(Photo: Peshkova/Shutterstock.com) (Photo: Peshkova/Shutterstock.com)
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Leveraging legal data to its fullest potential within law firms requires having a forward-thinking data strategy that incorporates the right levels of human capital, technical investment, and, obviously, data. While law firms have been gradually moving toward a more data-driven approach to practicing law over the past decade, COVID-19 has abruptly brought into focus the growing necessity for them to have a data strategy in place to remain responsive to their clients' needs. With the right infrastructure in place, law firms can conduct the data analysis needed to power their business development efforts and stay competitive in the legal marketplace.

In this article, we'll discuss how law firms can develop a data strategy for building out the human and technical infrastructure needed for meaningful data analysis, as well as important considerations for accessing the data needed to make their practices more efficient and profitable.

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Investing in Human Capital

To develop a thorough data strategy capable of accounting for a firm's diverse range of data needs from business development, to legal research, and matter management, firms need to make investments in the human capital required to fully realize their strategy. Three of the key functions/roles firms should continue to grow and develop in their data strategy are information technology, knowledge management, and innovation management.

Having a team of IT experts that can break down information silos and make integrations with new applications and data sources run smoothly provides tangible benefits to law firms through increased productivity and capitalizing on potential business opportunities. This is especially true for large firms with hundreds or thousands of lawyers, and countless internal applications and outside data sources to corral and harmonize. From what we've seen, some of the most successful firms go beyond just hiring traditional IT roles, and are investing in engineers and database architects to design their own databases to handle unique needs and more efficiently onboard new data streams.

In addition to having in-house tech know-how, law firms also need knowledge management experts to leverage their collective intelligence and to gather and retain information from their most important assets – their ingenious legal professionals. While it's important to have leaders like chief knowledge officers embedded within the law firm structure to help change culture toward better data management, it's also critically important to have KM attorneys and analysts on the ground level working to make sense of the firm's data and drive process efficiencies for particular practice groups and niche legal services needs.

To round out human capital investments for a successful data strategy, law firms also need to invest in innovation management professionals. Even in the best of times, executing firm-wide data management projects and process improvements is hard. It requires coordination between multiple teams, prolonged momentum, and real commitment to change. Innovation leaders within law firms help make sure that legal innovation is more than just a catchphrase for marketing. They are the people with a vision for the future, who follow through on seeing that a firm's data strategy initiatives reach the finish line.

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Leveraging Technology and Access to Legal Data

More than just buying a bunch of legal tech to address needs and fill gaps, firms need to direct their energy and resources to making their disparate technology systems speak with one another. When looking at onboarding new tech solutions to better manage a firm's data like a CRM or matter management tool, firms should consider whether data integrations are both possible and easy to develop from those platforms, so they can avoid adding another application in their arsenal that's sitting in an information silo.

A great example of how sophisticated firms are leveraging technology to handle the issue of siloed systems, is the creation of data lakes. For those not familiar with what a data lake is, it's exactly what it sounds like – a pool of information from both internal and external sources gathered in a combined location and given a standard structure and formatting. By collating firm data together in a common, structured pool, firms are able to produce more holistic reporting for business development and competitive intelligence insights with data from across a wide spectrum of applications and sources.

To make their data lakes even more effective and reliable, firms are also using APIs or application programming interfaces to pull in outside sources of information, such as court data directly in their data lakes. We've seen that the main reason firms turn to APIs is that they need the data they're gathering from outside sources to be organized and standardized, so that it's easier to integrate with their overall pool of information. Further, APIs are becoming the go to option for firms aggregating outside sources of data, as they can be used to automate the recurring flow of data and remove the need for manually grabbing and uploading important data sets, which is often resource intensive and prone to human error.

When it comes to accessing outside legal data from legal tech companies and other providers, such as statutes and regulations or court records and other public records, firms need to ensure the data they are ingesting into their data lakes and applications has already been properly cleaned and scrubbed. Legal data is notoriously messy, unstandardized, and often fraught with spelling errors and name inconsistencies that make it unreliable and ruin reporting. This is why it's imperative for firms to ensure that the data they're receiving from providers has gone through a process of "normalization," which, in short, involves refining data sets by clustering similarly named entities like attorneys, firms, and judges, and drawing connections between those entities by linking them together. By vetting providers on the front end to confirm the quality of their data, it will also save firms the considerable costs of hiring a team of data scientists just to make sense of that data once it's in their systems.

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Culture and Change Management: The Culminating Factors

Beyond investing in human capital, technology solutions, and access to legal data, forward-thinking firms are ultimately tasked with creating a culture that empowers their innovations. Hiring the right people and building a data pipeline is foundational for creating a well-thought-out data strategy, but these efforts are meaningless without a healthy culture to back them.

Law firms seeking to thrive amid an economic downturn will be challenged to put the right people in positions of power to influence their marketing and business development strategies so that in the end, their infrastructure is more than just a show for clients: it is the driving force behind meaningful change in the legal industry.

Jeff Cox is the Director of Content & Data Acquisition for UniCourt, a SaaS offering using machine learning to disrupt the way court records are organized, accessed, and used. UniCourt provides Legal Data as a Service (LDaaS) via our APIs to AmLaw 50 firms and Fortune 500 businesses for accessing normalized court data for business development and intelligence, analytics, machine learning models, process automation, background checks, investigations, and underwriting.