Digital White Papers

I L T A W H I T E P A P E R | I N F O R M A T I O N G O V E R N E N C E 23 Benefits In brief, governing your data well results in clean data, which can be analyzed, reported upon, and modeled after to better understand your business and capitalize off this understanding. Today it means you can answer an RFP or security audit with confidence and professionalism. Tomorrow it means you can predict how your business, your employees, and your clients will behave, and act accordingly to meet and exceed your expectations of success. The GDPR preparedness exercise a law firm went through identified a glut of vendors being used by individual attorneys, paralegals, and litigation support staff, undoubtedly resulting in the firm and their clients paying too much for services by not leveraging the potential work individual vendors could inherit. Once this manifested itself, the firm was able to establish a more select group of vendors at better rates. Clients are increasingly requiring firms to complete cyber security risk audits. There is no one standard audit to complete nor certification to attain to satisfy the requirements of these audits. And more recently, detailed cyber security questions have found their way into RFPs. Least privilege access and data access-auditing are core requirements of these audits and questionnaires. Good data governance makes these requirements easy to meet. And for RFPs, it can be a selling point and differentiator from your competition. Case Studies Acme* law firm's leadership wanted to improve their partner's cross selling efforts to acquire more work from existing clients. While partners are often reticent to jeopardize their client relationship by introducing colleagues they may not know well into the relationship, knowing who knows who helps begin the dialog. A firm leader who understood this principle saw CRM as an essential source of useful and actionable data. She succeeded where others failed by insisting, via process, that all client entertainment expenses be recorded in the CRM system for reimbursement. This forced the attorneys' hands and provided firm leadership with insight into their client relationships and opportunities for building upon them. Acme law firm's Marketing and Finance departments struggled with responding to RFP's asking for relevant experience, cost estimates and alternative fee arrangements. Not only was there not a single source for this information, but the integrity of the sources was suspect. Clients and matters were onboarded in the quickest rather than most accurate and comprehensive manner. Initial matters descriptions were never updated to reflect the actual nature of the matter, and fee agreements were made via email never to be seen by Finance. A Senior Partner was tasked with addressing this problem as part of the firm's overall strategic plan and developed a set of recommendations for establishing and maintaining a clean instance of matter data specific to the single practice group with the most interest and incentive to change, the group responding to the most RFPs. This involved pulling data together from disparate systems, as well as creating new data sets addressing their needs, and a curation processes to ensure that data accuracy is maintained over time. Note, curation in this context requires people and agreed upon processes that enable these people to take the time out of an attorney's day to ensure their matter is being documented properly. In the future, as the process is institutionalized, matter curation can be achieved through automated prompts rather than people showing up at the attorney's door. This new instance of the enriched data and improved processes became the model for how the firm redesigned their new matter intake and management practices. [*] The name of the law firm has been withheld to protect the Identity, IP and practices of our client. Data Governance for Artificial Intelligence A recent survey of risk managers, senior finance, IT, and management executives by analytics provider SAS and the Global Association of Risk Professionals (GARP) identified Data Quality as the top challenge to utilizing Artificial Intelligence. Fortunately for DLA Piper, they had confidence in their data governance practices using artificial intelligence to answer leadership's question of how to better retain clients. The firm analyzed various sets of D A T A G O V E R N A N C E F O R L A W F I R M G R O W T H A N D C L I E N T S U C C E S S

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