The Importance of Data for Legal Teams

Watch this short video where Tim shares his perspective on the significance of using data to make decisions, evaluate the consistency of your legal team, and more.

Transcript

Question: We talk a lot about data on Cockpit Counsel. Can you elaborate on the importance of data-driven decision-making for legal teams?

Answer: I think using data to make decisions is something that every legal team should start to lean into, as the data available to them becomes more and more, comprehensive. I talk a lot about consistency.

How it's important for legal teams to be consistent. And that's consistent in terms of quality, consistent in terms of process, and consistent in terms of communication.

And I think that data helps you to evaluate how consistent you are being. And also can help you to identify maybe problematic things in process or problematic, aspects of quality that you're seeing. Right? You may always recognize when something you know, maybe something drops below a quality threshold that you really want.

But it only happens two percent of the time. So is that something you really need to fix as opposed to maybe a process that is a little bit more tiresome, where if you look at how that process can change some of your other metrics, maybe you wanna change that process try to optimize for those other metrics. Right? So the data helps you evaluate how consistent you're being.

The better the data that you have, and the more you follow it for decisions, the more consistent your outcomes are. Every other part of the business has recognized that to be, almost an absolute truth.

Question: How can technology that helps with data also help your team stay productive?

Answer: Oftentimes it means that you don't have to manually collect that data. Right. That's probably the biggest the biggest part about it. Like, If you're using a system that does track your activity and does track certain characteristics of the work that's being performed or you know, the inputs and outputs of that technology.

Then you should, by all means, be able to more easily extract that data and then put that data into context that's useful for you and your team. I think it is important to think about pulling data from the tool and then putting it into context. A lot of people can pull the data from the tool, but you gotta put it in the context of the business, or the problem that you're trying to solve, or else it's not helpful.

It's data for data's sake. It's that context that actually makes it work. So, when you pull that data out, put it into the context of, like, what benefit is this telling me versus maybe there's a little bit of a more strenuous process associated with using that technology, the decision-making that you get out of that.

Again, I'll go back to consistency, the consistency that you get out of that and the context that that data brings to you is well worth a little bit of effort on the part of the people using the technology.