The Motivational Power of Business Intelligence


Blog post originally shared on iridium-technology.com. Iridium Technology is now part of BigHand. Learn more here.

How do we keep the wheels turning in our law practice? Good leaders find ways to keep their team motivated and focused on the task at hand. Business intelligence enables leaders to leverage law firm metrics to motivate their team members through collaboration and trackable progress.  Here’s how:

Creating Quantifiable Common Goals

Clear, common goals can bring a team together, as well as increase law firm profitability and productivity through unity. However, not all goals are the same. Typical law firm objectives (e.g., winning a case, pushing a deal through, etc.) have delayed outcomes that make progress difficult to track. Moreover, the contributions of individual law firm team members are nearly impossible to quantify. Goals that are set based on business intelligence metrics, such as the total amount of fees billed, the revenue a firm receives, and profitability metrics, are easily tracked and keep your team up-to-date on their progress until the ultimate goal is achieved.

Enabling Workload Sharing with Team Data

Nobody likes to feel alone, and this is especially true when facing a complicated legal issue. Knowing that the other attorneys in your firm have your back can reduce the pressure of the job, relieve stress, and allow for greater focus. Additionally, when teams work together, projects are completed faster and bonds are formed through shared experience and gratitude. With the proper business intelligence training and tools, a legal team can learn to track the amount of time each team member is spending on a matter and redistribute workloads on a rolling basis so that work is shared fairly and effectively, ultimately helping with law firm profitability.

Providing Real-Time Feedback Alongside Aderant and Elite

Providing your attorneys with real-time feedback is a great way to ensure the alignment of their goals and objectives with those of your law firm. Feedback also displaces any doubt your employees have about their work performance by making their strengths and weaknesses clear at any given time. Business intelligence platforms like those provided by Iridium Technology, now part of BigHand work seamlessly with Aderant and Elite software and other business and practice management tools to gather essential business intelligence data and present it to users in a meaningful way.

Focusing on Accomplishments, Placing Emphasis on Improvements, and Law Firm Profitability 

People respond much more favorably to recognition for their contributions to their company than they do to mere acknowledgments that they finished their assigned tasks.  Business intelligence data helps law firms identify and measure their staff’s accomplishments so they can reward good performance. Additionally, business intelligence data helps to identify ways to make incremental progress, such as by logging hours in a more timely manner to reduce lost revenue, and enable leaders to provide constructive feedback to facilitate continuous improvement.

Keep the wheels turning by keeping your team motivated. When you partner with Iridium Technology, now part of BigHand, we provide the tools you need to motivate team members, maintain productivity and accomplish your goals. Contact us to experience the motivational power of business intelligence for yourself.

About BigHand Business Intelligence

BigHand’s Legal Business Intelligence is the most advanced BI solution for law firms. It’s flexible, autonomous and source agnostic data warehouse solution, replaces manual law firm finance reporting with a real-time digital overview of your financial data.

Specifically tailored for lawyers, finance and management teams, it strips the complexity away from the mountains of information you generate. The self-service tool gives users controlled access to the appropriate legal finance data which can be quickly and easily shown through any visualisation tool of choice, including PowerBI.

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