Sector Focus Legal - FAQs

Yes — Power BI can consolidate across multiple legal entities or offices. Multi-entity consolidation is common in PS firms (separate LLPs for different practices, international offices, joint ventures). The Power BI model handles consolidation at the semantic layer with appropriate elimination rules and currency translation. The reporting shows entity-level detail and consolidated views from the same model. For firms in mid-engagement growth or post-merger, the consolidation work is often the gating factor in producing reliable group-level reporting.

Yes — Power BI works for law firms, with some adjustments. Law firms care heavily about realisation, lock-up, and matter profitability, and the standard Power BI patterns apply directly. The specific considerations are practice management system integration (Aderant, Elite 3E, ProLaw, Iridium), matter status workflows (live, dormant, closed), and the partnership profit allocation calculations that some firms run through Power BI for transparency. The mid-market law firm space is one we have worked in and the patterns transfer cleanly.

Power BI reports on disbursements and cost recovery for law firms through a Disbursement fact tagged to matter and category. Reports show disbursements incurred, disbursements billed, and recovery rates by category. For some firms (litigation, technology consulting with significant cloud costs) the disbursement recovery is material to project margin. For others it is a rounding error. The dashboard surfaces the position so the partners know whether it is worth attention.

Power BI reports team and partner capacity in a law firm as standard, and it is useful at every grade. The dashboard shows capacity by team and by partner: total available hours, hours allocated to live matters, free capacity, and the trend. Partners use it to manage their teams. Practice leaders use it to balance workload across teams. For firms with utilisation targets, the capacity report is the input to whether the targets are realistic given the matter mix.

Overall Equipment Effectiveness combines availability, performance, and quality into a single measure of how effectively a piece of equipment or a production line is running against its theoretical maximum. It matters for Power BI reporting because it is usually the single most requested manufacturing KPI, and getting the underlying calculation right (rather than a simplified approximation) is one of the more technically demanding parts of manufacturing analytics work.