To truly harness the power of business services in a client-driven market, the topic of my last column, having a firm-wide data strategy is essential to deliver actionable insights that drive agility in service scalability. It’s our belief that having this agility is the single most critical factor to achieving sustained competitive advantage. Firms that embrace this principle to drive their investment strategy will have the insight to help their clients effectively respond to the challenges they face in an uncertain economic environment.

The Briefing Frontiers 2024 report highlighted challenges the legal industry faces in realising this — only 16% of strategic law firm leaders rated the information flow/connectedness of their firms’ various business systems as being effective, shining a light on the siloed data assets in the vast majority of firms’ IT architecture, yet 61% say they already have a business-wide data strategy in place.

This poses the question of how effective these strategies are, especially in the context of the growing need for one — with over three-quarters of respondents saying that clients are asking about their firms’ ability or plans to use generative artificial intelligence (genAI) within processes that lead to work for them. Truly connected, trusted data assets represent the only meaningful way to unlock the power of innovative technologies such as genAI to deliver more value to clients.

Our experience of the challenges firms face in delivering an effective firm-wide data strategy can be distilled down into two main categories; the ability to transparently integrate financial and operational data assets at speed and scale, and the ability to secure and control the consumption of data both internally and externally.

These challenges are not unique to the industry, and our belief is that technologies which are proven leaders in solving these challenges in other markets can provide the solution to delivering an effective data strategy at scale.

Critically, these technologies are the most cost- and time-effective approach to delivering a business-wide data strategy with the lowest risk to the firm. Our position on these solutions is based on our experience of delivering them in other highly regulated markets where data security, user adoption and embedding new technologies (including genAI) into their solutions is proven at scale.

The benefits of enhancing and connecting the various business systems will enable law firms to deliver not only an effective data strategy but also the insight required for firms to embed the agility clients demand into their commercial and operating models.