Most law firms already collect huge amounts of data. Every matter opened, every fee note raised, every hour billed sits somewhere in the case management system. The problem isn’t a lack of data, it’s a lack of visibility.

Ask a managing partner how profitable their conveyancing department was last quarter, or which fee earners are consistently missing chargeable hour targets, and you’ll often get a shrug, a spreadsheet someone built two years ago, or a promise to “pull something together” that never quite arrives.

That’s the gap good BI reporting closes. Here’s what it actually looks like when it’s done properly.

It starts with the questions, not the dashboard

The biggest mistake firms make is building a dashboard first and figuring out what it’s for later. Good BI reporting starts with the questions the firm actually needs answered:

• Which practice areas are growing and which are quietly losing money?
• Are matters being closed within target timeframes, and if not, where’s the bottleneck?
• Is workload distributed evenly across fee earners, or are a handful of people carrying the team?
• Where is WIP building up, and is it being billed in time?

Once those questions are clear, the dashboard design follows naturally. A report built around real questions gets used. A report built to look impressive in a demo gets ignored after week two.

It pulls data out of Proclaim, not just displays it

For firms running Proclaim, the case management system already holds the answers to most of these questions, it’s just not built to present them clearly. Good BI reporting connects directly into Proclaim and turns raw case data into something a partner can glance at during a Monday morning meeting and actually act on.

That means live figures, not a static export someone updates manually once a month. When we built a Power BI reporting suite for Mansfield Solicitors, the goal wasn’t just to make the data look nicer, it was to give leadership a real time view of matter profitability, fee earner performance, and departmental trends they’d never had visibility of before. The reporting layer became something the firm relied on for decision making, not a compliance box tick.

It’s built for the people who’ll actually use it

A report that only makes sense to the person who built it isn’t doing its job. Good BI reporting is designed around the audience:

• Partners want high level trends and profitability at a glance
• Department heads want performance broken down by team and fee earner
• Finance wants WIP, billing, and cash flow visibility
• Ops teams want workload and capacity data to plan resourcing