Law firm conducts data strategy assessment to position for analytical and AI capabilities

Client background

This company is a major law firm headquartered in Chicago with over 430 attorneys. Their expertise includes mergers and acquisitions, securities, finance, private equity, real estate, tax, insurance, environmental and commercial law.

The business challenge

The law firm had significant challenges in using their data effectively due to siloed datasets in their existing data warehouse. Data was sourced from a mix of cloud and on-premises transactional applications but was missing a streamlined approach to data processing and the ability to easily add new data sources. The absence of a fully integrated and highly efficient platform limited the firm’s potential to perform comprehensive analysis of time spent by attorneys and paralegals on legal matters across the business and the associated profitability of various business practices.

Analysts experienced reporting delivery challenges – they had to extract data from operational systems, the data warehouse and separate Excel-based datasets and then merge the data manually to create reports. This labor-intensive process was a drain on productivity and prevented timely review of insights to make data-driven decisions.

As a result, the law firm was seeking assistance to design an overarching enterprise data strategy and to implement a unified data model on a modern cloud platform to deliver up-to-date actionable intelligence. The strategy needed to account for many new systems that were planned for and had to deliver clear, unambiguous analytical results.

Key desires of the overall approach to data strategy included:

• Streamline backend data acquisition, transformation and transactional system integrations
• Migrate applications and data hosted in the on-premises data center to a state-of the-art cloud environment
• Implement a repeatable framework for the addition of new data sources to the enterprise data repository
• Deliver a single-source-of-truth enterprise data model
• Deliver advanced analytical and AI-driven capabilities

Strategy and solution

Baker Tilly conducted an enterprise data strategy assessment to understand the current state of data usage and how it aligned with the firm’s overall business objectives. This included interviews with company stakeholders to identify data use cases and also where data governance processes needed to be implemented. As an output, Baker Tilly created an enterprise data strategy road map for the next eighteen months, identifying sequential solution elements that could be implemented to address highest priority items first and establish a foundation for the evolution of data management at the firm.

Baker Tilly identified the need to automate data extraction, transformation and integration to free up time for the firm’s analysts to focus on surfacing insights. Baker Tilly recommended Microsoft Fabric for the modern data platform cloud service. The firm was already using Power BI and saw the value and scalability that could be achieved by migrating their entire data management ecosystem to Fabric as well.

With the completion of the assessment, the firm was ready to begin their modern data platform buildout and requested the assistance of Baker Tilly to implement a set of initial items on the road map.

The work has begun to implement the new enterprise data strategy in Microsoft Fabric with a focus on:

• Establishing the foundation of a modern data platform
• Implementing initial patterns for data ingestion
• Implementing best-practice patterns for data transformation and modeling
• Performing development of the enterprise data model across the four initial in-scope data sources including Rippe LMS/Webtime, Master Data, ADP and Intapp

Through the unified data platform in Microsoft OneLake and Fabric, the firm will be able to leverage advanced analytics and reporting in Power BI with the elimination of data siloes. They are now also planning how they can leverage generative AI and Microsoft Copilot on top of the analytics platform and the rest of their Office 365 suite. This is becoming a near-term reality with their new modern data platform in Microsoft Fabric. Additionally, the firm will continue to expand their use of Fabric by continuing to move more of their on-premises infrastructure to the cloud in Azure in the months to come.

The firm will later embark on phase two, where Baker Tilly will continue to work with the firm to incorporate additional data sources into the model. Throughout, our advisory team will continue to teach them best practices and how to take ownership of the solution going forward.