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Big Data: Is It the New Big Brother for Law Firms?

By Lisa F. Geherin posted 04-18-2016 09:06

  

What do you get when you combine Avvo with a service like Judge Analytics? A window into the inner workings of your law firm for the world to see. For years, third-party lawyer rating service providers such as Avvo, Martindale Hubbell, Best Lawyers, and Law Dragon have delivered legal services consumers various methods for determining the best lawyers or law firms in a given practice area. Some rating systems are based on client reviews and peer ratings, while others are based on practice area expertise and contributions to the profession. But soon, lawyer rating systems won’t be the only way for consumers to find a lawyer. Enter “big data.”

You’ve been hearing about big data, but what does that term really mean? It is “a collection of data from traditional and digital sources inside and outside your company that represents a source for ongoing discovery and analysis,” says Lisa Arthur, author of the book Big Data Marketing. Big data analytics, then, according to Search Business Analytics, “is the process of examining large data sets containing a variety of data types –i.e., --to uncover hidden patterns, unknown correlations, market trends, customer preferences and other useful business information.”  For the legal industry, big data analytics may soon deliver “approaches to win/loss rates, lawyer performance by jurisdiction, case type, cost, and just about any other measurable factor,” predicts Brian Kennel, CEO of PerformLaw.

Already, companies like ELM Solutions have innovative tools and services like Litigation Management for Claims Professionals that allow law firms to price, plan, and manage legal services. Clients also benefit by being able to compare the legal performance of various firms based on a number of benchmarks. Likewise, its parent company Wolters Kluwer has an app called RateDriver that allows consumers to estimate lawyer billing rates based on factors like geography, firm size, and years of experience. In short, consumers will soon have access to your entire legal résumé—wins, losses, billing rates, experience level, and types of cases you have handled—and not handled, opening up a new transparency in legal services shopping.

So what can you or your law firm do to prepare? Embrace the trend. “Big data presents both challenges and opportunities for lawyers,” comment Sharon D. Nelson and John W. Simek in their article BIG DATA: Big Pain or Big Gain for Lawyers? Data analytics can help firms run leaner, be more profitable, and even help with case strategies. While harnessing big data to help your firm may not be cheap at the outset, explains Carolyn Elefant in her article, Big Data, Small Law Firms, there are no-cost methods for accessing big data now that can help your practice, such as using big data to identify profitable practice areas and even to educate your client.

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04-21-2016 14:53

While the horse may already be out of the barn and the legal profession is increasingly feeding on itself, in terms of both attracting new clients and legal malpractice claims, we need to be careful, extremely careful, how we go about allowing the internet industry to control marketing for new clients and retaining the ones already on board. While the internet can be a good source of providing the community at large about the issues involved with the law, each different website, each marketing website and all of the other entities attempting to influence our collective clientele, have their own rating systems, client reviews, comments about services or success rates and many other considerations many of us have not even thought of. WATCH OUT for what we wish for. Even more IMPORTANT, WATCH OUT for what we allow these websites to get away with. One unhappy client or someone who just does not like you, who has access to a computer and access to the internet can have a devastating impact on your practice. They can also have a direct impact on your billing rates, profitability and literally every other aspect of your practice. I suggest some type of control which would allow a lawyer to respond to performance reviews - good or bad - and a disclosure of whether a lawyer has paid money to obtain preferential treatment on the internet or whether the "rating website" is based upon client reviews, peer reviews or other criteria.