Founded in 1780, Wedlake Bell is a prestigious London-based law firm with 79 partners and a team of over 300 lawyers and support staff. The firm is structured into four practice groups: private client, business services, real estate, and dispute resolution.
The Challenge
Lawyers at Wedlake Bell faced frustrations with administrative inefficiencies and an underutilised dashboard system that failed to meet their needs. A new solution was required to enhance decision-making and streamline workflows while improving efficiency and profitability.
From the outset, it was recognised that a new solution was needed that responded to the specific needs of lawyers in terms of easy access to data. To understand needs, employee engagement initiatives, including interviews and a survey, were used to gather insights into lawyers’ pain points and desired data solutions. Initial analysis revealed a number of areas that a new dashboard could address through simple and easy-to-access live data. A working group, comprising both advocates who were keen to use new technology and sceptics who in the past had resisted the introduction of new technology, was then formed to co-design a modern and intuitive dashboard tailored to the lawyers’ needs.
The result was a dashboard designed to save valuable time by delivering real-time performance, finance, and work-in-progress data. This empowered lawyers to make informed decisions, improve data quality, and identify growth opportunities.
Crucially, the dashboard is a response to what lawyers said they needed. It can also be adapted and developed further as new needs emerge. The extensive engagement exercise underlying the design of the dashboard means the solution talks to the interests and needs of lawyers in a way that previous solutions did not. This has helped drive engagement with the dashboard and, crucially, has given lawyers confidence that technology projects can address professional priorities and needs in a practical and value-adding way. This provides the foundations for future projects by helping garner lawyer interest and engagement.
The Solution
Wedlake Bell selected Microsoft Power BI for its seamless integration with existing systems and zero additional investment. Known for its user-friendly interface, Power BI enables teams to visualise, analyse, and share data with ease. By fostering collaboration and knowledge-sharing, the tool promotes a data-driven culture within the firm. The newly developed dashboard ensures that all authorised users can access actionable insights with minimal effort.
Key Lessons
Communicate and engage the critics: Direct conversations with lawyers helped pinpoint priorities and establish a clear use case for the solution. Too many technology projects fail because they solve a problem that the target users do not recognise. At Wedlake Bell, the whole premise of the project was to respond to the needs of lawyers. This approach helped lawyers feel that the firm’s technology and innovation leads were responding to the priorities of the lawyers, something that ensured support for the TiPS project. In addition, there was constructive engagement with critics of previous technology projects. Instead of shying away from critics, they were brought into the project, their concerns addressed, and their cynical eye used to identify flaws with an early version of the dashboard. This created widespread buy-in and avoided problems when the dashboard was launched.
Set the strategy and understand the project: Articulating the challenge upfront streamlined planning and collaboration throughout the project. Picking the right use case is crucial when deciding how to deploy a new technology. At Wedlake Bell, focus was placed on identifying the specific needs of lawyers and how technology could solve current problems. This helped crystallise a clear problem – the choice of technology being determined by what would best solve the problem. Such alignment between the use case and technology selection is crucial to ensure that it is possible to evaluate a technology in terms of whether it can solve the identified problem effectively. It also gives a precise focus and measure of success for a project – i.e., does it resolve the identified problem?
Enhance approaches to innovation by building trust through early wins: Starting small and delivering quick successes fostered confidence in future technology-driven initiatives. At Wedlake Bell, a constant awareness of new technology developments is maintained through the innovation team. But to translate awareness of new developments into successful projects, there needs to be a way of connecting the potential of technology to the needs of users. The approach taken in the TiPS dashboard project has created a level of trust between lawyers and the innovation team, as well as a greater awareness in the innovation team of the needs and motivators of lawyers. Together, this provides a strong foundation for future projects that will build on the early win of the lawyer dashboard.
“My hope is that if we model it correctly and show some wins, then when we roll it out, we will have something that we can demonstrate works and saves time. This will set a precedent for future projects and be an easier sell.” – Tom Allfree, Partner
“Engagement is key. There needs to be a real question that is being answered that stakeholders can understand and get behind. Need to be respectful of people’s time, they are able to commit to the project and design the project around this. Need to break the project down into manageable portions, and focus on getting early wins – deliverables, with which to build momentum and buy in.” – David Hymers, IT Director
Following the success of the TiPS Proof of Concept, Wedlake Bell embarked on a drive to encourage all employees to use and value data. The firm is embracing innovation, and as such, they explored the time-saving and productivity benefits that generative AI can offer. In May 2025, the firm launched a 3-month trial of Copilot, Microsoft’s AI assistant, involving 27 enthusiastic champions from across the firm. The expectation was that Copilot would help the champions to streamline routine tasks, and to focus on what truly matters – clients. The pilot proved extremely successful, with noticeable time savings and improvements in work quality, and the firm is now considering rolling out Copilot more widely across the firm.
Copilot is designed to complement and enhance lawyers’ expertise, not replace it. By taking on repetitive tasks, Copilot will allow lawyers to focus more on high-value work, judgment, and client service. The hope is that Copilot will support lawyers in various ways, including speeding up document drafting and analysis, making email and communication management easier, automatically creating Teams call minutes and actions, enhancing collaboration across teams and helping to find information more easily.
The TiPS project demonstrated how strategic technology adoption, guided by employee input, can transform operations within a law firm. By leveraging existing tools like Power BI, Wedlake Bell enhanced efficiency, improved profitability, and paved the way for a sustainable, data-first approach to decision-making.
Wedlake Bell Testimonial
“I found the TiPS process to be very useful in terms of identifying what the problem is we’re trying to solve, before jumping immediately to a solution. It was also helpful to be part of a cohort of other firms who were going through the same process, and we took comfort in the fact that other firms faced similar challenges. Having the ability to bounce ideas off one another was a real benefit.” – Tom Allfree, Partner
“I thoroughly enjoyed our involvement in the TiPs project, and I firmly believe it helped us to arrive at an outcome, which may not have happened had we not taken part. For some time, we had discussed how to begin developing a firm data strategy and to make better use of the significant amount of data which resides on our systems. TiPs helped us to go through a formal process to devise a solution to this problem and help our feet to the fire in terms of producing an end product and launching it to the firm, by the end of the programme!” – David Hymers, IT Director
Watch the video case studies below:
Part One
Part Two