Data is invaluable for a law firm (or any other business), but it also carries potential pitfalls. You have to know which numbers to use, which ones to ignore, and what the landscape is going to look like down the road.

Nicole Armstrong, attorney and CEO for Rubenstein Law, joined LitiCast to share her thoughts on software adoption, practice area diversification, and using all the metrics at your disposal.

Watch the full conversation, or read the highlights below.

Two types of bad data

Armstrong says that there are two types of bad (or not-useful) data. One is “garbage in, garbage out,” in which employees enter the wrong numbers with misleading results. “If your staff and your attorneys are putting in incorrect data, or they’re not putting in the data they’re supposed to, it can confuse you,” Armstrong says. “It can make it seem like something’s not happening that is, or something is happening that’s not.”

Another way data can cause trouble is when it’s incomplete, or accurate-but-deceiving, especially if there is another piece of data you’re not analyzing at the same time. “That’s when a dashboard comes in handy because you can put all of your metrics together, and then you’re not looking at one in a vacuum.”

Armstrong notes that there’s a correlation between the time it takes for a case to go out and its value. “There’s a sweet spot, a certain amount of time that [the clients] need to see all their doctors and get all their procedures. If you do it too fast, you undervalue the case. But if you let it linger, bad things happen to cases.”

She emphasizes looking at the big picture, all the data together, to get a better sense of how these metrics interact with and influence each other.

The biggest hurdle for practice management software

Armstrong says Rubenstein Law had tried out at least four software rollouts prior to Litify, which exasperated some of the attorneys and made them skeptical of yet another platform. “The biggest hurdle is adoption,” she says. “The best way to get people to adopt is to show them the value. We’ve got TVs up on the wall and we put the dashboards up there, so not only are attorneys and supervisors looking at them, but a lot of our staff. We’ve got one in Intake, where they can see their stats and their closing rates and how many calls they’re taking.”

For attorneys, Litify also means that they always know when a statute of limitations is approaching. “When attorneys realize they can never blow another statute just by having correct data, they’re going to adopt the system a lot better.”

With dashboards, she says, “Nothing ever gets overlooked. We love it for litigation. We’ve made a lot of customization for litigation.”

“Once they see how it can help them, there’s no more pushback.”

“You have to diversify”

Rubenstein Law is constantly expanding, and numbers drive those decisions. The firm looks at three factors when opening a new office:

• Where clients are living (i.e., is there a need in this area?)
• The value of the cases in that area
• Rent, cost of living, and the state of the local economy

They use analytics when growing their practice areas, as well, and try to take the long view. “You have to diversify,” Armstrong says. “Auto [accident] is down because of the pandemic, but ultimately, it’s going to be declining anyway, from driverless cars and safety features and all of those things. So I think in any business, you need to think about what your risks are, your threats in the future.”

“You need to add other practice areas. That’s when it’s good to look at which cases are worth more. You can also look to your current clients to see if they might have other claims; that’s a good way to add claims to your practice.”

These strategies have proved effective for the firm. Armstrong says that the data showed a certain practice area had much higher value than auto accident cases, so they invested more in advertising and building around that case type. “We wanted those cases, so we made a push and it paid off. We made money on those cases.”

To grow your firm and figure out where and how you should expand, request a Litify demo.