The healthcare litigation practice at Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney is providing its clients with a differentiating value and a strategic edge—both in defending individual cases and in making business decisions—by collecting distributed data to generate actionable intelligence, thanks to help from Harbor.
Buchanan’s healthcare litigation practice group has a great team of long-tenured and highly experienced attorneys and para-professionals. The group recognized that there was valuable information in its case data whose potential it had yet to capitalize on. Buchanan also sought to improve the practice’s efficiency without diminishing the high-quality, hands-on legal service delivery that its clients have come to expect and appreciate.
We are excited by how this initiative has improved our ability to serve our clients. We think it makes our terrific lawyers even better, supplementing their legal judgment with real data on which they can make informed decisions about case strategy. Nolan Kurtz, Chief Operating Officer at Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney
Two key challenges
Buchanan engaged Harbor to help it achieve two key challenges. Firstly, it sought to differentiate its services by delivering unprecedented value to its clients by providing unique, strategic business insights. Secondly, it wanted to leverage data to optimize its internal operations, better managing workloads and offering best-in-class project and budget management.
A team from Harbor worked with the practice group to assess its portfolio of work and map its existing processes and technologies. The practice leaders, attorneys, and key firm stakeholders worked with Harbor to identify meaningful matter-centric details that they could analyze to inform decisions affecting case strategy. The Harbor team then defined and implemented a new process to capture that information from matter intake through resolution.
Leveraging data
The firm worked with Harbor to identify meaningful matter-centric factual details, the analysis of which could inform several decisions affecting case strategy. Harbor helped Buchanan collect and characterize its historical matter data and develop a process for collecting new data related to current matters. Buchanan and Harbor re-engineered the group’s processes, configured existing technology, and acquired new technology tools to enable customized cross-matter reporting, combining data elements from other firm systems (financial, timekeeping, docketing, new matter intake) with matter-specific factual details.
Harbor developed an innovative client dashboard that gave the group a clear, real-time visualization of its case-related data to inform strategy on other matters and provide valuable business insights for clients. Those clearly visible data aggregations allowed the team to frame insights guiding individual case recommendations and actionable insights about the bigger business picture.
Practice optimization
From an assessment of the group’s current matter staffing practices, service delivery processes, client expectations, billing structure, existing technologies, and historical financial performance, Harbor generated a playbook that encompassed a new optimal staffing plan and standardized processes for managing matters from intake through resolution, supported by retooled and reconfigured technology.
Value-added service delivery
The results have exceeded the practice group’s expectations. The newly created process efficiencies improved the team’s already exceptional client service delivery, enabling innovative strategic analysis. Attorneys draw upon deep data-based insights to assess new matters, develop strategy, estimate exposure and establish client expectations.
Proactive client insights
As a result, the Healthcare Litigation practice group’s attorneys are now bringing unprecedented information to client meetings. The practice group provides its clients with empirical claims and resolution data, identifies key drivers affecting outcomes, and estimates time and cost for resolution based on similar matters.
Its clients have the information they need to make better decisions and drive interventions that mitigate risk, potentially reducing their legal exposure. As a result of these distinctive capabilities, the practice has earned the expansion of work with existing portfolio clients and gained new clients.
Cost-effective client service
Because the group now has consistent processes, enabling technology, and better alignment among its team members, its attorneys and paraprofessionals can do their jobs with less administrative burden. Buchanan can deliver its clients a more proactive, strategic, and cost-effective service.
“We are excited by how this initiative has improved our ability to serve our clients,” says Nolan Kurtz, Chief Operating Officer, Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney. “We can now supplement our lawyers’ legal judgment with real data for informed decisions about case strategy. Beyond that, our lawyers proactively communicate with clients about data-based trends related to their business. Our clients find that invaluable since they can use the information to make business decisions to mitigate future risk.”
About Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney
Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney is a national law firm with a proven reputation for providing progressive, industry-leading legal, business, regulatory and government relations advice to our regional, national and international clients. Our 450 attorneys and government relations professionals across 15 offices proudly represent some of the highest profile and innovative companies in the nation, including 50 of the Fortune 100.
This engagement was executed by HBR Consulting, one of the companies that merged to form Harbor.
- Analytics
- Client centricity
- Data integration
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