Pfizer spends $500 million in legal fees each year on more than 1,000 law firms worldwide. According to a post by David Hobbie about an International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) session on Aug. 22, 2007, the huge law department found it difficult to produce reports about that outflow from their ensemble of TeamConnect, budgeting and IP management systems. Note that Pfizer’s legal department uses Hyperion Planning for budgeting, which is the first time I have heard of a law department with software solely for budgets.
The solution to the problem with reports was a data warehouse, created by Oracle, which integrated Informatica “for most Extraction, Transformation and Load (ETL) routines” and Business Objects for report, dashboard, and ad-hoc development (See my posts of Aug. 24, 2006 on dashboards compared to reports; and April 13, 2007 for more on dashboards.). The application now produces a couple of dozen reports on a monthly or quarterly basis across the multiple systems.