| | June 201819CIOReviewFinancial technology is crucial to the smooth functioning of modern law firms. The interplay between finance and technology has always existed, but it has become more complex in recent years. Experience shows CFOs spend a fair proportion of their time strategizing on technology and systems as on traditional finance and accounting. As law firms become more business oriented, firm senior management faces increasing demands from clients and internal users, acceleration in technology, and growing complexity in the external environment. To respond, law firms need smart thinking and robust technology solutions to manage, flow and present data. Making the right selection of technology platform and vendor against a backdrop of rapid change is a mission-critical decision. While the fundamentals of law firm finances the income statement, balance sheet and cash flow have not largely changed, the depth of detail and velocity of delivery has exponentially been altered.There are four key trends underlying financial technology in the legal industry:Edge of Big Data: Data volume generated and stored in law firms has grown exponentially over the last decade. Perhaps this volume is not at big data levels, but it is certainly seems to be getting there. In the past, information used to be collected for clients and matters, but the advent of alternative fee arrangements has created the need to manage at a sub-matter level. Clients now review time increments at phases and tasks. This means that law firms have to create matter budgets, and then monitor actual performance against such budgets. All this leads to large increases in the amount of data that needs to be smartly managed. Further, law firms are seeking to combine qualitative matter descriptions and experience information with financial data. CFOs and CMOs have to deal with complexities of integrating such numeric and non-numeric data. Near Real Time: In the past, law firm operations were reasonably stable, thus management reporting was required only on a monthly basis. Indeed, this CX INSIGHTSKEY TRENDS IN LAW FIRM FINTECHBy Madhav Srinivasan, CFO, Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP.
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