P2P

winter21

Peer to Peer: ILTA's Quarterly Magazine

Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/1439196

Contents of this Issue

Navigation

Page 72 of 106

73 I L T A N E T . O R G L ike many other working parents in the midst of a global pandemic, I was up late one night trying to find an art project to entertain my oldest daughter. After searching across a number of pages and finding nothing I thought would entertain my picky art aficionado, I switched to browsing Facebook before heading to bed. What popped up was a targeted ad for a company that offered a monthly subscription for arts and crafts projects. After being briefly incensed at how my search history could be so quickly and effectively used for targeted ads, I found myself buying the suggested product. It was a win-win for all, minus the privacy enthusiasts who collectively cringe at my acquiescence in my personal data being so widely collected and used. The truth is data collection is all around us. From the innocuous to the invasive, information is constantly being collected and disseminated in ways that can improve not only our experiences, but improve a company's ability to harness that information into more targeted approaches. Data collection is already happening at law firms, albeit in a much less invasive way. With all that data, it begs the question of what does one do with it? How do we make sense of the data we have? How do we see patterns in all those bits and pieces of information? Most importantly, how do we leverage that data to improve our internal processes, client relationships, and even overall job satisfaction? Experience Management tools enable law firms to collect a tremendous amount of information, and assist in all sorts of decision making processes from knowledge management, expert location, pricing and budgeting pitches and proposals, to even staffing. When you take a closer look at data in an experience management system, it's a treasure trove of information about your people. Sidley rolled out experience management to over 1000 attorneys in 2020, to not only capture details about our work and our clients, but also to help our practice leaders understand in real time the work we are doing for clients and who on their practice teams are doing the work. In the past this information was often informally shared via self-reporting during group meetings, or through the tedious process of filling out forms, or a variety of excel spreadsheets but with the deployment of Foundation, Sidley's Experience Management tool, we are able to consistently standardize data related to the work our lawyers complete across a variety of practice groups without relying on self-reporting. This standardization and adoption process allows practice leaders to begin to take a deeper look at their practice by matter industry, client industry, type of work and who on the team was doing the work. While having access to such detailed information about the matters we work on helped us move forward as a firm on a number of projects, it was difficult to always understand the data and identify patterns and insights into firm relationships. As an example, a practice leader wanted to have a sense of what type of work her group was doing, not only across all offices where attorneys in her group were staffed, but down to an office by office level. To accomplish this task, she previously spent months repeatedly requesting attorneys to select from a series of 21 potential classifications of work for each of the hundreds of matters that they were staffed on. This information was then collected and simple pie charts were made reflecting the self-reported classifications of matters. The process to build the charts was painful for all involved and took months to complete. Further, the pie charts could not be manipulated in any fashion as they were static. We all believed there had to be a better way to gather and present the information. First, since the group had been introduced to Foundation, we quickly realized that all the data we needed was in Foundation and that through custom reports based on combinations of client industries, matter

Articles in this issue

Archives of this issue

view archives of P2P - winter21