While navigating a corporate separation, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) enlisted HBR Consulting (HBR) to assist in identifying its law department staff’s time-per-task allocations. HBR’s enterprise legal analytics software, CounselCommand, was implemented to provide HPE with the ability to view and analyze employee time logs from a central location, paving the way for data-driven transformation.
Challenge
HPE faced a common challenge for corporate law departments – a lack of visibility into the activities of its legal staff. When confronted with a large-scale corporate separation, HPE needed the ability to determine whether legal staff were working predominately on client-facing or corporate assignments on a per-employee basis. The company also needed a way to easily cross-reference time, project and billing rate data without requiring a great deal of manual, labor-intensive effort by staff.
Approach
HBR’s experienced Services team worked closely with HPE to identify all available sources of legal department data. HBR then implemented CounselCommand – an enterprise legal analytics solution – to serve as a single system to connect and provide reporting on a variation of data, including employee time, project and billing data, contract management, intellectual property and compliance. This allowed HPE to easily access actionable and accurate data that could also be presented intuitively to stakeholders.
Objectives
To give HPE better insight into time allocation and project profitability, HBR focused on three key solutions:
Track legal staff time against projects. Previously, the law department had little visibility into how employees spent their time. This blind spot made it immensely difficult to determine which of the two newly separated organizations employees should belong to. Particularly with many staff splitting time between internal and external projects, the company needed exact data to understand who was predominantly corporate or clientfacing. By pulling employee time data into CounselCommand, HBR helped HPE delineate the best team structure for future success.
Integrate disparate data sources. Historically, highly fragmented data exposed the law department to less efficient processes and wasted time spent on repetitive manual tasks. Most law department analysis was performed via Excel, and was very time- and labor-intensive. By aggregating a multitude of data sources into CounselCommand, HPE has easy access to real-time reporting on law department work allocation, as well as visibility into potential bottlenecks. This allows internal staff to identify complex data patterns and trends without the need to rely on a costly and often scarce resource, such as a business intelligence analyst.
Provide a platform that can accommodate current and future needs. Beyond HPE’s immediate concerns around how to address staffing after the corporate separation, the law department wanted to streamline data gathering, analyzing and reporting processes. By moving away from manual data and trend analysis, HPE can more easily pinpoint and act on opportunities to increase efficiency and boost margins in the corporate law department.
Results + Benefits
Unified, easy-to-access insights. Rather than manually pulling data from multiple different standalone systems, HPE can now access all of its relevant information from a single dashboard, making analysis and reporting easy and efficient.
Actionable results. Beyond freeing up the law department’s time, CounselCommand provides tangible business results to HPE. With an immediate view into employee time and project use, the law department was able to reduce the cost of a key service by 30 percent within a few weeks.
Opportunities to outsource. Better project-based value analysis allowed the law department to more precisely distinguish between high and low-value tasks. As a result, the company can outsource low-value responsibilities to external partners at a reduced cost, while prioritizing higher-value work in-house. This not only allows the law department to accept more business, but also frees up employees from less engaging, non-critical activities.