The eBook is free to download.
It’s no secret I’ve been a bit obsessed with this “big data” thing for a little bit. It stemmed from a personal project of mine, collecting life data points, as it were, in an effort to gain a better understanding of myself and reactions to things. I wanted to understand what, exactly, made relocating more difficult than I anticipated. It opened a whole other viewpoint for me.
Out of the personal work I’ve done over the last year, I started connecting other data points. I read, a lot, and some of what I had read years ago took on a new meaning in this new context I found. I started playing around with this idea of “big data” and law firms in an article for GP|Solo eReport. We get caught up in the amount of information available today we don’t step back and ask: what do I want to know?
I ran into this problem myself. I have an Evernote Notebook just named “Data Points” that is full of Notes I’ve kept of my own observations, reactions, emotions and analysis of how strings of events and thought patterns form, function and gradually change. Everything from people to phrases to music. Stuff I hadn’t considered until I wrote it down. There are more than 400 notes. That’s a lot of data points.
Law firms have the same problem, if not a bigger problem. With technology today, they can literally track every single thing they do in any given day. Hundreds of tasks, time spent on answering client communications, drafting documents…every single thing done in a day.
I found myself running up against a “big data” mind block. The phrase, a buzz phrase, is a barrier. It sounds overwhelming, even to me. 400 notes! How am I going to figure anything out from 400 notes? If I’m asking that about notes, what are lawyers asking about all the data in their practice management systems? Granted they have the option of running reports, but still, what does that do?
A couple #GoneClio interviews made me realize that there are lawyers who make use of this data. If they can, so can I. But if they can, too, then so can other lawyers. In fact, lawyers probably do so in their every day lives already. Household budgets? Big data. Schedules? Big data. We just don’t think of it as “big data.” It’s just stuff we do as part of our normal lives.
I thought this. Until I started making Notes, what I did in a day was just what I did in a day. But after recording for almost a year, patterns start to show themselves. Patterns of thinking, of actions, even of the music I listen to.
This holds true for lawyers. What they do in a day accumulates, from time spent on cases to billing to what gets collected. The data is there, and once you’re aware, it’s a matter of deciding what you want to know. I wanted to better understand my own thought patterns and reactions to things.
The eBook is six pages, so it’s a quick read. It’ll give you examples of what other lawyers are doing with their firm data, like tracking which referral sources are the most profitable.
Who knows, you may learn something, too.
Hi Gwynne,
Saw your tweet on this recently. I too am a bit obsessed with big data, hype? reality? myth? legend? … have been writing, speaking on it and chatting with legal IT, marketers, security folks, corporations (who wish firms really ‘did’ big data) and partners who are starting to brand big data security/info privacy practice groups to gain an advantage. The verdict is still out but i agree, it (esp. smart use of accesible analytics) can/will emerge as a major leg up, especially for smaller firms. I aim to download your ebook and check it out. Cheers, Jobst
Jobst ElsterThanks for the comment! I was at #ClioCloud9, and @EJWalters gave a keynote on #bigdata, which was interesting. I think the concept is still over the heads of most lawyers, but so was #cloudcomputing. Just a matter of educating that A) it’s not just a buzz word, and B) it has practical applications regardless of firm size. I thought it wasn’t applicable to me as I don’t run, nor work in, a large corporation. The Data Data Data Google+ Community was super helpful though in making sense of the phrase, connecting some dots and helping me apply concepts to my personal project.
If I can do it, no doubt lawyers can too. Will be really interesting to see how this develops in the coming years.
Also curious to hear your feedback on the eBook.