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TO MANAGE CHANGE WE NEED TO MEASURE IT: HOW JUSTICE BID IS PUTTING DATA ANALYTICS AT THE FOREFRONT OF DEI STRATEGY
To Manage Change We Need to Measure It
How Justice Bid is putting data analytics at the forefront of DEI strategy
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BHIC caught up with Omar Sweiss, founder and CEO of Justice Bid to explore what Justice Bid is doing to further accountability around DEI in the legal profession and why this is so crucial. By Catherine McGregor
Omar Sweiss
Founder & CEO, Justice Bid, LLC OMAR SWEISS IS A NATURAL ENTREPRENEUR: HIS CREATIVE MINDSET is coupled with an awareness of injustice and the desire to drive greater inclusivity. Born in Amman, Jordan, Sweiss came to the U.S. aged three, when his family moved to the South Side of Chicago. He initially studied for a business degree, followed by an MBA. He operated his own businesses, becoming interested in the pivotal role lawyers played in many of his matters. This led him to attend law school to get his JD, followed by a year’s LLM in corporate governance. He graduated from law school at the height of the recession in 2009.
At that time, a key issue for corporate legal departments was their budget – that remains true to this day! This led Sweiss to his next venture: Justice Bid (JB), a sourcing technology for legal departments. While running JB, Sweiss became intrigued by the insights that data could provide on all aspects of legal matters. Driven by his experiences as an immigrant and his efforts to improve inclusivity in the Chicago community, he decided to extend JB technology to assist in collecting and analyzing diversity data.
Law departments can use filters, in combination with each graph’s interactive legend, to view firmwide data through their own lens. If a law department doesn’t see their firm, they can request to add them. To get your free account, law departments should contact operationempoweringchange@justicebid.comLEGAL DEPARTMENTS
PREVIEW Data At Large
Note: data shown below is illustrative
The Operation Empowering Change initiative was designed to enable law departments to skip the data collection and analysis process, and significantly reduce the number of firmwide surveys that law firms have to respond to, allowing both to get to what matters – focusing on DEI collaboration and actual DEI work. The below are illustrative samples of what is possible.
Justice Bid extended its technology to focus on DEI because it was already being used as a sourcing technology for RFPs and complex e-Auctions. “Because of my passion for diversity, I wanted to add a feature to collect the diversity attributes of the proposed teams on matters that got sourced with our technology. Firms might submit their proposals, pricing strategy, but also their teams, which would include diversity attributes,” says Sweiss.
However, there were issues: most matters don’t go through the RFP process. Despite getting some of the diversity data through the RFP process, the analysis was not privy to what happens afterwards. Were there changes in the staffing? What were the hours worked by those attorneys? That led Justice Bid to build a separate diversity module, which would collect and analyze the data related to firmwide diversity, progression, attrition, and client-specific staffing, hours billed, etc. This new diversity module is the power behind the initiative Operation Empowering Change (OEC).
OEC has two components – firmwide (Part A) and client-specific (Part B). OEC does both parts. Part A (firmwide) focuses on general diversity information for firms. This allows legal departments to access and analyze the data related to their panel firms and/or firms they are considering adding to their panel. That firmwide diversity data is available to every corporate legal department for free, so long as the law firm has accepted the legal department’s access request. Part B is the client-specific portion, where clients ask their law firms for their specific matter data.
Part A is free and the reason for that is to make it easy, explains Sweiss. “We want to ensure that data is not only being collected but used. This is the only way to drive change in the legal profession.” Most corporate legal departments get diversity data on their own or from an industry survey. That means: build and distribute a survey; collect, normalize, analyze and score the responses, then generate meaningful data to take back to the law firms. That’s a lot of work. Many law firms complain that they go through the entire exercise but never receive feedback. “I don’t think it’s because legal departments don’t want to collaborate with their law firms about this, but that the process is difficult and making sense of the data can be almost impossible. They don’t know what to take back to the law firms.” Explains Sweiss, “Based on feedback from both legal departments and law firms, we decided to make the firmwide data available for free – and not just the data, the analysis. We are presenting the data, in the aggregate, in multiple dashboards, and we are handling the time-consuming and difficult aspects of the process. We give legal departments and law firms their time back. This allows for actual conversations based on the data. It’s those conversations that will really drive meaningful change.”
Collecting DEI data is not new, so what makes OEC different? It’s the breadth of data and the ease of use, says Sweiss: “Our approach includes data points that a lot of corporate legal departments and law firms are not looking at. This enables legal departments to have conversations with their outside counsel about things that, prior to now, they didn’t have access to data on. This is the main way that we distinguish ourselves.”
Intersectionality can be an issue for data gathering, particularly if this isn’t approached in a sensitive manner. Justice Bid has taken intersectionality as foundational in how data is collected. “With traditional data gathering for DEI, the same attorney can appear in different tables, so is double or triple counted. This makes it difficult to get a true assessment of diversity. We’ve cracked that nut because of the way we’ve developed our survey.”
Tying data to individuals is not necessary to gain this insight, explains Sweiss: “We imbed privacy by design into our business practices by requiring the law firms to de-identify and encode the data before providing it to us. This de-identified and encoded data is presented to approved legal departments in the aggregate only; however, we do provide filters to find the numbers and the data points that they’re looking for and can break these down not only by diversity attributes, but by role at the law firms.”
Part B is where the power of corporate legal departments as buyers comes into play. It is a bespoke analysis for each
LEGAL DEPARTMENTS
legal department, covering more specific client matter-related questions. The analysis tracks the data on diverse attorneys working on the client’s matters: number of hours billed; fees; billable credits; how credits are being distributed among attorneys. “Most importantly,” adds Sweiss, “we track the meaningfulness of the work that the diverse attorneys are doing on their matters.”
It’s one thing to say ‘we have diverse attorneys at our firm’; it’s another to say that you have diverse attorneys on a client’s matters. But it’s something entirely different to say that those attorneys are being given career advancing opportunities and work. “Our data collection is shining a light on that: reporting on not only the attorneys working on matters, but what kind of work they are doing from quarter to quarter.”
THE LIMITS OF DATA
While data is central to creating transparency and measuring progress, there can be issues if we assume that all data is objective. The objectivity of data can be affected by how it is collected and the biases and the agenda of those reporting it. How is Justice Bid mitigating for those issues? It helps that the team are data experts. “We can easily spot disruptions in the patterns of data and then interrogate different data points to see what might be causing them,” explains Sweiss. “Also, the way we’re collecting data minimizes those risks. But I’m hoping that because law firms are committed to advancing diversity and to being transparent about the data, this shouldn’t be an issue.”
The cadence of this client-specific data collection is quarterly. This means clients will be able to diagnose issues and address these earlier on. Clients will also be able to report out on how firms are doing against their own departmental goals. “This means you can go back to the firms and talk to them – not anecdotally, about what you think is happening, but using the data points that you have from our platform. They can address issues then and there, rather than waiting a full year,” says Sweiss.
It’s also informative internally, helping with change management. This is because of the ability to drill down with filters, using practice areas and geography, for example. Often, the catalyst for having more diversity on one’s matters is the behavior of in-house attorneys. Giving them the data is just as important as giving it to the law firms, as it allows members of legal departments to use DEI data as a management tool. As the founder of modern management theory, Peter Drucker, said – what gets measured gets managed.
