How to Create a Law Firm Dashboard in Tableau

Building a Tableau dashboard for your law firm is the fastest way to get a clear, data-backed view of your practice's performance. Instead of drowning in spreadsheets and siloed reports, a well-designed dashboard brings all your key metrics into one place, allowing you to spot trends and make smarter decisions. This guide will walk you through the essential steps to create your first law firm dashboard in Tableau, from deciding what to track to visualizing your data effectively.

Planning Your Law Firm Dashboard: What Should You Track?

Before you even open Tableau, the most critical step is to define what you want to measure. A dashboard is only as useful as the questions it helps answer. Without a clear plan, you risk creating a collection of fancy charts that don't actually provide any insight. Start by thinking about the key decisions you need to make for your firm.

Identify Your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

KPIs are the vital signs of your law firm. They are the quantifiable metrics that show how effectively you are meeting your business objectives. Your choice of KPIs will depend on your firm's goals - are you focused on financial growth, operational efficiency, or client satisfaction? Here are some of the most common and valuable KPIs for law firms, broken down by category:

• Financial Health: These metrics give you a clear picture of your firm's profitability and financial stability.

  • Revenue per Attorney/Practice Area: See which parts of your firm are driving the most income.

  • Billable Hours vs. Non-Billable Hours: Understand how your team is spending its time and identify opportunities for improved efficiency.

  • Realization Rate: Track the percentage of billable hours that actually get invoiced and collected. The formula is (Invoiced Hours / Billable Hours) x 100.

  • Collection Rate: Monitor the percentage of invoiced amounts that are successfully collected from clients.

• Operational Efficiency: These KPIs help you understand case workflow and team productivity.

  • Case Load per Attorney: Ensure work is distributed evenly and no one is overwhelmed.

  • Average Case Lifecycle: Measure the time from when a case is opened to when it's closed. This can help identify bottlenecks.

  • Case Resolution Rate: Track the percentage of cases that are won, lost, or settled.

• Client Acquisition and Marketing: If your firm invests in marketing, these metrics are essential for measuring ROI.

  • Number of New Matters/Cases: A straightforward measure of business growth.

  • Client Acquisition Cost (CAC): Calculate how much you spend on average to acquire a new client.

  • Leads by Source: Identify which marketing channels (e.g., website contact form, paid ads, referrals) are bringing in the most valuable leads.

Sketch a Wireframe of Your Dashboard

Once you've listed your KPIs, grab a piece of paper or open a simple whiteboarding tool and sketch out how you want your dashboard to look. This doesn't have to be a masterpiece. The goal is to think about the layout and what visualizations will best represent each metric.

Consider your audience. A managing partner likely wants a high-level overview with big numbers showing total revenue and profitability. A practice group leader, on the other hand, might need a more detailed view of their team's billable hours and case turnaround times.

A common and effective layout includes:

• Top Level KPIs: Place big, bold numbers (often called BANs, for "Big Ass Numbers") at the top for at-a-glance metrics like Total Revenue or Open Cases.

• Trend Analysis: Use a line chart below the KPIs to show performance over time, such as Revenue by Month.

• Detailed Breakdowns: Use bar charts or tables to show breakdowns by attorney, practice area, or marketing source.

• Filters: Plan for interactive filters on the side or an interactive map that lets users drill down into the data for specific time periods or regions.

Gathering and Connecting Your Data in Tableau

Tableau needs data to create visualizations. For most law firms, this information lives in a few different places. The key is to consolidate it in a format that Tableau can easily read, like an Excel or CSV file.

Identify Your Firm's Data Sources

Your firm’s critical data is likely spread across several platforms. Here are some common ones:

• Case Management Software: Tools like Clio, PracticePanther, or MyCase are goldmines of data on cases, clients, and time tracking. Most of these platforms allow you to export data into CSV or Excel files.

• Accounting Software: Your firm's financials live in platforms like QuickBooks or Xero. You'll need reports from here for revenue and expense data.

• Spreadsheets: Many firms use Excel or Google Sheets for manual tracking, whether it's for logging marketing leads, managing budgets, or exporting data from other systems.

• CRM Systems: If you use a tool like Clio Grow or Salesforce for client intake, it contains valuable information on your client acquisition funnel.

For your first dashboard, the easiest approach is to export reports from these systems and combine them into a single, well-organized Excel workbook with different tabs for each data set (e.g., a tab for Case Data, a tab for Financials, a tab for Time Logs).

Connecting Your Data in Tableau Desktop

Once you have your data exported, connecting it to Tableau is straightforward.

1. Open Tableau Desktop. You can see a "Connect" pane on the left side of the screen.

2. Under "To a File," select the appropriate connector. If your data is in an Excel file, click Microsoft Excel. If it's a CSV, click Text File.

3. Navigate to your saved file and click "Open."

4. Tableau will now open the Data Source page. Here, you can see all the sheets from your Excel file listed on the left. Drag the sheet containing your primary data (like 'Cases') into the canvas area. If you have related data in other sheets, you can drag them in as well and define the relationship or join between them. For beginners, starting with a single, comprehensive spreadsheet is often the best route.

Building Your Worksheets: Creating the Visuals

In Tableau, each individual chart or table is built on its own "worksheet." The fun starts here. We'll now create a few of the visuals we planned in our wireframe.

Example 1: Top-Line KPIs as Big Numbers

Let's create cards for Total Revenue and Total Billable Hours.

1. In a new worksheet, find your Revenue field in the "Data" pane on the left (it should be under "Measures"). Drag it onto the Text card in the "Marks" shelf.

2. The number will appear. To format it, right-click the revenue number on the sheet, select "Format," and choose "Currency" from the formatting pane. You can also increase the font size and center the alignment to make it stand out.

3. Rename the sheet to "Total Revenue." Repeat these steps in a new worksheet for "Total Billable Hours."

Example 2: A Time-Series Revenue Chart (Line Chart)

Showing revenue trends over time is a classic and highly effective visualization.

1. Open a new worksheet.

2. Drag your date field (e.g., Close Date or Payment Date) to the Columns shelf.

3. Drag the Revenue measure to the Rows shelf.

4. Tableau will automatically generate a line chart. You can right-click the date field in the Columns shelf to change the period from YEAR to MONTH or QUARTER to see more granular trends.

5. Rename the sheet "Revenue over Time."

Example 3: Billable Hours by Attorney (Bar Chart)

Bar charts are perfect for comparing performance across different categories, like attorneys.

1. Create a new worksheet.

2. Drag the Attorney dimension to the Columns shelf.

3. Drag the Billable Hours measure to the Rows shelf.

4. Tableau creates a vertical bar chart showing billable hours for each attorney. You can click the sort button in the toolbar to quickly see who has the most and least hours logged.

5. Pro-Tip: Drag the Billable Hours measure again, this time onto the Color card in the "Marks" shelf. This will color-code the bars based on volume, adding another layer of visual information.

Using a Simple Calculated Field

Sometimes your source data doesn't have the exact metric you need. Tableau's Calculated Fields let you create new metrics from existing data. Let’s say you want to calculate the Average Revenue per Case.

1. At the top of the "Data" pane, click the small dropdown arrow and select "Create Calculated Field."

2. Name the field "Avg Fee per Case."

3. Enter the formula. It's often simple business logic.

   SUM([Revenue]) / COUNTD([Case ID])

This formula divides the total revenue by the total number of unique cases. You can now drag this new calculated field into your views just like any other measure.

Assembling and Polishing Your Law Firm Dashboard

With your individual worksheets built, it's time to bring them together into a single dashboard.

1. At the bottom of the Tableau window, next to your worksheets, click the "New Dashboard" icon.

2. You'll see a blank canvas with your worksheet list on the left. Simply drag and drop the worksheets you created (Total Revenue, Revenue over Time, etc.) onto the canvas.

3. Resize and rearrange them to match the sketch you made earlier. Put your headline KPIs at the top and your more detailed charts below.

Adding Interactivity with Filters

A static dashboard is fine, but an interactive one is truly powerful. Filters let you and your colleagues explore the data on your own.

Add a Date Filter

1. Select one of your worksheets on the dashboard (e.g., the "Revenue over Time" chart).

2. Click the small downward arrow in its top right corner and go to Filters > [Your Date Field].

3. A filter control appears on the right. Right-click the filter, go to Apply to Worksheets > All Using This Data Source. Now, this single date filter will control all the charts on your dashboard.

Enable "Use as Filter"

This is one of the easiest and most impressive interactive features in Tableau.

1. Click on your "Billable Hours by Attorney" bar chart.

2. In the top right corner of the chart container, you'll see several small icons. Click the small funnel icon that says "Use as Filter."

3. That's it! Now, when you click on a specific attorney's bar, every other chart on the dashboard will instantly filter to show data only for that attorney. It's an incredibly intuitive way to drill down and uncover insights.

Final Thoughts

By moving your law firm’s metrics from static spreadsheets into an interactive Tableau dashboard, you transform raw data into a strategic asset. You can now clearly see what's working, identify areas for improvement, and make decisions confidently backed by real-time information. With this foundation, you can continue to add more data sources and refine your KPIs over time.

While building dashboards in tools like Tableau is incredibly powerful, preparing the data and learning the software can still be time-consuming. Here at Graphed, we’ve found a way to deliver these same insights in just a few seconds. We help integrate your key data sources so you can use simple, natural language to ask questions like, “Show me our client acquisition cost from Google Ads last month,” and our AI data analyst builds real-time dashboards for you instantly. If you're looking for a faster way to connect your data and get answers without the technical overhead, you might enjoy giving Graphed a try.