Digital White Papers

62 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER LITIGATION AND PRACTICE SUPPORT Beyond Excel: Overcoming Obstacles to Get the Business Intelligence You Need LEXI – Business Intelligence for Legal Several years ago, we saw law firms adopting legal project managers to assemble this source data across platforms. But effective legal project management should not rely on manual data manipulation; it should be automated, real-time and available for key decision making at a moment's notice. To address the platform problem, Oasis developed LEXI, a soware application that gives legal teams the tools they need to manage their business operations using data-driven analytics and key performance indicators. In other words, business intelligence for legal. Whereas the private cloud solution from Oasis effectively brings data under control, solving the reach problem, LEXI solves the platform problem by normalizing data across the various applications, aggregating various sources into a single, unified series of customizable dashboards. The LEXI dashboards are powered by Tableau, the BI market leader. Tableau's intuitive, flexible and powerful toolkit gives Oasis clients the ability to visualize information like revenue projections, cost forecasting, team productivity and hardware utilization. Clients choose from a standard dashboard or select from a menu of widgets to build their own custom visualizations. (If you do not know about Tableau, you may want to check them out. Tableau's user experience, flexibility and innovative designs are seing the bar for what BI can be.) In addition to the dashboards, LEXI provides solutions for ticketing, workflow management, communication, invoicing, reporting, and administering complex eDiscovery technology. It is designed specifically for legal professionals, giving them the tools they need to organize tasks and stay in the loop with timely, accurate information. Conclusion The legal industry has been slow to adopt business intelligence and analytics tools, not for lack of interest but because of the distributed nature of how work is completed. The industry is comprised of a tightly integrated web of law firms, soware companies, and service providers that work together to help corporate legal teams solve complicated problems, first among them electronic discovery. Because of these technical challenges, data can easily end up dispersed across multiple organizations, effectively rendering business intelligence platforms powerless. Since there is no single soware application that provides an end-to-end solution for eDiscovery, information must be extracted from multiple applications, adding even more roadblocks to the realization of true business intelligence. The good news is that we are on the path toward data-driven decisions. As vendors consolidate and both firms and corporate buyers embrace single-source managed service providers, business intelligence in legal is closer than ever before. ILTA PHILIP WELDON Philip Weldon, CEDS, is a legal technologist working in New York City. His primary focus is on cost control in litigation through the use of automation and smarter review methodologies. He is an active member of the ILTA Content Coordinating Committee, an organizer for the NYC LegalHackers and a volunteer member with the FBI's InfraGard Team.

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