The challenge
A global law firm with a diverse range of expertise and experience in every legal tradition in the world, and employees from many different backgrounds and countries, needed to find a way to connect its international workforce.
The company grew extremely quickly, meaning that communication and visibility across the workforce had not scaled with it. This led to huge departmental and geographic silos. A problem which meant that lawyers within the same practice area did not know about each other and had never even met. In turn, this caused issues with effective project management and collaboration.
The solution
Initially, 1200 employees created profiles on the ProFinda platform. Details on their legal experience, background, interests and other relevant information was included on their profiles. The platform then intelligently matched each individual to projects, bids and other opportunities based off of their profile data. Staff could also search for relevant opportunities to be involved in, thereby expanding their potential work beyond their usual day-to-day role and allowing them to organically develop their careers through their projects.
One challenge ProFinda uniquely faced with this project was the range and depth of legal-specific terminology that the platform needed to understand in order to match lawyers to the correct matters. To overcome this, ProFinda used a variety of structured and unstructured data sources in order to build a rich and very detailed profile on each individual – right down to lawyers’ clauses of acts and legal statutes. Huge quantities of data was ingested by the platform, however, this cut down on the amount of work that individual lawyers had to do in creating their own profile. As a consequence, uptake was much higher than if these very busy individuals had to input their information themselves.
The results
Thanks to the increased collaboration and knowledge sharing the ProFinda platform has sparked, the firm has become much more joined up, with its employees increasingly aligned to shared goals and working under one brand.
There is improved collaboration and knowledge sharing across the organisation. Employees are now automatically sharing their expertise and insights across cities, states, countries and continents. In turn, this is now driving more successful and efficient resolution of matters. Lawyers and paralegals are also working more cost-effectively, with the organisation able to win more work as a result.
