Blog Post

3 Practical Applications for Predictive Analytics in Legal

April 23, 2020

Data can quickly get out of control in the legal department. However, data doesn’t have to be a burden to your teams. When managed properly, data can provide actionable insights to cut costs and drive business value for your organization. As you prepare your next data initiative, consider how predictive analytics can expedite — and enhance — the process.

What is Predictive Analytics?

Predictive analytics is the use of data, statistical algorithms, and machine learning techniques to identify the likelihood of future outcomes based on historical data. The goal is to go beyond knowing what has happened to providing a best assessment of what will happen in the future.

Predictive analytics technology enables you to uncover hidden insights in your business, embrace data as an asset, and drive big-picture initiatives that provide real value. With predictive analytics, old assets like legacy contracts transform into a goldmine for patterns and hidden insights.

Predictive analytics systems use data history, patterns and statistics to deliver the following capabilities:

  • Predicting client and employee churn
  • Decreasing operational costs and increasing efficiencies
  • Identifying current and future problems within your organization

…and more.

These insights lead to data-driven decision-making — allowing you to mitigate risk, manage compliance, and deliver successful outcomes for your clients, partners, and stakeholders.

Here are three practical applications of predictive analytics to help you get started on turning your data into actionable business intelligence.

1. Understand Your Current Needs — and Predict the Future

Predictive analytics can help you understand what your organization needs now, and what those needs will look like moving forward. However, before technology comes into play, you must first identify the challenges within your organization. What would you like to know about your business as a whole? Making a detailed list will provide a baseline of the long-term, core challenges for your data initiative to solve.

Once you do the creative legwork, predictive analytics can help you identify existing internal data that answers many of your questions. As your organization feeds more intel into the system, you can begin to uncover even more challenges — time and cost wasting across the organization — that you likely didn’t know were there.

For example, combining business data with HR data allows organizations to improve resource allocation for projects. Predictive analytics allows leadership to make decisions based on interdependencies of departments and individual skill levels. Such insights deliver operational efficiencies and productive, satisfied teams.

2. Extract Value from Data (That You Didn’t Know You Had)

Legal data is often siloed, disorganized or simply too abundant. Thus, identifying actionable data poses a challenge. However, employing predictive analytics can allow your organization to identify patterns or abnormalities in your data to build a stronger case, gain a better understanding of the opposing counsel strategy, and even predict case outcomes.

Your most valuable data may be hidden or locked in the following areas of your organization:

  • Legal contracts contain valuable insight into spend analysis, inventory status and compliance trend data can inform your spending, purchasing and services provided decisions.
  • Other documents with vast amounts of data, including legislation, docket data, property titles and others used daily by your teams, can directly feed into predicting case outcomes or strengthening your cases.

Once you uncover your data and identify appropriate use cases, your firm can reap multiple benefits, including managing costs more effectively, increasing efficiencies and better advising your clients and teams.

3. Empower Your Teams

Changing your team’s perspective from reactive to insightful is fundamental to success. Predictive analytics can deliver the insights your teams need for better case outcomes and best practices for productivity. Ultimately — data-driven decision-making is the best decision-making.

Here are some tips to empower your legal team with predictive analytics:

  • Assign a data leader, which creates an internal owner of data empowerment and allows your team to identify solutions quicker.
  • Involve data officers, who oversee data management and play a critical role in developing better solutions
  • Support your initiative and team members with data scientists for most actionable use of your data.

Optimizing your legal data through predictive analytics not only results in reduced costs, optimal decision making, new products and services, but enables your teams to perform at their peak and take on a proactive, instead of a reactive, approach to their practice. When you start with involving key stakeholders and empowering your internal teams, your data program will yield success.

It’s time to implement data-driven decision-making by integrating predictive analytics into your operations. Learn more about predictive analytics in legal by reading the blog post, Why data analytics and human creativity are the perfect MashUp.

For data science support in your predictive analytics initiative, lean on Exigent’s team of experts. Through an innovative combination of technology and analytics, Exigent’s multidisciplinary team leverages predictive analytics and expertise to generate insights and drive real change in your organization.

Get a consultation with one of our data science specialists to discover the value of your data!