Millennials enroll in law school dreaming about negotiating great deals for clients or winning cases in the courtroom. They’re not daydreaming about boring financial statements and being prodded to account for every minute of time spent on work. More than ever, this class expects their firms to have all the cutting-edge technology to make their jobs easier.
Finances are not on law school curricula, and young associates aren’t taught about the business implications and outcomes early in their firm life. These priorities belong to financial professionals and are generally managed and controlled by the finance department. Associates are told to track their work and input their time. These are the mundane and tedious tasks that no one wants to do.
Nevertheless, it is crucial to keep track of the number to ensure business success. Lawyers must get familiar with the financial drivers of their law firm’s success. Without a good understanding of the business effects of their work, they put the business under unnecessary risk.
Innovation is critical in law firms, and finance departments need to deliver practical insights to the new generation of lawyers in a meaningful way; otherwise, they won’t drive the behavioral changes they seek to accomplish. That’s where business intelligence solutions can help. By providing lawyers with clear and actionable data at their fingertips, countless hours of reading reports, processing the information in their head, and coming up with ideas of what to do with such data go away.
To increase the likelihood of reaching such an objective, we have added gamification features to our business intelligence solutions. Adding a gamifying element to the picture makes things more interesting for the user. If you were wondering why, the short answer is because that’s how the human brain is wired. The long answer is that gamification creates a particular narrative around the work, and the brain processes stories way better than facts. Moreover, the brain reacts positively to games, and winning makes you feel good. As a result, the gamification of your law firm’s business intelligence will make you, your partners and associates process the data better and feel good about it. Conversely, showing up on the bottom of the leaderboard drives a different motivation, especially in the highly competitive legal environment.
That’s what Iridium, now part of BigHand peer comparisons and ranking reports serve. Adding them to the Iridium role-based dashboard increases the likelihood of acceptance among lawyers. The rankings make attorneys aware of what they have done compared to their colleagues. These visualizations make them aware of their financial impact. That’s where the magic happens. The lawyers who hated reading “boring” data because that’s not the work they prefer now try to understand their performance better. Once they do so, they are set on the track of improving revenue realization.
This is how Iridium, now part of BigHand challenges your existing business intelligence solution. This is how business intelligence for law firms should look.
