The traditional conception of a law firm IT department may find itself evolving as firms look to engage in data driven analytics to help drive new efficiencies in billing and more informed decision making in general. The "Reimagining IT as a Business Intelligence Asset" session of Legalweek 2020 in New York spent Wednesday afternoon looking at some of the challenges IT personnel may face as they attempt to help their firms get up to speed.

It turns out that the first obstacle may be inexperience. "Law firms are so new at this data space. We haven't used data a ton for anything really," said Vedika Mehera, innovation adviser at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe.

Using data-based intelligence, firms can more easily track which practice areas may be underperforming or how the value of one big client stacks up against the worth of several smaller ones.

Given the obvious technical acumen involved, it's probably no surprise that a firm's IT department is often leading the charge on these projects. Still, convincing firm leadership or reluctant attorneys to take the plunge on data analytics can be an early stumbling block since some may not possess enough data literacy to look at a sheet of analytics and be able to locate the dollar signs hidden among the figures.

So how can IT personnel overcome that obstacle? Kermit Wallace, chief information officer at Day Pitney, suggested implementing the buddy system with other departments inside the firm.

"I'm a big believer in getting someone to be a champion along with you," he said.

The finance department can be a good place to start. After all, intelligent decision-making is only as good as the information behind it and incomplete or otherwise unreliable data sets can be one of the primary stumbling blocks that IT departments face straight out of the gate. A law firm's finance data tends to be in pretty good shape by necessity—people like to get paid.

Beyond that, Mehera suggested that firms initially focus their efforts on data that is high-value but takes minimum effort to process and collect. Some examples might be data related to training or how long a given class of matter takes to resolve.

However, success brings its own problems. David Jata, chief technology officer at Jackson Lewis, indicated that if firm leadership starts to see tangible results spring from analytics programs, their expectations could begin to outpace what is yet possible.

"Sometimes it's dragging yourself on the floor, then crawling, then walking, then running," Jata said.