Last Year's Agenda

Tom Jones, CEO

Iridium Technology LLC

Meredith Williams-Range, Chief Knowledge & Client Value Officer 

Shearman & Sterling LLP

Learn about the status of a project that was discussed at last year’s conference and how it has evolved. What has worked? What hasn’t? What has been learned that has affected and changed the project? What stage is the project at now?  

Tom and Mark have returned to discuss the challenges and successes around a project designed to put into place models and predictors of bad debt, including a detailed look at whether the objective of the project was met, revisiting the original hypothesis around bad debt predictors and explaining if that was proven or not. They will discuss if the statistical and learning models derived were successful or unsuccessful, and if so, how the process of putting these predictive models into place has been altered based upon these findings. They will also explore the challenges and opportunities associated with data availability, integrity and the utilizations of those models in the context of financial performance.  In addition, Mark will discuss the outcomes of a similar project that has been completed and the successes and challenges faced.  

Tom Van Der Moere, CFO

Neal, Gerber & Eisenberg

Mark Medice, Principal

Law Vision

Attorneys often do not enter correct task codes on their timecards. But, having correct task codes at the timecard level creates significant advantages for business intelligence and practice management.  In this session, we will demonstrate how to use pre-trained word embeddings and a neural network to predict timecard task codes with over 75% accuracy.  Two relatively recent advances in deep learning make this experiment possible.  First, transfer learning allows us to transfer pre-trained weights to a relatively small dataset, significantly improving the accuracy of our models.  Next, sequence networks process text sequences rather than treating text as just a bag of words. This provides a significant improvement in accuracy.  This presentation will be address these concepts in a clear, concise manner without requiring any specific technical knowledge or programming skills.  You will leave this presentation with a deeper understanding of the business intelligence available to be unlocked in your data with artificial intelligence.  

Shawn Hainsworth, Senior Architect/Developer & Programmer

Cooley LLP 

In this session, leaders in legal marketing will provide insight into which Business Intelligence strategies and technology they use to generate revenue and create value for their external and internal clients.  The panel will discuss the various tools available, how they put together their BI stack, and how they utilize these tools for everything from strategic planning to business development to client care. They will share how to gain buy-in from management, the process they use to gather the intelligence and apply the data to their daily roles, and how this information can be used to help lawyers and firms differentiate themselves from the pack.  

Mike Mellor, Chief Marketing and Business Development Officer

Pryor Cashman LLP

Michelle Murray, Senior Consultant

PP&C Consulting

Kristen Hughes, Business Development Associate Director

Kirkland & Ellis, LLP

A law firm’s most valuable asset is the information it collects (and generates). Firms house troves of information about their clients, their attorneys and staff, and their own operations. But the vast majority of this information goes unused, even as firms are asked by their clients to provide more insight into firms’ offerings. More importantly, data can be used to describe who the firm is, show how it manages operations, and help drive change throughout the organization. Data visualization is a powerful tool in analyzing firm information, and when used well, it can provide insights far beyond what’s measured in billable hours. For example, clients are increasingly requiring diverse teams and want proof that firms are taking steps across the organization to increase diversity. This has led to the rise in industry initiatives like Mansfield Rule certification which requires firms to track and report on diversity information across more than 30 data points. Firms struggle and waste hundreds of man hours trying to pull together reliable information manually. Little time is spent using the data to drive change in staffing.  Data visualization and data management tools (and processes) can mostly automate this process giving firms the intelligence it needs to proactively drive change across the organization. This discussion will examine how nimble dashboards and data visualizations can be used to help firms assess and achieve strategic goals and empower its staff and attorneys to strive for them.

Hunter Goolsby, Director of Client & Market Intelligence & Acting CMO

Troutman Sanders LLP

Madison Henry, Senior Business & Competitive Intelligence Analyst

Troutman Sanders LLP

Tom Jones, CEO

Iridium Technology LLC