DATA STRATEGY AND ANALYTICS
LEGAL
Professional services firms often cannot see their own profitability in real time. We change that.
Services
Data Centralisation
AI-Powered Dashboards
Data Strategy
Pipeline Orchestration
Law firms, accountancies, and consultancies share a common blind spot: billing, time recording, and CRM hold the answers, but nothing connects them. Partners make pricing and resourcing decisions on gut feel and end-of-year accounts. Dataverse builds the data infrastructure that puts real-time commercial visibility in front of the people who need it.
The moment there was a live view of WIP and margin by client, undercharged relationships that had been running for over a year became immediately visible. The data had been there the whole time. It just was not connected.
Real-time
Matter profitability visibility
4 systems
Unified into one warehouse
Zero
Manual prep for monthly review
The Challenge
Time recording, billing, and CRM are the three pillars of any professional services firm's commercial data and they almost never talk to each other. Without integration, there is no way to see a client's true cost-to-serve, identify over-serviced matters, or understand which practice areas are actually driving margin. Fee earner utilisation is tracked manually. Budget overruns are discovered after the fact. Monthly reporting takes days of preparation.
No real-time view of WIP, billings, or profitability per matter or client
Fee earner utilisation always out of date and tracked manually in spreadsheets
Matters routinely exceeding budget before anyone is alerted
Monthly business review requiring days of manual data preparation
The solution
Dataverse audited the firm's data landscape across billing, time recording, CRM, and project management. A centralised BigQuery warehouse was built using Fivetran and Airbyte connectors. dbt models created a clean semantic layer with standardised definitions for WIP, realisation rate, utilisation, and margin. A profitability dashboard was deployed in Looker with automated budget alert workflows built in n8n. Dagster was introduced to orchestrate the pipeline and ensure data freshness SLAs were met.
All billing, time, and CRM data unified in BigQuery and updated continuously
dbt semantic layer with agreed definitions for key financial metrics across the firm
Live matter and client profitability dashboard in Looker for decision makers
Automated budget alerts via n8n triggered before matters go over, not after
Dagster pipeline orchestration with monitoring and alerting on data freshness