Legal Management Insights

One general ideal of analytics is to drill down further and further into data while still maintaining a large sample size in order to gain meaningful insight into that data. When it comes to legal spend, data at the task level is more informative than data at the case level which is more informative than data at the law firm level, and so on. Therefore, the biggest benefit of the UTBMS framework is phase coding. With phase coding, line item entries of an invoice can categorized into one of five phases: case assessment, pre-trial pleadings/motions, discovery, trial, and appeal. The ability to break matters down into these subsets provides significant value in a few key areas.

Decades ago, as the data revolution gained momentum, the legal industry lagged behind other industries in mining data for analytics. This was, in part, because the legal industry is notoriously conservative and slow to change. Also, legal data was thought to be too variable in nature—making predictions based on historical statistics would be difficult because outcomes and measurables are on a case-by-case basis. But the main reason why the legal industry was late to the data revolution was that law firms had their own unique billing habits, which made comparisons across firms impossible. There was a need for a common, unifying language and method for tracking legal spend.