The quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/1097368
12 T he usual growth metrics of revenue and headcount don't adequately convey the intensity by which our data needs have evolved. Our growth in headcount has come from teams of lateral lawyers who bring decades of new experience to our door. We have legal ops leaders and quantitative PhDs embedded in our practices. Our executive committee and practice leaders expect real time insights. Our clients are assessing us with more measures than law firms historically share internally. In short, we're a modern business run on data and metrics – probably no different than your business. We've been planning for this for years, so here's our story. Collective Intelligence Look outside the legal market. Waze, Amazon, Quora, Reddit, Yelp, Wikipedia. Common among these thriving businesses is their ability to leverage crowdsourced knowledge to create value. That crowdsourced knowledge provides real-time intelligence that grows and adapts based on the activities of those involved. We recognized that we, too, had to expand our capabilities beyond searching previously documented information and shift our focus to providing access to real-time, fluid, and even tacit experience and relationship information that grows along with the firm. We call this "collective intelligence" and we Search is Dead. Long Live Insights. B Y D AV I D C U N N I N G H A M A N D G W E N W AT S O N changed Gwen's title to reflect our mission: to evolve from sharing what happened previously to what's happening now and what's likely to happen next. To sustain this focus while the firm and our clients evolve around us has required investments in process, data, search, user experience, and a firmwide effort to jump forward. Legal ERP as a Foundation for Data Over the years, we've taken a "legal ERP" approach to automating our key business processes, focusing on end-to-end workflows in financial, project, risk, content, and talent management, as well as client service and Our journey to making collective intelligence a competitive edge.