Gabrielle Orum Hernandez, Legaltech News
As law firms start to see the
benefits of integrating analytics into business practices, McMillan and IBM
look to collaborate on ways to expand analytics into the legal marketplace.
Canadian law
firm McMillan announced today a new partnership with IBM to develop an analytic
insights platform for the firm to review internal data about cost and resource
management.
The platform will use fundamental structures drawn
from IBM's statistical package SPSS, which allows manipulation and analysis of
data, along with IBM Cloud storage to derive insights about the accuracy of
cost estimates, time spent and staffing for its various legal services.
McMillan executives say that the partnership is part
of a broad effort to set a new standard for technology integration in the law
firm's business practices, as well as to open doors to collaborative learning
with IBM.
"We've seen how cloud and big data can transform
business. That's why we've chosen to be at the forefront of the legal industry
using advanced analytics to service our clients," said Teresa Dufort, CEO
of McMillan in a statement. "By partnering with IBM, we are looking to
provide clients with greater transparency on the timing and cost of
transactions."
Tim Murphy, executive partner at McMillan, said that
the firm hopes to learn from the information derived from an analytics base,
but agrees with Dufort that the data will likely help the firm inform clients
better about the cost and nature of services.
"Our hope is that we can sit there and have much
more informed discussions with our clients about the services we're providing
them and the services they want, that we have an understanding grounded in
analytics of pricing, of timing, of staffing," Murphy said.
Murphy says that using the analytics platforms may
help the firm make sense of some of its more routine legal services, offering
it a more systematic and scientific sense of its past business practices that
could yield predictive insights for future sales.
Taking just the firm's buying and selling transactions
as an example, Murphy said the analytics platform could break down key data in
the way the firm handles those transactions. He noted that he feels the firm
should be able to learn how long transactions take and variables that affect
this; what variables affect pricing; average partner and associate staffing;
key decision points; and variables affecting time and price.
As part of the partnership, McMillan hired its own
team of data scientists who will be retrofitting IBM's services to the firm's
needs, but both McMillan and IBM are committed to using the collaboration as a
place to learn from one another.
According to Murphy, IBM expressed interest in
expanding its tools into the legal marketplace, a vertical market it has a
fairly limited presence in. The partnership between the two companies promises
many mutually beneficial learning opportunities.
"They're looking to learn how this platform can
be used in a legal marketplace and what kinds of services might be available.
We're looking to use their software through the cloud to help us drive some
learning in our business. We're looking to use data to better serve our
clients, to better enhance the predictions of our pricing and internal
operations," Murphy said.
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