How Enhanced Reporting helps legal ops level up

Legal ops’ ability to leverage data is directly tied to the success of corporate legal and the overall business. In fact, Kearney found that companies could improve their profits anywhere from 25% to 81% depending on how well employees could analyze data.

So, if you have a powerful legal technology solution without robust data reporting capabilities, it doesn’t offer much value. But SimpleLegal delivers on both.

From day one, our dynamic legal tech has helped legal ops deliver thoughtful reports at all stages of their team’s growth. Now, with our new Enhanced Reporting upgrade, you have an even greater ability to analyze legal KPIs, track performance, and make informed decisions that drive your business forward. The more you use it, the more value you can deliver—it really is that simple.

Our Enhanced Reporting turns your team into all-stars in the strategic reporting game with powerful data visualization, custom analytics reporting, granular data filters, seamless software integrations, and top-notch data security.

Here’s how the Enhanced Reporting upgrade elevates your ability to turn data into usable business intelligence:

Data visualization tools make it easy to analyze and share complex information

Data can be overwhelming when your analytics are never-ending rows of numbers. Using this format to present key info to stakeholders can be confusing (and, if we’re honest, boring).

Enhanced Reporting solves these problems with interactive dashboards and charts. These visual tools distill your data in an easy-to-understand way, making it less difficult to identify trends and convey patterns to the C-suite. Want to see the top 10 vendors with the potential for the biggest cost savings? There’s a graph for that.

These visual features are helpful for any legal ops team — especially those that don’t have the hiring budget for a dedicated legal ops analyst yet. With Enhanced Reporting, even data newbies quickly become data experts.

Learn more about the secrets to successful legal reporting in our free whitepaper.

Reporting templates are tailored to your team’s evolving needs and save you time

Creating reports from scratch is a headache that drains your time and opens the door to manual errors. Our Enhanced Reporting automatically gives you a solid foundation to work from, providing fully customizable, robust reporting templates that are unmatched in the industry.

With a few clicks, you can easily compile your chosen legal analytics into a clear, comprehensive report. You can also save and clone reports, so there’s no need to create a whole new template when you only have to tweak a section or two.

This streamlining gives you back hours in your day, transforming a once-painful process into a straightforward task. Just take it from Young Adult Institute paralegal Alexandra Bedon: after switching to SimpleLegal, spend reporting became “the easiest part” of her job.

The flexibility of Enhanced Reporting also allows you to add or switch out metrics that best support the changing goals of your department and business. For instance, as your team gets more involved in environmental social governance efforts, you can quickly create reports to satisfy both internal and external stakeholders.

The intuitive nature of Enhanced Reporting makes it much easier to get new hires up to speed on legal reporting than trying to walk them through a manual, cobbled-together process.

Granular filters quickly uncover answers to key business questions

Besides showing you summary overviews of data trends, Enhanced Reporting allows you to dive deeper with custom data filters. As your team’s data analysis skills strengthen, you can add more data points into the mix to bring even more context to your reporting and enhance your decision-making.

Enhanced Reporting lets you quickly sort your data by different spend, vendor, billing, contract, and case analytics. For example:

• Spend analytics: Spend by practice area, timekeeper rates, spend to budget, etc.
• Vendor analytics: Average cycle time, hourly rates, alternative fee arrangements, etc.
• Billing analytics: Approval status, accruals, guideline violations, etc.
• Contract analytics: Approval status, renewal dates, content, etc.
• Case analytics: Case type, judges, clients, etc.

In addition, SimpleLegal leads the pack when it comes to diversity reporting. You can easily collect and view DE&I metrics from your vendors at the same time they submit their timekeeper rates. This helps you get better response rates than archaic methods like surveys (that law firms tend to ignore anyway).

This level of legal business intelligence helps your team scale. You can move away from merely recapping data trends to crafting strategic recommendations that help minimize risk and support your company as it evolves. As a result, you build legal’s reputation as an effective business partner.

Impress your GC and use Enhanced Reporting to create these 9 key reports for an efficient corporate legal team.

Seamless integrations remove frustrating data silos and improve data accuracy

If you store legal analytics in multiple platforms, you must compile all the data you need into a cohesive report yourself. This opens the door to simple mistakes that can significantly impact your decision-making if missed — imagine what adding an extra number to last month’s IP spend could do.

And when you’re bouncing between different tools (especially manual ones like spreadsheets), it’s also tough to figure out when the data was last updated. So, it’s hard to confidently report on what happened in a given time frame and accurately forecast future legal spending.

Enhanced Reporting removes these issues with its flexible application programming interface (API) that lets you connect SimpleLegal to other tools in your tech stack, such as iManage, Anaqua, Box, and IPfolio. This creates a clear, single source of truth that updates in real-time.

So, you save time, create more accurate reports and forecasts, and quickly answer data-related questions from the C-suite and other departments with assurance. That’s not just a win-win — that’s a win-win-win.

Access permissions keep legal data secure without affecting collaboration

Sharing valuable data and being transparent across teams is great. But without clear safeguards to protect that information, a simple human error can cause a costly data breach.

This happens more than you’d expect. As Verizon notes, 82% of data breaches in 2022 involved some human element.

To minimize this risk, SimpleLegal offers customizable access permissions. These give you total control over who can see and share certain types of legal data.

For instance, letting your general counsel access everything makes sense, but other departments like finance don’t need that level of visibility. So, you can set restrictions so finance members can only access relevant spend graphs and reports.

This feature helps you keep sensitive data safe while giving your coworkers easy access to the data they need to make smart business decisions. And since you’re not blindly restricting everything, you can say goodbye to emails from coworkers constantly requesting access.

Enhanced Reporting enhances legal ops’ potential

Our modern, easy-to-use reporting solution will help your team progress and scale with ease.

We specifically designed our intuitive tech to be 80% usable without any training. This faster time to value means employees can hit the ground running and deliver strategic insights that help the business grow and succeed.