Am Law 200 law firm Cole Scott & Kissane says it has transformed financial reporting and operational efficiency with BigHand Business Intelligence. The case study published by BigHand last week follows its extensive 2025 Annual Law Firm Finance Report, which we discussed recently with president for North America Eric Wangler and chief marketing officer Briana McCrory, and bring you highlights of here.
CSK reports 77% drop in time spent on year-end financial processes
CSK says that after a period of growth, it recognised the need to streamline its financial operations. As Florida’s leading litigation firm, managing financial reporting manually was increasingly time-consuming, affecting both billing efficiency and decision-making agility.
By implementing BigHand Business Intelligence, the firm says it achieved a 77% reduction in time spent on year-end financial processes and 28% reduction in billing and collections lifecycle.
With nearly 600 attorneys and 1,500 staff, Cole Scott & Kissane needed a more efficient way to integrate payroll data, track attorney performance, and complete year-end reviews. Previously, financial reporting required multiple platforms and took up to three months to finalise.
“The manual processes slowed down decision-making and limited our ability to stay agile in client negotiations,” said Ed Aguero, chief financial officer at CSK. “BigHand Business Intelligence has given us the ability to pull financial data and reports faster, improving our operational efficiency and client relationships.”
Read the full case study here: https://www.bighand.com/en-gb/resources/case-studies/cole-scott-kissane-and-bighand-business-intelligence/
Annual Law Firm Finance Report
BigHand’s Annual Law Firm Finance Report was out in January: this is brand new data and the fifth year that BigHand has undertaken a legal industry survey, with 813 responses from senior legal leaders.
While 2024 was a successful year for many law firms, WIP is up at 32% and the report shows far greater write offs.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider, Wangler said: “Firms are unanimous in increasing rates and 8-10% increases are not out of the question. But the reality is that many of those firms are discounting it away and writing it off, so they are not getting the net improvement that the rate increase should give them.”
Law firm financial performance has seen the Top 50 law firms outperform the rest of the market with minimal additional headcount.
Wangler said: “It’s a bit of a have and have not world. So the Top 100, Top 50 firms are receiving the benefit of these rate increases. The second 100 have missed the boat in some cases and are trying to catch up, but are having a difficult time landing those increases and then again across the board, they’re discounting them away.”
He adds: “Everybody’s predicting 2025 to be a positive year from a macroeconomic perspective, but we would advocate that the time to get your house in order is when the times are good, not when there’s pressure and clients get defensive.”
Arguably client pressure is growing, as the data shows that around a third of corporates are reducing the number of law firms they have on their panels and 85% of firms say clients are demanding more financial transparency, which is putting more pressure on partners and requiring them to do more active business development and cross sell.
Interestingly, 70% of firms surveyed say they still focus on billable hours as the main lawyer KPI, although 11% are planning to change this approach over the next year.
McCrory said: “The billable hour is in direct contradiction to what clients want. Clients are asking ‘why are firms are not listening to the data? We want the value of the piece of work and we don’t want to be blindsided at the end of it. We’ve been telling you this for years, and yet you’re still measuring and charging us by the hour.’”
She added: “Everyone knows the legal sector is slow to change. But technology is going to drive that change. Clients are being smarter, which we’ve been reporting on for years; clients are smarter about how they’re purchasing legal services. They are going to drive the change and the law firms that are not on board with it are going to be the ones that fall behind.”
To access the report see https://www.bighand.com/en-gb/resources/whitepapers/annual-law-firm-finance-report-2025/