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 HBR Consulting (HBR).
Challenge
Buchanan’s healthcare litigation practice group has a great team of long-tenured and highly experienced attorneys and paraprofessionals. 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.
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Objectives
Buchanan engaged HBR to help it achieve two key objectives:
- 1. To differentiate its services by delivering unprecedented value to its clients through the provision of unique, strategic business insights and
- Â To leverage data to optimize its internal operations, better managing workloads and offering best-in-class project and budget management.
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Approach
A team from HBR 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 HBR to identify meaningful matter-centric details that they could analyze to inform decisions affecting case strategy. The HBR team then defined and implemented a new process to capture that information from matter intake through resolution.
Leveraging data
The practice leaders, attorneys, and key firm stakeholders worked with HBR to identify meaningful matter-centric factual details, the analysis of which could inform a number of decisions affecting case strategy. HBR helped Buchanan collect and characterize its historical matter data and develop a process for the ongoing collection of new data related to current matters. Buchan and HBR 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. HBR 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, as well as 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, HBR 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.
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Results + Benefits
The results have exceeded the practice group’s expectations.
Value-Added Service Delivery
The newly created process efficiencies improved the team’s already exceptional client service delivery, enabling innovative strategic analysis. Attorneys draw upon deep databased 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 proactively bringing unprecedented levels of 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. Additionally, through trend analysis, the group can also spot problem areas and emerging issues and help its clients proactively address risks before they lead to claims. Its clients have the information they need to make better decisions and drive interventions that mitigate risk, potentially reducing their overall legal exposure. As a result of these distinguishing 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 member activities, its attorneys and paraprofessionals are able to do their jobs with less administrative burden. Buchanan can therefore deliver its clients a greater level of proactive, strategic, and cost-effective service.