Facts are the raw material of any legal practice and Minter Ellison Rudd Watts has just laid its hands on a whole pile of new ones with which to enhance its performance.

The firm, which has 275 legal and support staff in offices in Auckland and Wellington, has implemented iQ4bis’ business intelligence software, giving it speedier and more detailed practice information than it has ever had before.

It’s not that the information wasn’t being collected, says finance director Lynden Glass, but that it was difficult for the firm’s finance staff and 40 partners to lay their hands on it.

And, without ready access to information, opportunities to fine-tune the practice were eluding them.

“While we have a good robust practice management system that contains valuable data, we’ve struggled to get access to that data,” says Glass.

It was a struggle the firm put up with for more than a decade. But with the maturing of business intelligence, or BI, software, Glass realised MERW no longer had to.

“We’d been using different products to tap into our system to get relevant information out,” Glass says.

“But, because we were using various means to access it, there were a number of inefficiencies.”

Specifically, using reporting and query tools in combination with a spreadsheet, finance staff were able to deliver regular performance data. But the reports were two-dimensional only, were monthly and took one to two days to prepare.

“Finance people were spending a lot of time massaging numbers, which was inefficient and open to errors. We also lacked the ability to slice and dice information to view it in multiple ways.”

Timeliness — or lack of it — was another issue, as was distribution of the information to the people who needed it.

“For a relatively fixed-cost operation such as a law firm, it is critical to have access to timely information around your key performance indicators. As a firm this has been a challenge for us prior to iQ4bis,” says Glass.

For example, it was difficult to see the effect on the business of differing work levels across different dimensions in the business (e.g. industry sectors, clients, divisions, teams, or even across the different solicitor levels). Like wise there have been challenges in providing clarity around lockup (the firm's unbilled time and debt).

Being able to present relevant information to the partners and fee-earners in a simple, flexible way would help them decide, day-to-day, which clients and industry sectors to focus on; measure work levels in various parts of the firm, and keep tabs on bad debt.

Results within a week
“Our primary aim was to provide relevant timely information to the fingertips of our people, while at the same time significantly reducing the need for us to manually produce reports.

In the months since implementing iQ4bis, it has succeeded spectacularly in its goal.

iQ4bis’ approach to sales is to offer a demonstration of the analytics suite using a prospective customer’s live data.

Glass admits when the iQ4bis team, led by Asia-Pacific general manager Asj Smith, promised results within a week, he was sceptical.

“I laughed when they said they could, but they did, and every step along the way iQ4bis’ team have been superb.

They delivered what they said they’d deliver.”

For Minter Ellison Rudd Watts, this meant compiling key performance measures into a “cube,” or three-dimensional array, which can be displayed in different dashboard views depending on the viewer’s particular area of concern.

Assembling the cube took about a fortnight of technical effort, while dashboards, which might highlight a number of key indicators, can be designed in as little as five minutes.

“The biggie here is transparency,” Glass says. “Our key stakeholders now have the ability to access relevant information that is fresh — that’s what it comes down to.

“They’re also able to slice and dice information in a completely new way, and that’s quite staggering for me.

Once you start to tap into three-dimensional reporting, it’s quite amazing — the mind boggles at the flexibility it offers, at the new ways you can begin to understand your business.”

Shining the BI spotlight
The firm has initially chosen to direct the BI spotlight on a handful of areas: to illuminate the range of services particular clients are using, internal performance and improving credit management processes.

Glass estimates that savings from more efficient time tracking and better debtor management will on their own cover the cost of iQ4bis within six months. On top of this, there is the enormous amount of time the system saves in preparing various internal and client focussed reports, as well as other intangible benefits.

“What would have taken three to four hours to produce we can now produce in five to ten minutes.

You really realise the power of the product when you get that sort of turnaround.”

And it promises the potential for the firm to make other cost-savings and enhance value for its clients as more of its inner workings are revealed.

“We’re increasingly spending our time analysing variances, understanding those variances and advising the business as to what’s going on, and possible areas we need to change.”

For partners, who are the firm’s main iQ4bis user group, the most valued dashboard is daily performance, which is refreshed with new data overnight for them to digest in the morning.

Glass says the partners are lapping up all the information that’s now at their fingertips, and that’s endorsed by managing partner Mark Weenink.

“The increase in transparency and the efficiencies recognised have been substantial,” Weenink says.

“We've discovered new things about our business and it has assisted us in achieving one of our primary objectives: that of operating at the highest level for our clients.”

Asj Smith            
General Manager- APAC
iQ4bis Management Software Limited
+64 9 366 2635
Visit our website www.iQ4bis.com  

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