The reputation of business intelligence for delivering both deeper and more actionable data is driving DW Reporting, now part of the BigHand group, who is a specialist in the field, to diversify and expand operations.

A law firm’s people are essentially incentivised to perform for their firm through changes in numbers. There are the numbers that are ideally nudging skyward at the bottom of their pay slips, of course. But sadly managing performance isn’t quite that simple. Even the best lawyers won’t just perform at a constant hum. Moreover, the work is never really done.

Like many other professionals, lawyers, and those managing or supporting them, need to prioritise the tasks that really do need to be done today – the contract to be completed, bill to be sent, or client needing a catch up – without delay. They need to know the numbers they most need to know this week, they need to know when those numbers change by a critical amount, and they may well need to know what to do about it this minute before it’s too late.

That’s not an easy dynamic for any business to manage. Not only will the priorities not be the same for every firm – each linked to a different strategy. The goals themselves will change with external factors – and today’s specific numbers are, of course, changing all the time as the world unfolds. Global firms, moreover, are increasingly finding ever more sophisticated ways to divvy work up across convenient time zones to keep things going around the clock.