affecting the quality of information surfaced in its dashboards.”
He continues, “A key part of my role is to look at how we are using technology as a vehicle to optimise the overall performance of the firm. To do that successfully, it’s important that our fee earners and department heads have access to the relevant financial information they need to spot where improvements can be made, and then optimise their working practices to achieve them.”
“We were really impressed with how versatile BigHand Business Intelligence is, and how simple it is to gain access to detailed financial information, tailored to the specific role-based needs of each user.”
BigHand Business Intelligence is a source agnostic business intelligence solution, that is split into five different modules which group key information types. Ward Hadaway has purchased the Revenue and Profitability modules to provide transparency into areas such as time entry, work in progress, debtors and individual client and matter profitability. This information can then be used to make more informed business decisions that drive business change, using analytics.
The solution will also create considerable time savings for the Finance and IT teams, who previously had to manually create all financial reports for the firm. With BigHand Business Intelligence in place, the finance teams, lawyers, department heads and senior management will all have access to tailored dashboards of information in real-time.
Jonathan adds, “The team at BigHand have a wealth of industry knowledge having worked in finance for multiple leading law firms themselves. They understood our pain points and were able to answer all our specific questions there and then.”
Martin Hulls, Managing Partner at the firm concludes, “At Ward Hadaway we take pride in our approach to technology as an enabler for business change. BigHand Business Intelligence will provide visibility of key financial data at every level of the firm to underpin both day-to-day operations and strategic planning for the future, to ensure we maintain our first-class client service delivery.”
