AmLaw firm financial data migration
Ollion helped a global law firm achieve fast, reliable and consistent analytics that gave them an edge up in the market by migrating the firm’s financial data to a cloud-based data platform.
Overview
THE CHALLENGE
An AmLaw top 20 law firm needed a cloud modernization solution to decrease report load time, centralize information, standardize metrics and increase data security.
THE SOLUTION
Ollion helped with a data migration to the cloud and developed a data platform to organize operational data and store a standardized set of metrics. Ollion also established single sign-on and row-level security to quickly identify users and filter data to the correct level of access.
THE OUTCOME
As a result, the law firm is able to tap into one location for all data and reporting needs. This enables them to better support their partners in answering questions, reduce the number of reports and time spent on report creation, and decrease the time and money spent on IT support.
The challenge
Our client faced many challenges with their existing technology environment, and they believed they needed to modernize in order to stay competitive.
The most frequently noted issues were:
- Reports took too long to load, especially in offices across the world.
- Employees had to go to multiple places and people throughout the firm to find information.
- Metrics used for making key decisions were often different based on who put them together and where they retrieved their data from.
- The firm could not see a clear lineage of who had access to what data.
The solution
While there were many options to purchase financial analysis systems, our client wanted to build a foundation that could expand beyond just the financial information to cover their firm-wide metrics on both the operational and the practice sides of the business in the future.
To address this need, Ollion developed an end-to-end law firm cloud modernization solution that:
- Pulls data used for reporting out of Elite 3E (the firm’s financial system) using Microsoft Azure resources, which improved the system’s speed for daily use
- Stores a standardized set of metrics (that the business users have reviewed and agreed upon) in Snowflake (a cloud-based database) for end-users to easily access
- Established single sign-on (SSO) and row-level security (RLS) to quickly identify a user and then filter the data to the correct level of access
- Created a starter pack within Tableau that pulls together the data from Snowflake and adds any commonly used dynamic calculations for a quick start to reporting
The outcome
By making reporting and ad hoc analysis faster and easier with a centralized cloud-based data platform solution, Ollion enabled the operational employees to:
- Better support their partners in answering questions about clients, timekeepers, and financials.
- Have drag-and-drop reporting capabilities.
- Reduce the number of reports created from 800 to 50.
- Tap into one location for all data and reporting needs – no more emails sent to five different employees for the same data set.
- Reduce time spent on report creation and instead shift this time to data analysis and action item suggestions that led to more revenue.
- Spend less time and money on IT support of the data and analytics systems, and spend more time making new and more data available to end-users.
- More than 300 metrics were standardized and agreed upon at a firm level, with drag-and-drop capability for any reporting need.
- Report creation time was decreased by 45%.
- The onboarding time for new operational employees to create their own trusted reports went from three months to two weeks.
- IT support hours of the data platform were reduced by 85%.
