Practice Management and Financials

The Problem

Our customer, a law firm,  struggled to understand revenue and profitability at the practice-area level because their Aderant financial system offered only static, siloed reporting. Partners lacked a reliable way to view the financial performance of their individual practices without manual consolidation. The marketing team also had limited visibility into client-sector performance, making targeted campaign planning difficult. Operational decisions were slowed by inconsistent data definitions and outdated extracts. Overall, the firm needed a unified, analytics-ready view of its financial data with self-service access for both leadership and business teams.

The Solution

DSI integrated the firm’s Aderant data into the Microsoft cloud analytics stack, building a structured and governed model that standardized revenue, cost, and profitability calculations. The pipeline automated ingestion from Aderant, applied business-approved logic for allocations, and enforced consistent dimensions for practice areas, time periods, and customer sectors. This eliminated the need for manual reporting work and ensured a single version of the financial truth.

On top of the model, we delivered interactive reports and dashboards that allowed partners to drill into their practice performance in real time. They could see revenue drivers, cost contributors, and margin trends without relying on finance to assemble extracts. Variances were tracked automatically, making both monthly reviews and long-range planning more straightforward.

For the marketing team, we exposed customer-sector analytics that connected sector definitions, client types, and billed activity. This helped them identify which sectors were growing, which were declining, and where campaign efforts would produce the greatest return. By centralizing these insights on the Microsoft platform, the firm gained a durable analytics foundation that supports ongoing operational and strategic decision-making.