Legal Analytics

Updated February 14, 2025 | Argopoint Consulting

what legal departments use analytics for

Legal analytics is the management process of extracting actionable knowledge from data to assist in-house legal leaders and decision-makers on topics as diverse as matter forecasting, process improvement, legal strategy, comparative legal costs, billing optimization, resource management, and financial operations. The payoff is better decisions, higher effectiveness, and reduced costs.

Legal data analysis, with its complex inputs and sometimes inherently subjective outputs, may seem like an area where it is difficult to quantify and measure activity and results. Corporate legal departments operate across varied geographies, divisions and business lines, and utilize non-standardized processes for matters—all making data collection and value-added analysis challenging.

However, used appropriately, legal analytics tools are bringing new levels of transparency and access to insight to forward-thinking legal departments.  Leading departments are investing - in a meaningful way - in this increasingly critical competency.  The insights gleaned from from these analytics is real-time, unbiased, and allows legal leaders to leverage the best legal analytics tools to improve legal department productivity and reduce legal spend.

types of LEGAL ANALYTICS TOOLS: overview

Legal department leaders recognize that data and analytics can be a powerful and sustainable source of competitive advantage.  The “menu” of more established analytics tools, combined with more recent advancements in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) for legal, now provides a wide range of options to suit the needs of any legal organization.  Types of legal analytics tools include: 

• Data visualization tools – for instant insights, transforming complex legal data into visual formats, such as charts and graphs, to help legal professionals easily interpret trends, relationships, and key patterns in their data.  

• Financial decision making analytics tools – settlement amounts, budget forecasting, legal spend analysis

• Predictive data analytics for legal – forecasting case outcomes, timelines, costs 

• Litigation analytics tools – insights on  trends, case context, information on judges and opposing counsel, e-discovery analytics tools 

• Advanced search results and legal research tools – via natural language queries supported by machine learning and big data 

• Enterprise management, case management and workflow tools of all types 

Capturing, interpreting (both structured and non-structured data), analyzing, and managing legal data requires both experience and unique capabilities.  The legal analytics space is currently crowed and noisy - our experience is that few service providers can make a meaningful impact.  Our legal analytics methodologies provide insights into more effective approaches, saving legal departments time and money. Powerful insights that would have stayed unknown just a couple of years ago are now be uncovered with powerful new tools.  Using our legal analytics approach, Argopoint helps drive meaningful change in legal departments, often breaking the inertia of "the way it's always been done." Many in-house counsel are often surprised to see "what the data really says"; the fact-based approach can challenge assumptions and direct improvement opportunities appropriately.  Additionally, reinforcing legal improvement initiatives with ongoing legal analytics capabilities can drive sustainability.

keys to successful adoption of systems and tools

Argopoint has over a decade of experience leveraging quantitative tools in the legal environment. We have targeted expertise to help solve legal departments' toughest, most "analytically-resistant" problems: quantitatively analyzing legal data and providing meaningful insight.  With new insight, legal department leaders are empowered to drive the changes they know (instinctively - but without data) are possible.  No matter where a legal department is "on the journey" of legal analytics - we increase the ROI on their legal data - improving the operations and practices of legal departments and their outside counsel.  Often expanding scope and scale from small "pilots" legal analytics and impact and improve many areas across an legal organization.  Indeed, early successes only often increase in-house counsels' appetite for the additional transparency and  data that legal analytics brings.

The Argopoint consulting approach and methodology combines fact-based legal analytics with our tested legal change management strategies.  We know insights left in reports are useless.  Legal departments - even the best-intentioned - only make progress when they put data-driven insights to work, altering key processes, structures, and approaches based on new information.  We help our clients translate legal analytics into actionable recommendations and ultimately meaningful results.  When tracking and ongoing measurement is needed, that is also provided.

Understanding where your department is on the "legal analytics journey", and how progress on that path can be accelerated is a critical first step.  Argopoint's expertise and knowledge of leading departments "best-practices" are reasons why legal department leaders speak to us first when they want to get started.