My Founder’s Story

Iron Carrot is several years old, and I get asked (quite a lot) to share why I took the leap of faith to leave a fantastic job that I loved and step out on my own by founding Iron Carrot.

Why I set up Iron Carrot

I have to say that despite being a qualified librarian with more than 30 years of industry experience under my belt, I'm not a traditional librarian or researcher; my focus has always been on working smarter, not harder, and that naturally means looking at sharing data joining data up and automating or doing more things with data.

A little over 20 years ago, my first law firm role was to help set up and manage credentials and knowledge databases for project finance practice. As I learned more about law firms and progressed in my career in learning new skills and becoming more senior, I took on more and more project responsibilities for projects which ultimately had data governance challenges at their roots.

As I worked through those challenges and as the biggest project of my career started to come to a close, I realised that I missed having conversations about data ownership, data quality and data rules. I am interested in data governance and all the types of collaboration that good data governance can bring to a law firm more than anything else.

In short, I think it was because the time was right; I felt brave enough to follow my passion and had faith that the conversations that I enjoyed having about data were out there.

The problem in the legal sector

In complex organisations like law firms, the technologies, processes, and people depend on each other for success. Most people in the firm will only see data relevant to them, so they need to trust that they are looking at quality data.

A law firm's lack of data maturity means that the data is of low quality or the correct information is unavailable outside of the team which maintains it. For others, a lack of access to good data contributes to a lack of trust in all the data that they see. So, they start to create and manage their own versions of the same data.

This goes unnoticed since law firms tend to manage data for operational and not strategic reasons. In recent years, law firms have focused on achieving operational efficiency. Most law firms review each business service in turn (using techniques such as Six Sigma), which results in any documented processes starting and stopping at each team's borders.

But data doesn't sit neatly in team groupings. Many of the firm's systems and processes utilise, for example, employee or client names.

The operational focus on managing data in functional silos has the unintended consequence of minimising communication between teams. The lack of transparency means that no one understands the decision-making process behind operational data management decisions, even for data in which they have an interest.

This has a massive impact on culture.

Without transparency and communication, there can be no trust.

When leaders create operational structures that are designed not to communicate, employees then mirror this behaviour and withhold what they really feel about the way that data is managed. This leads to a lack of trust in the data and each other. Without transparency, there is no mechanism for people to contribute to or collaborate on a challenging decision.

The only way for a law firm to successfully leverage the opportunities that AI and other technology tools present is to adopt strategic data management processes which focus on the activities necessary to ensure competitive positioning and take a cross-functional view of data and data management processes.

Add into that the added complexity of law firm structures (business support, practice teams, alternative resourcing, etc.), and it's easy for people to get this wrong in a law firm. There are a lot of standard models for data governance that can be used, but not everyone has the experience or sector knowledge, or indeed ability, to talk in the language of law firms that can make or break a data governance initiative.

I’m different because…

Data governance programmes are relatively new to the legal sector. Because existing data governance programmes focus on authority and accountability for managing data as an asset, top-down command and control implementations can become invasive or challenging to the firm's work, people, and culture.

Since law firms are ‘people businesses‘, my approach is to put your firm's people first and focus on identifying and formalising the accountabilities and responsibilities that already exist within your firm without handing out more work or assigning additional duties to already busy people.

Although the conventional wisdom is that all data governance implementation starts with creating a policy, Iron Carrot’s focus is on embedding data governance as a series of conversations to improve cross-functional communication, data protection, and data quality efforts alongside shared data standards.

This bottom-up practical approach leverages the strengths of the people that you already have and positions your subject matter experts as a cross-functional asset. It makes your small data governance team a centre of excellence which leverages distributed capability to support all data integration risk management business intelligence and master data management activities rather than being a blocker or challenge to functional projects.

Challenges, and how I address them

Most law firms already have the people processes, skills, and knowledge to implement data governance. Unfortunately, these things are often found in pieces across different business services or operational teams. It can be challenging to know where to start, and that's where I can help along with the Iron Carrot team.

I believe that no matter what challenges your firm has with its data or data governance, everything can be solved by finding the right people to have the right conversation at the right time. That's why having a data governance Centre of Excellence with the right roles, accountabilities, responsibilities, and operating model is so important.

We support law firms starting out on the data governance journey by helping them work through the five steps of our roadmap process. This quickly delivers a complete data governance framework and plans out the roadmap for assuring the governance and quality of the firm's data.

We also help firms who have a gap in their ability to deliver their road map as firms often need short-term support with activities such as training group members, creating new documentation, mentoring and supporting new data governance leads, creating and applying taxonomies, and other documentation challenges.

We typically help firms in one of two states: Those that have made some progress with data governance but have stalled and need some expert guidance to move them to the next level or those that know data governance is important but are feeling a little confused and overwhelmed about how to get started with a plan that everyone agrees on.

I am utterly convinced that conversations about data need not be as hard as people think they are and should not be left to technologists who may or may not speak the firm's language.

My entire approach just comes down to talking to people. It’s about finding out what their challenges are, figuring out who can help them solve those challenges, and guiding them to be able to find each other so they can solve each other's challenges in future. It's a combination of building a community and managing the knowledge of that community to the benefit of the firm.

How Iron Carrot can help

Innovative law firms have big goals for improving the client experience through data innovation.

Through our extensive law firm background, we have developed a unique data governance road-mapping approach to help law firm leaders launch the proper foundation for their data strategy.

If you want to chat confidentially about how Iron Carrot can help your firm with its Data Strategy and Data Governance initiatives, then send me a?Direct Message via my Profile, or book a call via the?Iron Carrot?website.

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