Drawing Aces: The Best Hand to Bet High on Machine Learning
This post has been viewed 2,731 times.
Data: Your firm needs to have numbers that will help in management decisions in a format that software can handle. Ideally, the data has been collected in one or more spreadsheets, but database repositories can also contribute. Despite the hype about “big data,” law firms don’t possess such large-scale pools of data. Still, you can actually do useful analyses and, more fruitfully, make predictions with modest amounts of data. For example, with a spreadsheet having details on 50 or more closed cases or matters of a similar type, you fill the straight!
What is also important about legal management data, however, is that it be reasonably “clean.” Clean means it cannot have too many missing values or different styles in cells of the same column. If the fees column has cells with a dollar sign and other cells without, for example, the software algorithms will probably not perform. Or if some cells in the spreadsheet show “NA” when data is not available but others show “—”, you need to clean that. Clean data is also reasonably accurate data (not a data entry error that some associate billed 4,299 hours last year!) and not pockmarked with bizarre values (called “outliers”).
Your firm not only needs a sizeable data set, but you will also probably supplement it. For example, you might want to combine time-and-billing data or input information from your HR system. Examples include adding a variable for years of experience of lawyers or the concentration of an industry’s companies.
Tags:
