Legal and Data: An Unlikely Marriage

“I’m bad at Maths, that’s why I took up law.”

You’ve probably heard that 110 times over.

Never have I met a group of people more happy to proclaim that they are not arithmetically gifted than lawyers. (Unfortunately, I’m part of the group. I got C for SPM Add Maths.)

Well, for good reason. When you think of law, what words come to mind?

• Subjective
• Paragraphs
• Words
• Papers
• Dictionary
• Long sentences

Words like statistics, data and formula would rarely, if ever, pop up.

Because all this while, what’s in our heads is that Legal focuses on words, business people focuses on numbers. Separate lanes for Legal and business departments with little to no overlap.

(I really thought that all those numbers were behind me when I left high school.)

My introduction to legal-related data

But that all changed when I created my first tracker.

The tracker is a simple Excel spreadsheet that revolves around a type of Letter that Legal issues to other financial institutions for the benefit of our customers. There’s a few columns where we key in info like customer name, date, name of financial institution and type of management approval. (If you’re in the financial services industry, you can probably guess what this Letter is.)

In the beginning, it started out as a way to track the progress and persons-in-charge of sending the Letters out. Just a simple tracking tool so that we could update people who ask.

But over time, it evolved into something insanely useful:

• Monitor progress. It still serves its original purpose, but now we could see the exact stage where each Letter is at.
• Track KPI. Everyone in Legal could easily check how many Letters they’ve been preparing and the person assigning the work can do so by rotation.
• Increase accountability. The Letters can only be issued once we receive management approval and the business departments are in charge of that. Now we can see what’s pending on their end and follow up.
• Tool for leverage. We request our customers to fulfill certain conditions (that they’ve failed to do previously) before we issue the Letter.

I saved the best for last: Make inferrences from data. Because we’ve managed to capture several key data points by keying in info after each Letter is issued, we now have incredibly valuable information that are directly relevant to our Management and business departments.

I was thrilled when I realized this because it’s an opportunity to cement Legal as a true partner to our business departments.

Lessons I learned on creating a great tracker

I’ve since went on to create several more trackers for Legal’s core tasks. But my first tracker remains the most comprehensive tracker yet. Here’s what I learned:

1. For your first tracker, go for the quickest win. Go for the simplest process first. The Letter was perfect for my first tracker because there’s only one type of document involved and limited variations for the content.
2. Set up a basic version of the tracker and allow it to naturally evolve with time. The perfect firstborn is a myth. Just prepare a few columns of data and start tracking. If you need more kinds of data, you can always add more columns later on. (I keep forgetting this lesson…)
3. Find out what data is relevant to your Management and business departments. Either through attending meetings or consultations, you’ll be able to recognize the key data points and omit the rest. (But of course, data that’s relevant to Legal only is important too.)
4. Make data entry simple. If you’re the only one keying in the info, then great. But if colleagues are involved, getting them to commit to data entry is challenging. So make it simple for them. (Explore the Data Validation function in Excel to make drop-down lists.)
5. Hype up the tracker to secure commitment from your colleagues. No matter how simple data entry is, it’s still yet another thing to do. You need to help your colleagues see the business and operational benefits of maintaining the tracker. Get them excited!
6. Excel dashboards are cool and are sure to convince even the most reluctant. Take the data and make a visual representation of it. (Face it, looking at rows of data is BORING.) Try making a bar chart or two. So far there’s only two bar charts on my first tracker, but I’m already giddily in love.
7. Cleanse your tracker early and often. Check your tracker regularly and see if there’s any incorrect data entries. It’s easier to ask people to fix the errors if you catch them early. And when it’s time for you to analyse the data or create your dashboard, it’ll be less of a headache.

A marriage with great opposition

There will be people who will try to convince you that legal and data shouldn’t be married at all. They will say, “Leave the number-crunching to the business people!”. I understand. Legal has enough headaches as it is.

There will be people who seem to support this marriage but falter when it comes to execution. (Well, collecting data is a lot of work.)

I’m lucky enough to have my boss and colleagues supportive and committed to this endeavour. There’s been a few roadbumps AND they were indifferent to it at first, but now they’re requesting their own trackers!

(By the way, no, I’m not saying I was the one who caused this change of mind. The fact of the matter speaks for itself. Trackers are GREAT.)

Data represents hard facts. How would you feel if you could stand in front of Management and say, “70% of our cases are….” because you have the data to back that up? It sure beats saying things like “a lot of cases” or “many cases”. Numbers are more persuasive!

What if you could use that data to ask for more time, resources, manpower or discretionary authority for Legal?

You’ll be doing yourself and your colleagues a huge favour.

The age of Data: Legal has to catch up

In many ways, the legal profession is rooted in tradition. The formalities. The case precedents. The practices. The terminologies. And that’s the beauty of the profession.

But Legal Operations doesn’t have to remain traditional. Where there is so much new approaches and technology adopted by other departments, it is a disservice to the company to lag behind.

The age of data means that Legal is also expected to make data-driven decisions rather than relying on gut feelings and handed-down practices alone.

I don’t pretend to be an expert on data analysis. (How can I, when I just recently started playing around with Excel?) But I feel very strongly that Legal has much to offer to the company in terms of data. And there are some kinds of data that Legal alone can offer.

Unlikely marriage? Yes. But it could be a happy one!