Product Comparison: Bodhala vs. Tableau

Tableau: A Business Intelligence Platform, NOT a Legal Intelligence Platform

With the abundance of data available at our fingertips, organizations are increasingly challenged to utilize data in meaningful ways. IT departments often overstate the utility of data visualization tools to internal legal teams to map out high-level metrics through charts and graphs – in ways that otherwise wouldn’t be apparent through traditional spreadsheets.

Tableau has been the leader among ’self-service’ business intelligence platforms — yet this popular generic data visualization platform fails to cover the nuances of legal spend management and often fall short of delivering meaningful insights.

Bodhala provides the solution through Hercules, our proprietary data tool that analyzes rates, practice areas, matter types, matter, and other factors to create peer sets that provide accurate apples-to-apples comparisons when it comes to cost and staffing. 

Let’s dig further into why Bodhala is the most powerful end-to-end legal spend management platform.

Quick and Easy Doesn’t Always Mean Insightful

Tableau is a presentation tool, not an analysis tool. Tableau gives you the “what,” but not the “why” and “how.”

With Tableau, you need to not only know where you’re starting but where you’re trying to go. While building simple dashboards on Tableau is easy if you have an admin on staff, legal spend management is relentlessly complex and requires data-backed insights to drive impactful decisions.

Bodhala is a groundbreaking technology platform created by lawyers to transform the half-a-trillion dollar global legal industry. Our platform refines organizational processes by empowering your legal team with deeper insights that allow you to better analyze, interpret and optimize outside counsel spend, trailblazing a new era of legal market intelligence.

Our dashboard answers the following questions that your traditional data visualization platforms can’t:

• How do firms allocate work to their associates?
• How do law firms account for different discounts?
• How much time, on average, does each matter take and what does it cost?
• How much are you paying compared to the industry rate?
• How are your rate cards impacting your total legal spend?

Utilizing Data You Trust

One of the greatest operational challenges Tableau users face is data cleanup. Although the platform was built with big data in mind, Tableau users find it difficult to manipulate and model data in an efficient manner. Some Tableau power users even recommend that data work be done outside of Tableau, and then be imported back into the platform for the best results.

On top of this, they must ensure that the imported data is clean and uniform, which is a process that requires countless hours by your data team to just make sure that everything is tagged appropriately and nothing falls through the cracks.

Bodhala removes this key operational headache with Hercules, the god of all analytics platforms. Hercules’ proprietary suite of data tools helps companies marry legal spend data in a clean, organized, and pain-free way.

Hercules uses machine learning to automatically organize, categorize, and taxonomize your legal data so you’re always working with clean data. The algorithm also detects any major disruptions in data patterns and helps you identify any anomalies within your massive dataset.

Fundamental Data Errors Lead to Bad Behavior

Law firm discounting is complex and difficult to measure through your invoicing platforms. Bodhala’s Hercules engine identifies and simplifies the following structures right out of the box:

• Write-offs and task-level discounts
• Invoice level discounts
• Line item discounts
• Relationship discounts

Leveraging Unmatched Business Intelligence

Teams utilizing data visualization tools like Tableau have traditionally relied on 3rd party benchmarks to determine the “best” rates when negotiating with their law firms. Unfortunately, this process doesn’t allow in-house counsel to go into the specifics of how those rates came to be.

Bodhala goes beyond the ‘rack rate’ and provides precise industry benchmarks that work closely with your proprietary data to identify how your legal fees weigh up to industry averages.

Our benchmarks empower teams to make true apples-to-apples comparisons. Unlike publicly available benchmarks, we provide transparency on integral factors like matter-type competitiveness, bankruptcy history, law firm financials, and aggregated client data.

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Real transparency, real accountability, real control.

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