Season 5 Episode 5

Transcript

Welcome to Season 5 of the Law Firm Data Governance Podcast. I’m CJ Anderson from Iron Carrot, helping law firms do more with their data by improving their data governance. This season, we’re levelling up law firm data from intake to insight, with clarity, confidence and practical steps to move your firm’s data forward.

In this episode, I’m talking about how law firms can make data quality visible by choosing the right KPIs, embedding weekly remediation, and using governance only where it adds value. Data quality is one of those phrases that sounds important, but it’s oddly intangible.

Everyone agrees it matters.

Yet when you ask what good data quality actually looks like in a law firm, answers get vague very quickly. Accuracy, completeness, consistency, all true, but all still abstract. Data quality only really lands when people feel it. When an invoice gets returned because the billing contact was wrong, that’s felt. When a matter can’t be priced properly because the matter type wasn’t controlled, that’s felt. And when reports don’t reconcile across systems and partners stop trusting them, that’s felt.

So today, we’re going to make data quality visible and actionable by designing data KPIs that actually drive behavior. Not dashboards that look impressive, and not metrics that are interesting but unused. Measures that connect directly to how work gets done, how problems get fixed, and how decisions get escalated. By the end of this episode, you should be able to pick a handful of data KPIs that have a clear business payoff, create a habit of regular remediation, and only escalate to senior governance when they genuinely need to.

The first mistake that I see firms make is trying to measure everything. They end up with a long list of data quality metrics that no one really owns and no one tracks week to week, and certainly no one changes their behaviour because of them. Instead, you want to start with domains that cut straight through operational noise, and in most law firms, these are clients, matters, and time.

These domains touch revenue, delivery, reporting, and client experience, which makes problems visible very quickly. From there, you can pick a small number of KPIs with an immediate, tangible payoff. For example, things like invoice return rate caused by data errors, or time taken to open a new client or open a new matter. The percentage of matters with complete and valid phase codes, or a matching of matter rate types across billing, finance and reports.

Each KPI needs to answer a simple question. What breaks, slows down or costs money when this data is wrong? If you can’t explain the impact of a KPI in one sentence, for example, when this drops, cash flow slows, or when this fails, partners don’t trust their reports, then it probably shouldn’t be a priority KPI. And critically, publish a baseline. Don’t wait until the number is flattering. Baselines create honesty. They give you something real to improve from and they make your progress visible.

One final rule here, if no one is using a KPI to change how they work, drop it. Metrics and measures that aren’t used quickly become background noise, and noise is the enemy of behaviour change. Once you have your KPIs, the next question is where most programs stall. Who actually fixes the data?

This is where teams get tempted to launch a data quality project or a central clean-up initiative, and these might improve things in the short term, but they rarely stick. Instead, you need to aim to make remediation part of the routine.

One effective pattern is a visible data quality calendar. For example, week one, remediate missing or incorrect client parents. Week 2, fix phase code completeness. Week 3, validate contact roles and billing contacts. Week 4, review rate or pricing exceptions. And then repeat the cycle. Each week, stewards get a short, specific list they can realistically close inside that week, not an endless backlog.

The goal here isn’t perfection, it’s momentum. And this approach does a few powerful things. It moves ownership closer to the work, it shortens the feedback loops between the issue and the fix, and it turns data quality from a special event into just normal operational behaviour. You’ll often see cycle times improve surprisingly fast, not because the tools changed, but because responsibility became predictable. And don’t underestimate the value of recognition here.

Call out teams and individuals who close their lists well. Make improvement visible. When people feel progress, engagement goes up, and data quality stops feeling like a punishment. Another common failure point is escalation. Too much goes to the governance council and that council slows everything down.

Your data governance council should only see exceptions. That means persistent KPIs that stay below threshold despite remediation, or cross-domain issues that require investment, policy change or some kind of executive decision making. Everything else belongs in your stewardship community.

A strong pattern here is to keep the council small, chaired by an executive sponsor, with a standing agenda item that reviews just two or three KPIs that truly matter this quarter. Not 20, not a full catalogue, just the ones that are either blocking progress or exposing risk. And when those decisions are made, publish them, make the outcome visible and explain what changes as a result of that decision and then move on.

Heavyweight governance creates delay.

Lightweight governance creates movement. And movement is what ultimately changes behaviour. Dashboards matter, of course, but only if they’re designed for action, not admiration. A useful data quality dashboard answers 4 questions really quickly. What’s the KPI? What’s the target? Are we improving or getting worse? And what’s stopping us right now? Put the KPI at the top. Put the target right next to it. Show the trend clearly, not buried in a chart, and then list top three blockers underneath.

And here’s the most important part. Include a direct link to the remediation queue. If someone has to leave the dashboard, find another system, and search for what to fix, your momentum is lost. But when people can jump straight from insight to action, they will often do exactly that. Avoid rainbow charts, vanity metrics, and beautiful visuals that don’t tell someone what to do next. Clarity beats sophistication every time.

KPIs only drive behaviour when people know what happens when something crosses the line. So you need to set thresholds that actually matter. For example, phase code completeness below 92% automatically generates A steward task list, or invoice return rates above 3% trigger a root cause review, or repeated failures across cycles escalate to the governance council. These triggers should be predictable and automated wherever possible. Surprises create defensiveness, consistency creates trust.

And finally, don’t forget to connect improvement to recognition. That doesn’t have to mean bonuses or formal rewards it can be a shout-out in a practice meeting, visibility in regular operational reviews, acknowledgment in performance conversations for owners and stewards who move the needle. When data ownership is recognised as real work, not invisible work, people take it seriously. And the same is true of data stewardship.

If you want to put this into practice, start small. Pick just three KPIs and run a 12-week improvement sprint. Make the work public, track progress weekly, and celebrate wins as they’re happening. Be ruthless about retirement. If a metric isn’t being used, stop measuring it. Every metric you drop makes the remaining ones stronger.

So measure what matters and stop measuring what doesn’t.

That’s how you turn data quality from an abstract concept into something people can see and feel every week.

Thank you for joining me for this Law Firm Data Governance Podcast episode. If you want to see where your firm stands today and what to prioritise next, download the Law Firm Data Governance Maturity Benchmark at ironcarrot.com or drop me a note and I’ll send you the report and a one-page action checklist.

If we haven’t connected yet, follow me on LinkedIn for weekly law firm data governance tips, insights and episode updates. You’ll find the link in the show notes. And don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss any of this season’s insights, or head over to ironcarrot.com to get in touch with your questions and ideas for future episodes.