Law Department Management Blog
A post on visual analytics drove me to imagine uses of it in legal departments (See my post of Feb. 10, 2010: a future of software that helps in-house counsel make decisions on data.). More generally, the reports software produces make or break them in terms of value delivered, especially matter management systems.
As it turns out, I have here and there returned to the topic of software reports (See my post of Dec. 18, 2006: five ways to obtain reports from matter management systems; March 26, 2007: turnaround time shown by matter management system; May 8, 2008: exporting reports from matter management systems to a spreadsheet; Feb. 15, 2009: management systems are only as good as their reporting capabilities; and March 20, 2009 #1: VizQL, a visualization query language of Tableau Software.).
Cousins of reporting, the domains of business intelligence and data mining may some day reach law departments (See my post of May 17, 2006: software for “legal business intelligence”; March 23, 2006: compared to knowledge management software; and May 6, 2009: data mining by law departments and law firms with 10 references.).
Further strengthening the robustness of reports are portals, which combine data from multiple systems (See my post of June 27, 2006: portals with 4 references and Aug. 16, 2006.)
All of these techniques – visual analytics, business intelligence, data mining, portals – draw heavily on data visualization (See my post of May 7, 2008: methods to portray data with 9 references; 22 cited in one.).