Briefing article: Harnessing Tech to Power Your Strategy

Elisabet HardyChief product officer, Elite

Law firms today face no shortage of challenges, with competition increasing and clients getting ever more demanding in terms of both services and fees. Firms are under pressure to develop innovative strategies to combat these forces, but thankfully technology can — and arguably must — play an important role in a couple of areas when it comes to developing and implementing strategy.

Firstly, let’s first look at the productivity challenge, meaning where law firms want to shrink the size of their support staff while at the same time getting better utilisation from their lawyers.

In this case, technology can vastly improve workflows and automation, today often done through artificial intelligence (AI). Using tools such as Microsoft Copilot to save time on a document, an email response, or even transcribing notes from a call with a client can significantly improve productivity of the law firm.

Another example is in automating some of the mundane tasks that lawyers need to spend time on a daily basis, such as time entry. There are AI tools available than can help fill out the timecard entries and draft GPT-generated narratives, which can save time and boost utilisation.

Firms are under pressure to develop innovative strategies, but thankfully technology can — and arguably must — play an important role in confronting several key challenges.

Next, it’s no secret that well-informed decisions are based on data. However, the challenge is that law firms are often swimming in data and have a hard time knowing how to harness that data to actually make good decisions. Data is coming from multiple sources such as the financial management system, HR platforms, social media inputs, matter-related data and more.

Most firms have the basics they need to make key financial decisions around issues related to utilisation, WIP and revenue, for example, but many firms do not have the data warehouse or ‘data lake’ solutions in place to help make sense of the broader scope of multiple sources of data.

The more sophisticated firms are working on tackling this ‘big data problem’ as part of their strategy, as they see a big opportunity to improve their insight into the marketplace as well as help the firm make projections about where to invest in terms of practice area, location and other parameters.

Big data solutions can give firms real insight into trends and help them “see around corners” as they try to gain a competitive edge. With demand growing for technology experts in structuring and mining big data solutions, the race is on to shore up firms’ expertise in this area — making it a real strategic imperative.

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