Gurveer Virdi, Partner and Finance Director at Leigh Day discusses how BigHand Business Intelligence has supported their firm with actionable data to improve long-term profitability. 

We’re using the BI dashboards which also include the budgeting and forecasting tool. We now have dashboards for fee earners, partners, lawyers and business services. Now we have access to live information. If you compare that to management accounts, which are a month out of date, it’s transformational.

How does BigHand BI build commercial understandability and accountability?

At Leigh Day, we treat each partner as their own business unit. We empower them to say “That is your business, your team, you’ve got your own P&L.” It would be unfair to expect them to then be accountable without giving them transparency of information. They need important information when they need it. Otherwise, how are they going to operate their business? Because we’re a law firm, primarily we sell our time. Partners need to know what their time recording is, what their costs are, what their billing is, collections, age debt and what they need to bring in and chase. This is data that the BigHand dashboards can provide.  

In this period of growth that we’re going through, we’ve got some really good partners coming in, including lateral hires from bigger corporate firms who are used to having this data from BigHand or equivalent dashboards. They’re driving us and encouraging us to provide not just profitability information but figures on realisation, utilisation, pricing and profit per matter. Before the dashboards or having a finance team that could provide this depth of information, we didn’t have access to these insights.